One of the most adhesive binding agents for researchers in EM/CA is the weekly get-together, whether to pore over data or to discuss the week’s chosen reading. Some reading groups and data sessions come and go, and some have an admirably long and unbroken history. One of the latter is the Ethnomethodology Reading Group originally based at Manchester University. Here, Phil Hutchinson delves into its past and looks forward to its future.

Every Wednesday, at 10am UK time, a familiar pattern unfolds on my laptop screen. I open MS Teams and watch as people log on from across the globe. Most have the week’s PDF open on a second screen. For the next three hours we do something simple but increasingly rare: we talk, in detail, about a piece of ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, or related philosophy that everyone has read closely. This is The Ethnomethodology Reading Group.

The roots of the group go back to Manchester UK in the late 1960s, when Wes Sharrock began a weekly discussion group that soon became a fixture: students, colleagues, and visitors knew they could just turn up. In fine discussion-group tradition, the name never quite captured what went on in the group. Rather, the reading followed the distinctive predilections of the Manchester EM/CA group and ranged widely: classic EM/CA, Wittgenstein, Wittgensteinian philosophy, Ordinary Language Philosophy, and Phenomenology.

Going online

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, Alex Holder and I moved the meetings online. We set up a Google Drive folder for distributing readings, met first on Zoom and then on Teams. The basic format remained the same, only now we were online and the meetings grew from two hour sessions to three. The readings are agreed collectively: sometimes week-to-week, sometimes by committing to working through “big books” chapter-by-chapter.

Since 2020 those big books have included Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, On Certainty and Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 2; Garfinkel’s Ethnomethodology’s Program; Aron Gurwitsch’s Field of Consciousness; Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception; Frank Ebersole’s Things We Know; and Gus Brannigan’s The Use and Misuse of the Experimental Method in Social Psychology. We also spent a stretch with Jeff Coulter’s work, both to mark his death and to celebrate his writing.

In March 2023 we began what became a major joint project: we worked our way through Harvey Sacks’ Lectures on Conversation and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Big Typescript (TS 213) in alternating two-week blocks, returning to each in turn over the course of about two and a half years, and finishing with the final Sacks lecture in September 2025. Speaking for myself, that project has been one of the most rewarding intellectual undertakings in which I’ve been involved. It has strengthened my conviction that Sacks is a worthy heir to Wittgenstein and an extender of his ideas in innovative directions.

The Lectures on Conversation read to me like detailed implementations of what Wittgenstein called grammatical investigation: a refusal to be rushed into “theory”, a determination to stay with the ways members themselves use words, and a patient recovery of what competent speakers already know how to do. Set alongside the Big Typescript and Philosophical Investigations, CA staples such as adjacency pairs, repair, and recipient design, in addition to membership categorisation, begin to look less like empirical discoveries in need of explanatory theory, and more like reminders—perspicuous presentations of everyday practical know-how that is usually taken for granted.

Calm and gently reflective discussion?

Not always! One of the liveliest sessions came when we reached Harvey Sacks’ remarks on a passage from E. E. Evans-Pritchard in Volume I, Part III, Lecture 17 of the Lectures on Conversation—unlikely material, perhaps, for one of our more animated mornings, but so it proved. It quickly turned into a heated debate about how one learns from Peter Winch’s Wittgensteinian philosophy and his own reading of Evans-Pritchard. Several members of the group have written on Winch, and the discussion became sharp and somewhat heated, culminating in a rather theatrical exit by one member. For a moment several of us wondered whether we were about to re-enact the famous incident where Wittgenstein (allegedly!) threatened Karl Popper with a poker; but being on Teams, and with central heating having largely replaced coal fires in the UK, no actual pokers were available (though some present that morning report a plastic radiator bleed key being thrown at the screen).

There have also been mornings when we have had to confront our limits more quietly. I still remember opening Teams to a rather sparse collection of faces as we reached the more technical, mathematical sections of the Big Typescript. Those who turned up gamely tried to work through them together; we all struggled, but those who stayed the course were, I think, rewarded. …I think. Those sections of Wittgenstein cost us a few members, perhaps. Over the years there have even been a few breakaway groups—“splitters”, as we affectionately call them—when clusters of regulars have gone off to pursue more specialised readings (or just avoid Wittgenstein on maths).

