Every two years, the worldwide tribe of academics, students, researchers interested in the analysis of interaction meet up for a week of presentations, gossip and all-round good cheer. This year the International Conference on Conversation Analysis (ICCA) was held in Edmonton, Canada, and, as ever, was hugely well attended and greatly enjoyed. I’m delighted to have the view of the event from Alonso Vásquez-Kanashiro, an enthusiastic and lively early career researcher, who brings a fresh eye to this global CA gathering.

This year, ICCA brought together around four hundred people with a shared interest in Conversation Analysis. In line with its theme, ‘Diversities, Language, Interaction’, the conference offered a remarkable range of perspectives, topics, and areas of study. This was reflected in the diversity of workshops offered – ranging from turn-taking and particles to social categories and evidencing claims – as well as in the broad range of panels, theme sessions, and keynote presentations. The conference also featured a special tribute to Schegloff, providing an unforgettable moment of sharing memories about him. Together with the beautiful surroundings, good food, and great company, ICCA2026 offered a particularly rich conference experience.

But what was it like to experience such an event for the first time? Of course, different first-time attendees will have different starting points, motivations, and goals. In this blog post, I wanted to share a little of my own perspective, which includes anecdotes and reports of the conference workshops and presentations, but also some reflections I had within the whole process. And these reflections require some framing of where I was when I came across ICCA, and how I was engaging with the field back then.

ICCA as an invitation to meet other members of the CA community

As an undergraduate student in Peru, I first came across CA in the classroom, in linguistics courses concerned with language, society, and use. At that point, I wasn’t thinking about a ‘community’, a gathering of people doing CA. Rather, CA initially appeared to me simply as knowledge about how we interact, and as an interesting subject to become familiar with. However, as I started reading more, I became interested in what made CA distinctive as an approach to social and linguistic inquiry. That made me wonder whether this is something one could get into and specialize in.

Later on, I was invited to Conversanalista a Spanish-speaking network of conversation analysts, and to its Permanent Seminar on Conversation Analysis (SPAC), which gathered every Tuesday for online data sessions. Participating in these activities led me to think of CA not only as knowledge, or even as a methodology, but as a community that had developed, sustained, and preserved a compelling way of doing inquiry. Perhaps that is what motivated me to keep going to data sessions, while reading more literature and attending more spaces where I could get in contact with other members of the community. Without noticing, three years had passed since I first encountered CA, and I had been attending online workshops, meeting researchers online, doing CA research, and helping build a CA group in Peru. I would say, then, that I thought of ICCA as a first opportunity to meet other members of the CA community in person. It would be my first time attending and presenting at an international conference, but, more importantly, it felt like an invitation to become more directly involved in the community

The pre-conference workshops

After arriving, settling in, and exploring a little of Edmonton, the first days of the conference began with the pre-conference workshops. Part of my fascination with ICCA was the opportunity to learn and practice under the guidance of people I had previously known only through their work. This was particularly significant to me, given that opportunities for specialized training in CA are scarce in my home country. These pedagogical experiences are, in my opinion, among the most significant parts of gathering at a conference: not only because of what one formally learns in each workshop, but also because of what one learns from other attendees and through more informal exchanges during breaks with the organizers.

The conference

After two and a half days of workshops and a welcoming reception venue, the conference officially started with opening remarks by Xiaoting Li, the local organizing chair of ICCA2026. This certainly was not my first time attending and presenting at a conference. What was new to me, however, was the sheer variety of theme sessions and panels taking place simultaneously across different rooms throughout the four next days. This variety made me realize more than ever that the field has been engaging with a diversity of data, phenomena, settings, and orders of detail. As I expected, I had to make difficult choices between equally interesting presentations.

I remember attending presentations on topics I already expected to find interesting, such as minimal linguistic resources or sequential structures of conversation. But I also attended panels and theme sessions on material activities, emergency calls, and conflict in interaction, opening up new areas of interest that I could eventually pursue. Some even inspired me, prompting connections with my own projects, previous empirical observations, or methodological reflections on how to study certain phenomena.

On the final day of the conference, I had the opportunity to give my first presentation abroad. In a theme session called “Topicality and topic management across languages”, I presented some of the results of a scoping review on topicality, conducted in collaboration with Luis Manuel Olguín and Gerardo Chávez-Lazo. Beyond the challenge of deciding what to include and prioritize in a twenty-minute talk, I found it satisfying to present what we had done and the avenues for future research that emerged from the review. I am grateful to those who attended, asked questions, reflected with me, and offered their insights and comments.

