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.

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.

“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. 

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.

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.