Then there are the debates that re-emerge every few months and never quite resolve: to what extent are Garfinkel’s studies and Sacks’ analyses continuous with Wittgenstein’s and Ebersole’s grammatical investigations? Does it really matter, for practical purposes, whether we work with naturally occurring data or carefully staged examples? On mornings when those questions flare up, it sometimes feels as though we ought to have a glass case on screen containing a symbolic poker with a label reading: “In case of argument over naturally occurring data versus imagined cases, induction versus grammatical investigation, break here”.

Present and future

Since finishing Wittgenstein and Sacks, we have returned, for now, to a more episodic programme. We recently spent several weeks on Goffman’s posthumously published “Felicity’s Condition” followed by Emmanuel Schegloff’s 1988 “Goffman and the Analysis of Conversation”. Next, we plan to work our way through the contributed chapters in Hedwig te Molder and Jonathan Potter’s Conversation and Cognition. The rhythm of the group continues to oscillate between close engagement with EM/CA “classics” and forays into whatever new or neglected work participants suggest.

A global group

Moving online also reshaped who takes part, and from where. What was once a meeting whose membership was effectively restricted to those within commuting distance of Manchester is now genuinely global. Since 2020, the group has included participants logging in from Canada, Czechia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Macau, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, the UK, and the USA. The disciplinary range is also diverse. My own background is in philosophy, though I am now based in a psychology department. Other members come from psychology, communication and media, medicine and health, sociology, criminology, science and technology studies, geography and education. The group also includes a practising psychotherapist and several retired academics. That mix is part of what makes the discussions so rewarding: it pushes back against increasingly siloed academic disciplines and keeps EM/CA in conversation with the traditions that have shaped it and that it has influenced—but also, and perhaps more importantly, sustains EM/CA as a living tradition that is in conversation with contemporary concerns.

What, if anything, makes this group distinctive? One feature is the tempo and duration of the discussions. Three hours on a single text, week after week, is unusual in contemporary academic life, where reading and reflection are often squeezed into what is left after teaching, admin, and the latest institutional demands. Another is the way we allow EM/CA texts to be in live conversation with philosophy and phenomenology, without reducing either to “background theory” or methodological window-dressing. For many of us, ethnomethodology has long been understood as a kind of praxeological phenomenology; discussing Garfinkel and Sacks alongside Gurwitsch, Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein, and Ebersole has helped us develop that thought.

A place to think

Above all, the group has become a place where people who care about EM/CA, and about the things that shaped it, can think aloud together over time. People drift in and out as jobs, family life, and time-zones permit, but many have been attending for years. And although we are firmly in the tradition of discussion groups whose names no longer fully capture what they do, we have at least avoided one famous precedent: in all our years of sometimes quite vigorous debate, no-one has threatened anyone else with a poker… yet.

Erving Goffman’s legacy is everywhere visible in the social sciences, and Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz‘s new book shines light on the “invisible college” of his contemporaries among his close circle and further afield. The result is a fascinating account of the intellectual climate of the 1960s-1980s, and a throughly engaging read for all whose work has felt the influence of Goffman down the ages.

In writing Mapping Goffman’s Invisible College (Leeds-Hurwitz, 2025), I followed the advice I was given in graduate school: to research something most others did not know about. The name, and the work, of Erving Goffman are of course well known in the social sciences; but he has typically been described as a “loner” and I wanted to throw some light on the intellectual environment surrounding him.

Here I will describe two elements: why I began this project in the first place, and a little about the research process.

Origin Story

I was invited to present as part of a celebrationin Brazil in 2022 honoring the 100^th anniversary of Erving Goffman’s birth. I thought about what I knew that neither I nor others had already written about, given that an enormous literature discussing Goffman and his ideas already exists (full disclosure: I co-authored one of the books: Winkin & Leeds-Hurwitz, 2013, and wrote chapters for two others prepared in honor of the same anniversary: Lenz & Hettlage, 2022; Jacobsen & Smith, 2022).

Eventually I realized that as a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1970s, I had been research assistant at the Center for Urban Ethnography (CUE) while Goffman was there, and so I knew more about his role with CUE than most others. While writing that up, I realized there were in fact several other projects I knew something about which also had not yet been widely discussed, and added those in. I contacted the Penn archives with questions, and they were very helpful. Each project added more names of people who were part of Goffman’s invisible college. (Briefly, an invisible college describes a scholar’s connections to people who are not generally known to be part of their network.)

