Members Forum Newsletter #6 Jul 2021

It is the middle of summer in the northern hemisphere, a time when many of us would normally pack our suitcases, travel the world, and present our research in a range of conference venues. Unfortunately, we have had to manage as a globally distributed community with events like the International Pragmatics Conference taking place online. And while not everyone is a fan of Zoom presentations, virtual lectures organised by Rutgers, Loughborough, York, and Mannheim are attracting hundreds of scholars from around the world – some getting up in the middle of the night! It seems that, if nothing else, Covid is bringing us together as a global community in new ways.

We are delighted to have three new fascinating articles in this edition of the newsletter, involving not just a brand new squib by Marco Pino and David Edmonds, who discuss misgendering, but also a report on virtual and in-person data sessions in China by Enhua Guo, and a reflection on the International Pragmatics Conference, which this year took place virtually, by Agnes Löfgren. The State of Talk Podcast is returning from a short break with an interview by Elliott Hoey featuring Sara Goico and Natasha Shrikant talking about the first year of the EMCA For Racial Justice (EMCA4RJ) group.

As in our last newsletter, we want to put out a call for short announcements. If you want to share something like a call for papers or a conference, the first place to look remains the EMCA Wiki. But we will highlight short announcements in each Newsletter, so do send your tweet-length summary announcements to pubs@conversationanalysis.org if you’d like them to be included. The newsletter goes out four times a year and the next edition will be in October.

Squib

In this edition, Marco Pino and David Edmonds investigate misgendering in talk-in-interaction, the practice where people are addressed, referred to, or described with language that does not match their gender identity. They discuss the challenges of doing research on this topic. Not only are clear cases hard to come by – they have had to rely on publicly available data – but they point out that as both the authors are cisgender, and lack the lived experience of misgendering. Working with trans people is, for them, crucial in developing an analysis that aligns with the perspective of the participants.

As the research is still in exploratory stages and data is hard to come by, Marco and David would greatly appreciate any input on their project, as well as any possible cases they could use in their analysis. Read their full discussion on Misgendering in social interaction.

Report from Happy Data Session in China

Data sessions are one of the foundational practices for doing Conversation Analysis. While we are not able to come together right now, in April last year a group of scholars in China led by Guodong Yu and Enhua Guo started to come together for a regular online Happy Data Session, with the goal of increasing the community and exploring Chinese talk-in-interaction. The data sessions have been a great success, but also provide interesting points for analysis. Enhua dives into the question of how participants manage silence in a data session, and how this differs between online and in-person data sessions, arguing for the importance of visual participation.

Read and comment on the full article here: “How do the rest of us look at it?” – A Meta-report on Happy Data Session in China

Reflecting on the International Pragmatics Conference 2021

As the Covid pandemic continues to rage across the world, the International Pragmatics Association decided to host their bi-annual conference online. Although there were some technical hiccups, it was the most widely attended edition of the conference in history. Agnes Löfgren, PhD candidate at Linköping University, attended the conference and presented some of her own work on non-lexical vocalisations. She discusses her impressions of the event and gives us some of the highlights.

Read and comment on the full article here: A PhD candidate’s reflections on IPRA 2021.

State of Talk Podcast: EMCA for Racial Justice

In the latest episode of our State of Talk Podcast, Elliott Hoey (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) interviews Sara Goico (UCLA) and Natasha Shrikant (University of Colorado, Boulder) about the development of the group Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis for Racial Justice (EMCA4RJ) since its inception in the summer of 2020, following the murder of George Floyd by a police officer, Derek Chauvin. The interview covers the genesis of the group, current projects, growth and future plans, as well as ways that you can participate. 

You can find The State of Talk Podcast on Apple Podcasts / Stitcher / Spotify or listen to the latest episode here on our website.

Short Announcements

Over the coming months, the Institut für Deutsche Sprache is hosting a series of virtual Talks on Action Formation and Ascription. The talks in this series will address one of the main questions in the social sciences: “How people grasp the subjective meanings of each other’s actions”. This series of talks will bring new insights into what factors (such as position of an action in sequence or project, its linguistic and nonverbal design, other contextual features) contribute to the situated understanding of an action. It will further deliver important methodological and theoretical insights on action formation and ascription in social interaction across different languages.

After a brief summer intermission, the series will continue on August 16^th with a talk by Traci Walker and Isabel Windeatt from the University of Sheffield. The series is accessible for free only to registered participants. To sign up for the talks of this series, please register here: https://perso.ids-mannheim.de/anmeldung/en/329.

If you would like to send EMCA-related announcements out with the ISCA newsletter as well as on the EMCA wiki, please send them to announce@emcawiki.net, copying in pubs@conversationanalysis.org, and state that you would like the announcement both on the Wiki and in the Newsletter. Please include a tweet-length (~240 character length) version of your news!