In this final round-up of reports from the International Pragmatics (IPrA) conference in Antwerp, I’m delighted to have reflections of Barbara de Cock on CA and social media (including Twitter!) and then Catrin Rhys looking forward to her and her colleagues’ organisation of the next big IPrA, in Belfast 2017.
Barbara de Cock: CA, CMC and social media
In the second of our guest blogs on the huge IPrA conference, Mark Dingemanse sends in this comprehensive and thoughtful report on one of the liveliest of the discussion Panels – how languages other than English fare in the research community.
Transcribing talk-in-interaction in languages other than English
Mark Dingemanse, MPI Nijmegen
Testifying to the power of CA methods and insights, a growing number of researchers study the empirical details of talk-in-interaction in languages other than English.
I’m delighted to introduce a series of short guest blogs written by friends of ROLSI who were at the Antwerp IPrA conference, and took active roles in Panels and presentations. I’ll be publishing their reflections in a series over the next couple of weeks.
We start with a report by two early-career researchers on their experiences of one of the linguistics world’s largest international meetings, then a report on a panel of papers reporting research on “change-of-state” tokens. Continue reading
In June 2015, the “Revisiting Participation: Language and Bodies in Interaction” conference took place at the University of Basel in Switzerland. It was a tremendous success, and I’m delighted that three of the organisers, David Monteiro, Hanna Svensson & Nynke van Schepen have sent this enthusiastic report.
Continue reading
Conversation Analysis (CA) is a particularly attractive research tool for investigating the communication of people with autism: its careful, moment-by-moment method picks up just how it is that their interactional moves fail (and succeed). In this very welcome guest blog, Tom Muskett explains the promises of CA in working with the complexities of this often distressing disorder.
Tom Muskett, now at Leeds Beckett University
I was a speech and language therapist with an interest in working with children on the autism spectrum. By definition, this diagnosis is associated with so-called deficits in social interaction and communication, but I had become increasingly dissatisfied with the accepted representations of these, particularly within research and clinical writing.
In this guest blog, two enterprising young researchers, Fabio Ferraz de Almeida and Joe Ford, grapple with the slippery combination of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. They ask: for a given research topic, which bits of each does one use?
Fabio Ferraz de Almeida and Joe Ford, Loughborough University
Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (hereafter EMCA) have a long history of being used to examine social (inter)action in institutional environments. Moreover, they are also frequently used as a way of re-examining topics that have been previously studied using other approaches. This synthesis can yield a number of benefits – for the institutions, for our understanding of the topics and, of course, for EMCA.
CA researchers have given talks all over the world, but few can have done so in a venue as venerable as the Royal Institution. Liz Stokoe, whose work has rightly gained a world-wide following (see for example her TEDx talk) reports on her experiences as the first scholar of interaction to be invited into its historic lecture theatre
In May 2015, I was invited to present a Royal Institution ‘Friday Evening Discourse’. The Royal Institution’s most famous lecture series is probably the Christmas Lectures, but the Discourses have been running since 1825. They were started by English scientist Michael Faraday, and most “eminent scientists” have presented one. Continue reading
Transcribing and analysing touch and bodily control is a very demanding business, as Asta Cekaite attests. In this guest blog, she takes us behind the scenes of her recent article in ROLSI.
Asta Cekaite, Linkoping University
Setting up a study about children inevitably implies sensitivity to embodied aspects of social interaction. For me, moving into children’s everyday spaces involves an exciting challenge and a possibility to turn to the some of less explored issues – touch, movement, multi-activities, bodily integrity and affection. The list is quite long. For researchers, interested in complex interactions, management of multi-activities, cooperation or social control, interactions from children’s everyday life – families and educational settings – can provide an inspiring venue for scrutinizing the taken-for-granted aspects of social interaction. Continue reading
CA has been applied in some sensitive locations, but perhaps never in such a situation as Aug Nishizaka (Chiba University) describes – the aftermath of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear reactor disaster at Fukushima in 2011. In this guest blog Aug shows us that interaction research can be inspired by humanity and civic consciousness.
Aug Nishizaka, Chiba University
A huge earthquake (called the Great East Japan Earthquake) occurred in northeastern Japan on March 11, 2011. More than 18,000 individuals were killed in tsunamis triggered by the earthquake, and the subsequent explosions at a nuclear power plant in Fukushima Prefecture (about 220 km northeast from Tokyo) forced more than a hundred thousand people to evacuate their homes. Continue reading
Studying the to- and fro- of a busy medical facility is not easy, though the promise is that the results can bear on what are literally life or death matters. Vasiliki Chrysikou and Fiona Stevenson give us a fascinating account of working in a UK Accident and Emergency unit.
Will Gibson, Caroline Pelletier, Fiona Stevenson and Vasiliki Chrysikou – the University College, London research team (Sophie Park not pictured)
Setting up our study was a complex business, and threw up all sorts of issues which needed thoughtful – and sometimes sensitive – decisions. Here are some of the most salient things to come out of our team’s journey towards collecting video and audio recordings, and ethnographic material, for our CA study of decision making in A&E. Continue reading
Research on Language and Social Interaction - Blog 