At least some members of his core group of colleagues at Penn should be familiar to most ROLSI readers: Dell Hymes, Bill Labov, Ray Birdwhistell, John Szwed, and Sol Worth. They were all involved in at least some of the major projects described in detail as successful, as well as at least some of the other projects covered in less detail, most of which were far less successful. The goal was not to stop after introducing the initial narrow cast of characters, but rather to demonstrate the range of people who were part of his extended network at Penn, and then beyond Penn.

My contribution to the 2022 celebration in Brazil has since been translated and published in Portuguese (in Martins & Gastaldo, 2024), but I wanted to publish in English as well. So, I visited both Penn’s archive and the American Philosophical Society (APS) archive in Philadelphia to get answers to additional questions arising as I expanded the scope of the story. (It was a pleasure to return to the APS since I had conducted some of my dissertation research there in the 1970s.) As the number of projects included in the story increased, so did my understanding of Goffman’s network, expanding not only across many departments and colleges at Penn but also to other universities (Chicago, Berkeley, Harvard, Indiana, Texas) and the National Institute of Mental Health. In the process, what was originally intended as an article grew into a book.

Research process: solving the jigsaw puzzle

Overall, this research was a complex jigsaw puzzle: 21 collections deposited in a dozen different archives each revealed different parts of the story; my task was to fit all the pieces together into a coherent story. Basically, I wrote up each project separately, and every time I located more information, I updated the relevant document. What was most surprising was just how often a folder related to one topic contained new information about another – a person who was involved who I had not yet known about, or a result that I had not yet seen documented elsewhere.

For example, a conference on the Comparative Ethnographic Analysis of Patterns of Speech in the United States, held in 1975 at Temple University, was funded by the Committee on Sociolinguistics of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), and organized primarily by Joel Sherzer (a student of Hymes). Most of the relevant documentation was found in the Hymes Papers at the American Philosophical Society, but some was in various correspondence files (especially with Sherzer, Labov, and Allen Grimshaw) while much of the rest was located in several Committee files. The best surprise was finding the report of the event, prepared by Virginia Hymes as Rapporteur, which included detailed quotes, some from Goffman.

All archives outside of Philadelphia were contacted through email. (There are very good guides now available online revealing what information can be found in what archive, something that did not exist when I first conducted archival research for my dissertation.) I did not visit any of the other archives in person. Instead, once I had sorted out what I needed from each, the archivists could locate that documentation, copy it, and email it to me (usually for a fee). Since this research overlapped with years we were all being extra cautious due to COVID, that was important – in fact, some of the archives were still closed to in-person visits, but most of the archivists were able to be access their own records.

In the end, the vast majority of what is reported in this book was found in archives, and has not been previously reported. To give just one example, this time taken from the Allen Grimshaw papers (he was a sociologist at Indiana University who Goffman – as well as Hymes – corresponded with over decades). As a member of the Committee on Sociolinguistics at SSRC, Grimshaw organized the Multiple Analysis Project (MAP) as a way to compare different methods early in the development of sociolinguistics, and Goffman was one of the original members of MAP. This is one of the projects that failed, but we have much to learn from it nonetheless. One (of many) interesting things to know is that Goffman, even after leaving the group as a result of disagreements in terms of data collection (taking with him what Grimshaw referred to as his “constituency,” that is, Harvey Sacks and Emanuel Schegloff, who were also part of the project, but only so long as Goffman was), still visited Grimshaw at Indiana as previously scheduled a few months later, writing that he would never think “that such business could strike deep enough to wither affection.”

Professional quarrel Overall, it astonished me that such a short time after Goffman left MAP, taking Sacks and Schegloff with him, causing complications for Grimshaw and everyone else involved with that project from that point forward, he and Grimshaw were able to put history behind them to first organize all the details, and then actually manage a visit lasting several days, especially given that Goffman stayed in Grimshaw’s home. Perhaps people were simply more polite and considerate in the 1970s, but it seems unlikely that such behavior could be expected today of colleagues who had quarreled professionally to the point of leaving a joint project. It demonstrates an impressive ability to separate the personal from the professional, on the part of both Goffman and Grimshaw. They were personal friends who professionally disagreed.