Meeting fellow conversation analysts

Above all, the exchanges I had with other conversation analysts remain memorable. For starters, I had the chance to meet several Spanish-speaking colleagues from Conversanalista – Vero, Carmen, Alexis, Alexa, and Simon. After years of sharing online spaces, it was wonderful that we could finally meet face to face, walk around Edmonton, and get to know each other better. I still cherish our conversations, which reinforced our sense of an increasingly connected Spanish-speaking EMCA community.

The conference was also an opportunity to finally meet in person conversation analysts whom I had previously encountered in online data sessions, workshops, and webinars. It was striking to see that we could easily recognize each other. It made me realize that connections built through online meetings can provide a strong foundation for meeting again, this time face to face. I also got to know conversation analysts whom I had read or heard of but had never met before. I even met the scholars whose work formed the core of the literature review for my bachelor’s thesis. And, in every case, I enjoyed learning about what others are currently working on and what interests them, as well as reflecting together what characterizes our particular approach to social and linguistic inquiry.

Final takeaways

ICCA2026 marked several kinds of first experiences for me: it was my first time attending and presenting at an international conference, and taking part in face-to-face workshops. Most importantly, it was my first opportunity to meet other members of the CA community in person, get to know what they do and what interests them, and reflect with them on what our field means. Beyond these ‘firsts’, attending ICCA also transformed the way I understand the field, shaping how I approach my current research projects. This clarified several doubts and uncertainties I had before, and opened up new questions and possibilities. Ultimately, what I take away from ICCA is that, behind the ‘body of knowledge’ that I once encountered in the classroom, there are spaces where the work of doing CA becomes visible, and where that body of knowledge is being shaped, discussed, and revised. And being there meant, above all, witnessing how that happens!.

CA scholars are proving increasingly inventive at engaging their students with the science and craft of the discipline. We have already featured a blog about using an AI podcast to help students work their way through an academic research paper, and one of the most frequently visited blog pages on this site is a long list of video clips which illustrate CA practices for use in teaching. Here I’m delighted to feature an intriguing new teaching resource developed by Maartje Roodzant and Borbala Sallai at the Radboud Universiteit, Nijmegen.

Can teaching CA be gamified?

In this blog post, we will tell you about this game, how it was created, and how it can be applied for various academic purposes, while also reflecting on how this game fits in the trend towards gamification in science.

First we prepared a set of cards. One set was made up of abstracts of an academic paper that studied a certain phenomenon; the other set was made of matching short clips from a movie or tv show which featured a salient (we hoped!) instance of those phenomena. The cards were mixed up and placed face down on the floor.

When a card with a number was uncovered, we played the corresponding clip to the players; if it was an abstract, the players read it and discussed it.. Then the card was placed face down again, and as the game went on and the players had got an idea of where the cards were, they had to pair them up.

The game
The objective of the game is basically to identify and remember those pairs. Players were divided into teams to speed up the game and to make it more engaging. Then, it was finally time to start playing the game, using the following rules:

1. Mix the cards and lay them face-down on the floor, arranging them in a big square (classic memory-style). Discuss the rules:
   a. Is note-taking allowed?
   b. What is the maximum time for teams to confer during their turn?
2. The team with the youngest player starts.
3. Upon each turn, one team member flips over two cards at a time.
4. The corresponding video clips and abstracts are shown on a big screen to ensure visibility for all players. Note:
   a. Each fragment is only shown once per turn.
   b. A predetermined amount of time will be allocated to read the abstract upon first appearance (e.g., 2 minutes).
   c. It is possible that players end up with two abstracts or two fragments in one turn.
5. When the team thinks they have a match, they ask the jury to assess.
   a. If the match is correct, the team claims the pair and takes another turn.
   b. If the match is incorrect, the team flips the cards back over and the next team takes their turn.
6. The game ends when all the correct pairs are claimed. The team with the most pairs wins.

Try it yourself

Would you like to try the game out for yourself? We won’t make you do the memory version, but at least you can see if you can match up the cards! We’ve helped by turning the cards over already. Click on the numbered tiles to open the video clips, then see if you can pair the card with an Abstract. (You can check your guesses with the answers at the foot of this blog.)

