During the last couple of months, many of us have been getting notifications of acceptance (hopefully!) from various EMCA conferences. Now it’s time to start thinking about different sorts of arrangements: praying technology won’t let us down for the online conferences; sorting flight tickets and accommodation for others. On the bright side, we might be able to do some networking, meet new colleagues and also be able to hug those wonderful friends we have made over the years from different parts of the world!
Now, moving on to what brings us together here, after a bit of a break, we are back with another newsletter. We also have some new ISCA Publications Committee members we would like to welcome, and many contributors, past and present, to thank for their contributions! Thanks particularly to Lucas Seuren, from whom I am taking over as Publications Committee chair with this edition of the newsletter. In this edition, we have two conference reports to share. The first one is an account of a two-day event organised by the “Grammar of Everyday Life” group from Aarhus University. Virginia Calabria gives us a thorough and fun description of this event. We also have a detailed and thought-provoking report of the hybrid event Advancing Multimodal Conversation Analysis (AMCA) Summer School which took place in Basel last June. Finally, we are happy to announce a new episode in the State of Talk podcast series, this time Saul Albert interviewed Doug Maynard and Jason Turowetz about their latest book Autistic Intelligence.
From Action to Grammar
In this contribution, Virginia Calabria leads us to the discovery of the workshop titled “From Action to Grammar”, which took place on August 18-19, 2022. This hybrid event was an interesting and enriching occasion for interactional linguists to discuss the relationships between the concepts of ‘action’ and ‘grammar’, speculate about theoretical concepts, confront interactional data from a variety of languages and settings, and work toward the construction of a grammar of spoken language.
Chocolate, cookies, pizza, fun and laughs also contributed to the workshop…
Read and comment on the full article here: Putting into Action building a Grammar of spoken language
Advancing Multimodal Conversation Analysis
A group of researchers from the University of Basel and the Hermann Paul School of Linguistics hosted the Advancing Multimodal Conversation Analysis (AMCA) Summer School in late June in Basel. It was a hybrid event, with attendees all over the world invited to watch the keynote lectures, and with collaborative and feedback-rich activities for the participants on site. Their report discusses some of the highlights of the event, including reflections on the theoretical and methodological consequences of the multimodal turn in CA and the complexity of building collections of multimodal phenomena and analysing complex settings and activities.
Read and comment on the full article here: AMCA 2022 Summer School Report
2 new podcast episodes
We have two new episodes of the State of Talk Podcast for your listening pleasure:
- An interview with Hansun Zhang Waring, Professor of Linguistics and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University and founder of their distinguished Language and Social Interaction Working Group (LANSI). In this interview, we asked Hansun to talk to us about her route into CA, about how she came to set up LANSI, and heard about some of her current research including work exploring language socialisation from a conversation analytic perspective, and an edited collection of critical perspectives in CA that she is developing with Nadja Tadic.
- An extended interview with Doug Maynard (emeritus of University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Jason Turowetz (University of Siegen) about their exciting new book entitled Autistic Intelligence, published by the University of Chicago Press in summer 2022. Their collaboration stands as an “examination of diagnostic processes that questions how we can better understand autism as a category and the unique forms of intelligence it glosses.” The interview touches on the interactional processes associated with autism spectrum disorder, as well as other themes such as the sociology of diagnosis, categorical structures, and the social production of medical records.
If you have ideas or want to participate in the ISCA newsletter or our podcasts and other projects, please go to https://conversationanalysis.org and reach out to us. We would love your input in what we are building, which we hope is a truly international connection amongst our EM and CA communities.
Announcements
Please send any announcements you’d like listed on the EMCAwiki to announce@emcawiki.net and cc pubs@conversationanalysis.org if you’d like it to go out with the next newsletter.
Job Opportunity
May I draw your attention to a Research Associate (FTE 0.8) post currently advertised in Sheffield. The project is about online arts interventions for older people with dementia or other mental health issues using video analysis. A brief description for the post can be found here: https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/CTJ300/research-associate