I did conduct a few interviews when I needed answers I could not locate either in publications or archives – as when I contacted Robert Kleck to ask about a conference he organized with Goffman in 1969. I had seen what turned out to be an incorrect conference title and the wrong year listed in an early CV for Adam Kendon, which he sent to Allen Grimshaw in the 1970s, and which Grimshaw had deposited with his papers in an archive, where I found it. As Adam died in 2022, I was unable to simply write him and ask for details. Instead, in the process of trying to learn more about that conference, I somehow found my way to Kleck. He was gracious enough to reply and sort things out. A good example of the twists and turns of historical research.

In conclusion, what are the major things I learned putting this book together? To give only one example of what I learned about Goffman, I discovered much about his connection to sociolinguistics, hardly the topic with which he is usually associated. More generally, I learned a great deal about multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity and the differences between them; about invisible colleges, and the ways in which ideas need to be shared if they are to have influence; and about learning from failure (so as to be more successful in future). There is much more for me (and presumably others) to still learn about all of these general topics, though I do assume I at least have now finished writing books about Goffman.

References

Jacobsen, M. H., & Smith, G. (Eds.). (2022). The Routledge international handbook of Goffman studies. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

Leeds-Hurwitz, W. (2025). Mapping Goffman’s invisible college. Bethlehem, PA: mediastudies.press.

Lenz, K., & Hettlage, R. (Eds.). (2022). Goffman handbuch: Leben – werk – wirkung. Stuttgart, Germany: J. B. Metzler.

Martins, C. B., & Gastaldo, E. (Eds.). (2024). Erving Goffman 100 anos: Explorando a ordem da interação. Rio de Janiero, Brazil: Ateliê das Humanidades.

Winkin, Y., & Leeds-Hurwitz, W. (2013). Erving Goffman: A critical introduction to media and communication theory. New York: Peter Lang.

“The baby cried. The mommy picked it up” is Harvey Sacks’s vivid example of how descriptions imply relationships, attitudes, behaviours and a whole host of physical, social and perhaps moral attributes. As Sacks pointed out, we all unconsciously see “the mommy” as being the mommy of that baby, and having the right or indeed the obligation to pick it up. But where do the two sentences come from? Jack Joyce takes up the story…

“The baby cried. The mommy picked it up” is a tried and tested illustration of Sacks’ assembling the apparatus of what he called Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA) to analyse categories-in-use. A cursory search on Google Scholar reveals 743 citations using the quote. They range from membership categorisation analysis textbooks, studies of storytelling, studies of child-talk, studies of humour, clinical communication studies, countless PhD theses, to the Wikipedia page for Conversation Analysis. 

Its immediate recognisability and accessibility for describing MCA is why Linda Walz, Tilly Flint and I decided to use it in our upcoming book chapter (Identity and Membership Categorization Analysis – out in the Handbook of CA in a couple years’ time!). We sent off our chapter to the editors, only to receive spine-chilling email: “Routledge has asked that one of the authors go to the original publisher and seek copyright clearance”. But who to ask? Where did the quote actually come from?

What makes this pair of sentences so evocative, anyway?

The example beautifully and plainly captures different aspects of how we may recognise categories and their predicates in everyday talk—and how we might be inclined to see the mommy as accountable for comforting a crying baby.

It’s why so many authors have used and reused the example in their work. Sacks’ analysis of the two sentences describes how the action of the baby ‘crying’ is responded to by the ‘picking up’ action by the mommy. The hearer’s maxim explains how the hearer may interpret ‘baby’ and ‘mommy’ as being a standard relational pair and belonging to the same category device ‘family’, which Sacks terms collection R (rights and responsibilities) as opposed to collection K (knowledge). The sentences illustrate the rules of application: economy (a single category is sufficient to describe a person) and consistency (categories used proximally can be heard as belonging to the same device). Sacks also explains the viewer’s maxim whereby activities (e.g. ‘crying’/’picking up’) may be bound to members of a category (e.g. ‘baby’/’mommy’).

