In this episode, Saul Albert interviews Charles Antaki, Professor Emeritus of Language and Social Psychology at Loughborough University. Charles is a member of the venerable Discourse and Rhetoric Group, which, with his central involvement, has helped to shape the field of applied CA and discursive psychology. He is also editor of one of the premiere journals in our field – Research on Language and Social Interaction, and his research interests lie in understanding ordinary and institutional interaction through CA.
Alongside his fundamental conversation analytic work on social identity, explanations and accounts, formulations, and his significant range of methodological contributions over the years, his extensive applied conversation analytic work in the field that’s come to be known as ‘atypical communication’ has involved applying conversation analysis to understand how adults with intellectual disabilities engage in interaction, and how conversational practices can promote discourses of agency for people with profound intellectual disabilities. His work on police interviews has explored questioning practices, and has extended his work on atypical communication to understand how vulnerable and disabled people manage questions of fault and blame around allegations of sexual assault.
His 2011 collection with palsgrave macmillan on applied conversation analysis synthesised a range of studies that demonstrate the power of CA for not only describing, but also shaping the institutional and mundane settings that constitute our experience of everyday social life.
References
Boas, E. V. E. (2017). Analyzing Agamemnon: conversation analysis and particles in Greek tragic dialogue. Classical Philology, 112(4), 411-434.
Wootton, A. (1997). Interaction and the Development of Mind (Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511519895
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Our theme music is “Ethnomethodology” by Peter Daniel off of the album Convulsive Listening (Spotify, Apple Music)