Game play The team typically spread out the cards in front of them on the floor, and puzzled over them for some time.

How did it go?

Did this go entirely without struggle? Of course not.

Try to put some critical (CA) scholars in a room, show them a fragment, and you will definitely get some fairly argumentative exchanges. Isolating a single interactional phenomenon in a 30-second clip, especially when one does not know what they are looking for, is quite a challenge. Lots of discussions – within teams, between teams and between the jury and teams – arose. Not only did this make the game more fun, but it also allowed for data session-style collaborative thinking.

Overall, it turned out to be a very fun and rewarding activity, with lots of potential for applications outside of our own teambuilding day.

Adapting CA Memory for various settings

Building on our experience with CA Memory, we propose that it could be used for a variety of (semi-)academic purposes, including:

1. teaching CA, as it helps engage with literature in a playful setting,
2. as an ice-breaker activity for a conference,
3. in a research group to get to know each other’s research,
4. etc.

Virtually any aspect of the game can be adapted depending on the audience and intended outcome. You can adjust the gameplay process, the level of difficulty and the content as you like. For example, you could (dis)allow note-taking, turn it into a puzzle instead of memory (by showing all fragments + abstracts at once and letting the participants find the matches), or allow for preparatory reading. The game also lends itself well to being ‘recipient-design’-ed, by adding papers and fragments based on the course curriculum or the scientific output of the players – in our case, this was well received.

If you want to create your own version, you could use the video clips in this ROLSI blog of video clips which illustrate CA practices. If you have any further questions, feel free to reach out to Bori (borbala.sallai@ru.nl) or Maartje (maartje.roodzant@ru.nl).

Carl Rogers was perhaps one of the most influential psychotherapists of the late 20th century, with his “person-centred psychotherapy” having a lasting impact for many decades later. Attention has recently turned to how psychotherapy achieves its ends in talk, and here Yuanyuan Zhang, from Loughborough University, tells us how – as an aspiring therapist herself, as well as a conversation analyst – she looked into the therapy black box by studying online recordings of Rogers’s own psychotherapy sessions.

My interest in psychotherapy initially started from my role as a psychotherapy client. Later, I wanted to learn the craft of psychotherapy, and this led me to undertake psychotherapy training. I came across Carl Rogers’ recorded sessions during the training course. The trainer played us Rogers’s therapy sessions with “Gloria” and “Dion” (publicly available on YouTube) to illustrate the psychotherapy process and invite students’ comments.

I didn’t pursue the training, but instead became fascinated by what Rogers was doing in his sessions, and I decided to make it the focus of my doctoral work.

What does it mean to eat together with other people? Sally Wiggins Young has delved deep into it, and come back with a fresh, new way of seeing what had seemed to be a familiar landscape. Here she and  Amy van der Heijden report on their inauguration of EatSiN, a wide-ranging group bringing together EM/CA researchers working on what happens when people eat in the company of others.

What do we know about eating as a social phenomenon? It’s been an object of study for EMCA and language socialisation research, whether as data source (such as the data set affectionately known to CA old hands as the chicken dinner transcripts), as topic (such as the latest multimodal research on tasting), or both. But there isn’t an over-arching way of thinking about it – until you stand back and compare it with other ways in which people spend time together.

The meeting in the White House on February 28, 2025 made headlines around the world. President Trump and his vice president JD Vance accused President Zelensky of obstructiveness and ingratitude, in what many saw as offensively intemperate terms. The details of the exchange bear close scrutiny and study, and we are lucky to have a detailed and thoughtful analysis by Alexa Hepburn.

Political meetings between heads of state typically follow a predictable structure: expressions of goodwill, diplomatic pleasantries, and controlled messaging. Even in disagreement, leaders maintain strategic ambiguity to uphold a sense of alignment or at least mutual respect (e.g., Biden & Zelenskyy, 2021). However, the February 28, 2025, Oval Office meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy broke sharply from this norm. Widely described as unprecedented in its public confrontation, some media outlets framed it as an “ambush” (Nichols, 2025), with Zelenskyy “aggressively bullied” (Elser, 2025). Others portrayed a two-way dispute, calling it a “shouting match” (Sanger, 2025) or a “spat” (Faguy & Matza, 2025).