Time and time again we see writers using Sacks’ illustration to exemplify MCA — a nifty short-cut to package a description of the MCA approach. Often it’s no more than just that shortcut, but people have also engaged with it in a more critical way. Some authors question the social norms drawn on, if inferring the ‘mommy’ as related to the baby. Lakoff’s (2000) analysis, for example, explores the consequential relationship of the two sentences comparing ‘picking it up’ to ‘ate a salami sandwich’, and of course Schegloff’s (2007) tutorial on membership categorization analysis explaining that observations which may assume a relationship between the ‘mommy’ and ‘baby’ (or are based on other assumptions) “steer analysis into dangerous, shallow waters” (p. 465). Of course, as any MCA researcher will remind you, MCA does not treat categories as static and decontextualised, but as constituted in the local context. 

Tracking down the source

Although most famously used throughout Lectures on Conversation (1992), Sacks first published the quote in his On the Analyzability of Stories by Children in John Gumperz and Dell Hymes’s edited collection on the Ethnography of Communication (1972). In Sacks’ words “the sentences we are considering are after all rather minor, and yet all of you, or many of you, hear just what I said you heard, and many of us are quite unacquainted with each other. I am, then, dealing with something real and something finely powerful” (1972, p. 332)

Although most famously used throughout Lectures on Conversation (1992), Sacks first published the quote in his On the Analyzability of Stories by Children (1972) in Gumperz and Dell Hymes’ edited collection on the Ethnography of Communication. In Sacks’ words “the sentences we are considering are after all rather minor, and yet all of you, or many of you, hear just what I said you heard, and many of us are quite unacquainted with each other. I am, then, dealing with something real and something finely powerful” (1972, p. 332).

Tracking down the source

I assumed the 1972 chapter would be the end of the trail but upon closer inspection I noticed a footnote referencing the quote to a book analysing children telling stories by Evelyn Goodenough Pitcher and Ernst Prelinger (1963). Pitcher and Prelinger’s book collected the stories of 137 children in the late 1950s and emphasises the value of analysing how children understand the world around them, their emotional states, and their interpersonal relationships.

I assumed the 1972 chapter would be the end of the trail but upon closer inspection I noticed a footnote referencing the quote to a book analysing children telling stories by Evelyn Goodenough Pitcher and Ernst Prelinger (1963). Pitcher and Prelinger’s book collected the stories of 137 children in the late 1950s and emphasises the value of analysing how children understand the world around them, their emotional states, and their interpersonal relationships. This is where we find the origin of our quote. A 2-year-old named Bernice W told a story and from that innocuous story, a whole programme of research into culture-in-action was born. In Sacks’ words “the sentences we are considering are after all rather minor, and yet all of you, or many of you, hear just what I said you heard, and many of us are quite unacquainted with each other. I am, then, dealing with something real and something finely powerful” (1972, p. 332).The sentences are famously used throughout Lectures on Conversation (1992), but Sacks first published the quote in his On the Analyzability of Stories by Children (1972) in Gumperz and Dell Hymes’ edited collection on the Ethnography of Communication. Buried in a footnote next to the quote is a reference to a book by Evelyn Goodenough Pitcher and Ernst Prelinger (1963) – a collection of children’s stories – and here is where we find the origin.

This is where we find the origin of our quote. A 2-year-old named Bernice W told a story and from that innocuous story, a whole programme of research into culture-in-action was born.

Could I delve further? My excitement at finding the original quote was short-lived when I realized that the book’s publisher had been out of business for over 20 years. Undeterred, I tried to reach out to the authors, only to come across their obituaries—Evelyn Goodenough Pitcher passed away in 2004, and Ernst Prelinger in 2021. Both obituaries speak warmly of their character, highlighting how they “bettered the lives of hundreds of people”, acknowledging their prolific body of work across psychology, and both mention the 1963 study on children’s storytelling and how it was inspired by Pitcher’s own children.

It would have been wonderful to have found out more about Pitcher and Prelinger: how their book was received, how they developed it, and what further work they did thereafter. Sadly that is denied us. But one of the items in their collection has been the touchstone for a flourishing research tradition with ramifications well beyond children’s stories.In Sacks’ words “the sentences we are considering are after all rather minor, and yet all of you, or many of you, hear just what I said you heard, and many of us are quite unacquainted with each other. I am, then, dealing with something real and something finely powerful” (1972, p. 332).

