Members Forum Newsletter #1 Jan 2020

We are very excited to present you the first ISCA Forum Newsletter.

Over the past few months we have been hard at work to gather ideas and interesting content to reach out and engage the world-wide EM/CA community. In this newsletter, we offer a gloss of what can be found at conversationanalysis.org/newsletter.

Aspirations

One goal of ISCA is to do more outreach to the EM/CA community. This forum provides members the opportunity to share their work and ideas, and to invite discussions on methodological developments and emerging theories. In this way we hope to cross borders, by bringing together researchers from across the globe and making ISCA a truly international society.

As this is the first edition of the newsletter and the forum, it is a sort of pilot a proof of concept. It is a way for us to show what they can be, but that also means that they are unfinished. To make sure both are of continuing interest to the community, we would love to hear what you think on anything from the layout to the content: comments, critiques, and suggestions are very welcome. We are also on the lookout for more content: if you want to contribute, either in one of the formats we already have or a new format, please get in touch.

As this is a forum, we look forward to the discussions this issue evokes. We plan to circulate the next edition in late April. Keep a look out for the upcoming launches of the Jefferson Index, Schegloff Sound Archive, Remote Data Sessions, and an ISCA Podcast! With your input, we hope this forum and the associated projects will be invaluable resources for EM/CA researchers.

This newsletter

For this first edition we have some great articles we think will be of interest to many of you. These show the type of content we envision for the forum, and provide an excellent overview of the work of some of the committee members.

Squibs

The squib is a short paper in which the authors provide a preliminary analysis of an interesting phenomenon. The format holds in between a conference presentation and a manuscript for publication, and is therefore not peer reviewed. It provides authors an opportunity to share their analysis at a point where they are not yet ready to write up a manuscript, and want to invite comments and ideas from the community.

For this first edition, Vittoria Colla and Letizia Caronia of the University of Bologna present an analysis of how parents and children invoke books as a source for epistemic authority during homework sessions. They suggest that participants construct books as an ‘epistemically authoritative resource’ and that in doing so children reveal their trust in school books as a reliable source of knowledge.

Check out the full length: The book knows best.

Ethics and data collection – Field Report

Our first field report offers a reflective account of naturalistic researcher’s experience. Authors, Emma Tennent and Fiona Grattan describe Fiona’s predicament when faced with an ethics committee that was unfamiliar with interactional research. They recount the process of navigating the unduly stringent consent requirements placed on participants, and the effects it had on successful data collection. Perhaps this story sounds unfortunately familiar? We hope to compile resources to help! We are making a call out for successful ethics applications to upload to the emcawiki. These may help researchers streamline the process of effectively communicating to ethics committees what we, as naturalistic researchers, are trying to capture with our data collection.

Read their full account: Risk, time, and consent: Balancing ethics and natural data collection.

Data session report

The data session report provides insights into how different groups of EM/CA scholars conduct data sessions. There are no standards for how a data session should be run. Despite their central role in EM/CA research they take place essentially in the background: we just do them. But this also means that there are different conventions, and we can learn a lot from how our fellow researchers organize their data sessions.

For this first edition, Stamatina Katsiveli-Siachou discusses a central issue fo many EM/CA scholars: how to deal with multilingual data sessions. English is the lingua franca of modern academia, but many of us study other languages: some similar to English, but some fundamentally different. This provides a lot of challenges during data sessions, and Stamatina talks us through them providing an invaluable discussion for cross-linguistic analysis.

Read the full discussion: Transcript Preparation for Multilingual Data Sessions

EMCA wiki digest

On the forum we will provide a digest of the EMCA Wiki.

Wait! There is an EMCA Wiki?

YES!

In 2014 a group of volunteers began moving Paul ten Have’s EM/CA news website onto a wiki. Since that time, they have successfully moved all 8,500 bibliographic entries over to the wiki!! Now hosted by ISCA, this wiki contains (nearly) all published EM/CA work. It also lists current job opportunities, calls for papers, links to web pages, upcoming conferences, teaching resources, etc. An active group of volunteers currently maintains the wiki, by adding new and relevant information as it appears. In each newsletter, we will spotlight an aspect of the wiki, showing what an invaluable resource it can be for EM/CA researchers. We will also flag some of the upcoming opportunities and deadlines.

Check out the wiki for the full listings: EMCA Wiki

Are you on the #EMCA Social Media sphere?

Follow our twitter accounts at:

• @iscaupdates (for news about ISCA and retweets from #EMCA researchers worldwide)
• @emca_news (for announcement, conference/workshop calls for proposals, jobs, events etc.)
• @emcawiki (for new additions to the emca bibliography).

You can also like our ISCA Facebook Page and follow our new ISCA Instagram.

Editorial committee

• Saul Albert – University of Loughborough, UK
• Maha Al-ayyash – King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, SA
• Yusuke Arano – Saitama University, JP
• Vittoria Colla – University of Bologna, IT
• Yumei Gan – Chinese University of Hong Kong, HK
• Amelia Hill – UCLA, USA
• Elliott Hoey – University of Basel, CH
• Emily Hofstetter – Linköping University, SE
• Stamatina Katsiveli-Siachou – Queen Mary University of London, UK
• Holly Sansone – Queensland University of Technology, AU
• Lucas Seuren – University of Oxford, UK
• Emma Tennent – Victoria University of Wellington, NZ