Gumperz, J. J. & Hymes, D.(1972). Directions in sociolinguistics: The ethnography of communication. Holt, Rinehart and Winston

Pitcher, E. G. & Prelinger, E. (1963). Children Tell Stories: An Analysis of Fantasy. International Universities Press

Sacks, H. (1992). Lectures on conversation: Volume I and II.  Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell.

Schegloff, E. A. (2007). A tutorial on membership categorization. Journal of Pragmatics, 39(3), 462-482.

How does the criminal justice system in England and Wales accommodate witnesses or defendants who have difficulty with language? Only within the last twenty years has much thought been given to vulnerable people who struggle to understand and communicate, especially in unfamiliar settings. Now, the system does recruit help, and I’m delighted to invite Tina Pereira, trained in conversation analysis, to explain how she uses multimodality CA to help all parties cope with the demands of police interviews, enabling them to deliver ‘best evidence’.  

Reader of this blog will hardly need reminding that human communication in everyday contexts is typically multimodal, and that embodied conduct i.e. interactions that includes physical objects, gesture, as well as spoken language, typically impart meaning in a communicative encounter. So it may surprise some that those latter channels have, until recently, been largely underplayed in the criminal justice system, which, traditionally, privileges text and speech. Think of legal documents, police interviews and the to-and-fro of the courtroom.

But some vulnerable people can’t easily cope with complex language. Many individuals with an intellectual disability struggle to understand and communicate through speech alone. But, on the other hand, they do have relatively better visual processing skills (Cherry et al. 2002). So there is a discrepancy between their greater competence with the visual and the historical bias towards using speech in the legal system and interactions in legal contexts (both at police interviews as well as at court). That is a state of affairs which is inconsistent with the concept of a fair trial referred to in Article 6 of the Human Rights Act (HRA 1998). This incongruity is one that I have been addressing in police investigative interviews, as a Registered Intermediary (RI), for over 15 years. How can CA help?

Intermediaries and communication aids

An RI, in England and Wales, is a communication specialist with a professional background in a communication related field (such as speech and language therapy), who has received additional training in legal processes. RIs are registered with the Ministry of Justice to provide specialist communication assistance between a legally defined VP and others in legal settings (Ministry_of_Justice 2024). The intermediary special measure (YJCEA 1999b) is covered under the Act referred to above, which also makes provision for the use of communication aids (YJCEA 1999a) i.e. material objects, drawing, writing etc, as resources, if their use can be justified in court.

I typically work on cases where a complainant has a diagnosis of Intellectual Disability, with children as well as adults. My role in that context is to firstly assess the VP’s specific and individual communication and interaction difficulties, make targeted recommendations in relation to the manner in which they can be interviewed (or cross examined in court) and then to provide contemporaneous assistance in situ.

Multimodality CA has significant benefits in the legal system, both for VPs whose visual processing skills are tapped resulting in more complete, coherent and accurate evidence, but also for the police and courts, who are thus able to understand the relevance of tapping the visuo-spatial-gestural modality. 

A case study

In this case, a 13 year old VP with an intellectual disabiity and Autism was due to be interviewed by the police, putting forward an allegation of rape by her paternal grandfather. This was a case that would obviously need careful and sensitive questioning, and it would be important that the complainant be able to understand physical terms to do with proximity and contact, and temporal terms to do with sequence and narrative.

My assessment revealed difficulties in communicating positional (i.e., ‘behind’, ‘below’, ‘between’ etc) and orientational language (‘at right angles’, ‘next to’, ‘in front of’ etc) using speech alone. She also struggled to communicate a sequence of events, which was essential in describing the order in which the suspect had allegedly assaulted her. However, assessment also revealed strengths in understanding some time-related concepts ‘before-after’ (or ‘first-next’), as well as consistent awareness that miniature material objects could represent real concepts (Peirce 1893-1913). 

I used multimodality CA in a detailed planning meeting prior to the interview, to explain, demonstrate and provide evidence-based reasons for recruiting aids in interview. Any barriers to recruiting material objects in interview were resolved at that point. We used two different sized mannequins to represent her grandfather and herself (A), and coloured paper to represent a bed and a sofa (B) involved in the allegation. 

All communication aids were introduced in a non-leading, systematic and orderly manner, with the VP typically using a word or phrase first before each successive aid was recruited. Aid use was managed by the police officer and myself, where the VP was given clear step-by-step aid-related embodied instructions, enabling her to ‘show’ what happened in a sequential manner. Neither the police officer nor I told her WHAT to say: we had shown her HOW to communicate in a manner that was aligned with her mode of communication. Her use of embodied actions (i.e., placing of the objects, positioning them in relation to each other) comprised the second part of the adjacency pair, enabling her to communicate various sub-happenings in the allegation (C).  

We used colour, size and manipulation of 3D objects in that manner, to render her account more linguistically accessible.

Explanation and evidence to court

I wrote a comprehensive report for court, analysing her understanding and use of aids in assessment, drawing parallels with how they were used in interview and how they could be used in cross examination if and when the case proceeded to that part of the trial. The court was able to view the visually recorded interview including the non-leading, systematic and orderly manner in which the aids and embodied instructions were given, to satisfy itself that the evidence thus produced was legally admissible. Because aid selection, introduction and management were carried out in a transparent manner, together with robust analysis of her communication and interaction abilities, any possible future accusations of bias would be unfounded. 

Not only did the aids enable her to communicate evidence that she was previously unable to do in accordance with her right to a fair trial, but they also enabled the court to understand the timeline and positions of the parties involved. The defendant offered an early guilty plea on viewing the video recorded evidence-in-chief, thus eliminating the need for additional court time. While the verdict is immaterial in relation to me as a practitioner-researcher, it was satisfying to appreciate the real-world application of CA in the justice system. 

Dr Tina Pereira is a highly experienced HMCTS Appointed Intermediary who has worked with vulnerable people in criminal and family courts, mostly in the West Midlands for several years. She  is also an accredited Registered Intermediary with the Ministry of Justice (MoJ). She was on the MoJ’s intermediary training team for some years and currently serves on their Registered Intermediary Reference Team, which provides corporate intermediary related work.

References 

HRA. 1998. Human Rights Act: The Articles. In: UK Parliament ed. Right to a fair trial. London: The National Archives.

Ministry_of_Justice. 2024. Ministry of Justice Witness Intermediary Scheme: Information about Registered Intermediaries as part of the Ministry of Justice Witness Intermediary Scheme. [Online]. London: Ministry of Justice Available at: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/ministry-of-justice-witness-intermediary-scheme#:~:text=Registered%20Intermediaries%20conduct%20an%20assessment,therapy%2C%20teaching%20and%20social%20work. [Accessed: 19-06-24]. 

Peirce, C. S. 1893-1913. What is a sign? In: Project, P.E. ed. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical writings. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. pp. 4-10.

YJCEA. 1999a. Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act. In: UK Parliament ed. Special Measure 30: Communication Aids. London: UK Parliament,.

YJCEA. 1999b. Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999 London:

I’m Jamie, an undergraduate studying Psychology and Linguistics at the University of Oxford. Having decided that being employed post-graduation would be ideal, I’d been looking around for internships that would help me explore the career paths I’m interested in, one of which is research. 

Some court cases rely on the interpretation of verbal exchanges – recorded conversations, interviews, police interrogations. The expert may be asked to say whether something is evidence of a bribe, a threat, a confession, and so on. Gary C. David PhD CCS is one of the very few conversation analysts who have been called on to help the court. His report makes for fascinating reading.

When is an interrogation and interview, or an interview an interrogation? How much does it matter how such encounters are characterized versus what they look like? How can we tell the difference between the two? These are questions that I had to address as I was asked to examine a police encounter with a person suspected of murder. My expert opinion could make a difference in whether evidence is admitted or excluded, and whether the suspect goes to trial or goes free.

Conversation analysts soon accumulate many hours of tapes and transcripts; usually these have been collected on the understanding that they are for the researcher’s own use, with permission only to publish extracts anonymously. But should such data be open to other researchers? Jack B. Joyce, Catrin S. Rhys, Bethan Benwell, Adrian Kerrison, Ruth Parry summarise here the arguments examined in a recent paper.

Paul ten Have’s son Frans has shared the sad news of Paul’s passing. Paul ten Have died on Tuesday May 10, 2022 in a nursing home in Alkmaar (The Netherlands), two years after he lost his life partner Immelien Kramer.