Kevin McKenzie

This paper explores how the temporal disjunction established in the production of narrative affords a way of managing the tension between competing demands for accountability in settings where the issue of cultural difference features as a participant concern. Specifically, in speculating upon the nature of cultural variation and cross-cultural contact, interview participants employ narrative accounts to manage the tension between the demand to formulate their concerns in an impartial and unprejudiced fashion on the one hand while displaying an appreciation of and sensitivity to cultural difference on the other. Such interactional work is considered for its theoretical significance to recent developments in discursive psychology. The deployment of narrative is therefore examined for how it relates to the situated production of social scientific investigation itself as a form of social activity in which speakers manage the reflexive implications of their own participation in an undertaking where knowledge of cultural difference is worked up as the outcome of the situated activity in which they are engaged. {Narrative, Discursive Psychology, Culture, Identity, Reflexivity)

This paper explores how what is both appropriate to and excluded from consideration in a given episode of talk involving question-and-answers between a speaker and audience is the outcome of complex negotiation. We consider the details of such collaborative work in talk at a press conference with the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, in discussion concerning his own and other countries’ military involvement in the Middle East. What gets excluded from consideration in the talk is itself established in dialogic interaction where the problematic nature of inferences potentially made relevant to the discussion is highlighted by reporters and brought to account by the Prime Minister. This feature of dialogue is related to recent scholarly debate regarding the place that context of controversy and the implicit availability of meaning should play in an analysis of talk, where what does not get said features as of equal importance as what does get said. We explore how the questions at issue in just such debates get taken up as participant concerns, pursued as a practical order of business in efforts where principal speakers work to foreclose the inferential potential otherwise opened up by audience scrutiny.

This paper addresses a range of theoretical issues which are the topic of recent social psychological and related research concerned with the “new racism.” We critically examine examples of such research in order to explore how analyst concerns with anti-racist political activism are surreptitiously privileged in explanations of social interaction, often at the expense of and in preference to the

That the issue of racism is a pressing social concern which requires serious and detailed attention is, for ethnomethodology, not a first principle from which its own inquiry is launched but rather a matter to be considered in light of how mundane actors (both professional and lay) treat that very topic. This paper explores how the assumption of an ontological distinction between social structure and individual agency is integral to the intelligibility of racism as formulated in scholarly accounts. In particular, I explore how recent scholarly treatments of racism pose as problematic the diverse formulations of racial identity assembled through the deployment of various measures, and then seek to adjudicate upon the resulting inconsistency with an analytic heuristic that assumes an underlying or foundational source for the various expressions it seeks to resolve. Further, I explore examples of analytic work that makes use of first-person accounts of racially significant episodes and experiences as a means to document the formulation of the events and actions those accounts describe in terms that warrant a reading informed by the assumption of the structure-agency distinction. I relate the corroborative work that takes place in the research relationships between students and teachers with ethnomethodology's own project to explore how the efficaciousness of analytic readings of racism entail the pervasive assumption of the structure-agency distinction in order to be rendered them with the sense they have for the various participants involved.

My interest in this chapter will be to explore how an orientation to different aspects of temporality affords a way of managing contrastive demands for moral accountability in descriptions of conflict intervention by peace psychologists and other third-party actors. More specifically, I will be concerned to explore how the professional activities of those outside parties involved in managing the various effects of armed conflict are afforded moral legitimacy through the selective appeal to both structural and agentive accounts of related violence, and will consider the way that these different forms of explanation are variably invoked to underwrite the legitimacy of activities on the part of these professional practitioners. We will begin by examining the text of a programmatic description taken from the literature of peace psychology (Christie, Tint, Wagner, & Winter, 2008; see also Christie, 2006 and Christie & Montiel, 2013), and then move on to consider a number of examples of t...

This paper explores the argumentative work undertaken in talk and text about conspiracy theory (CT), relating this to recent scholarly debate regarding the significance of critical inquiry in the context of developments in poststructuralist and postmodern social theory. We examine discussion of CT as a site where the transformation between deconstructive, depth analytic critique and its opposite, realist claims takes place. Meta-theoretical formulations attempting to accommodate both such argumentative gestures in a coherent program for the pursuit of dialogue are shown to be inconsistent with the nature of argumentation as an undertaking to resolve ambiguity in accounts. The sharing of concerns on which agreement is to be founded are the outcome, rather than the basis, of dialogue, even if such an encounter is pursued on the grounds of shared presupposition distinct from the shared concerns which emerge from dialogue. Discussion concerning CT is a site where the formulation of moti...

Recent scholarly and practitioner research on the work of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) has been concerned with questions about the moral legitimacy of humanitarian aid in settings of armed conflict. At issue is the extent to which NGO activities are said to affect the conduct and outcome of warfare, thereby potentially implicating humanitarian aid in the partisan interests which it has traditionally eschewed as a condition of its legitimacy. This paper explores how such issues are taken up in the explanations offered by humanitarian aid operatives in descriptions of the work they carry out in settings of armed conflict. Drawing on a corpus of conversational material recorded in open-ended interviews with representatives of various NGOs that operate in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), I examine how speakers work to make themselves accountable to demands for sympathetic affiliation with the losing (or vanquished) parties in the Palestinian-Israeli confli...

This paper is concerned with the way that laughter is employed to manage threats to interlocutor affiliation in talk among humanitarian aid workers as they describe their professional activities in settings of armed conflict. I first set out to situate my analysis within the tradition of work in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EM), exploring how that approach differs in significant ways from work in pragmatics and related traditions of discourse analytic research. Unlike the latter approaches, EM examines laughter for the intelligibility it is deployed by speakers to furnish, so that the presumption of laughter’s revelatory nature which characterizes a pragmatically-oriented analysis is seen as a participant resource for rendering the situated significance of actions visible by and for the involved parties of a given episode of interaction. Following this, I examine talk from open-ended interviews with aid agency operatives who work in Israel and the Palestinian Territor...

This paper is concerned with the way that laughter is employed to manage threats to interlocutor affiliation in talk among humanitarian aid workers as they describe their professional activities in settings of armed conflict. I first set out to situate my analysis within the tradition of work in ethnomethodology and con- versation analysis (EM), exploring how that approach differs in significant ways from work in pragmatics and related traditions of discourse analytic research. Unlike the latter approaches, EM examines laughter for the intelligibility it is deployed by speakers to furnish, so that the presumption of laughter’s revelatory nature which characterizes a pragmatically-oriented analysis is seen as a partici- pant resource for rendering the situated significance of actions visible by and for the involved parties of a given episode of interaction. Following this, I examine talk from open-ended interviews with aid agency operatives who work in Israel and the Palestinian Territories, exploring how laughter is employed to manage threats to interlocutor affiliation where the potential accusation of opportunism arises in accounts of personal job satisfaction as against the legitimacy otherwise afforded with an appeal to altruism and self-sacrifice. Where speakers attend to the criticism of humanitarian activity for its significance in affecting outcomes of warfare, the management of these different demands is accomplished in reflexive work to ironize their own and others’ formulations of motivation for pursuing humanitarian work.

This paper explores how category membership features in talk where speakers address the issue of racial discrimination. In particular, it examines how category membership gets invoked to furnish speaker entitlement in the course of destabilizing and reworking the category-bound inferences that inform membership attribution. I begin with the analysis of two relatively short extracts of talk in which speakers invoke ethnic and racial group identity as a preliminary to an examination of the paradoxical uses for which category membership is made relevant, moving on to consider an extended episode of The 700 Club. In contrast to analytic approaches which seek to reveal the denial of racism in speaker claims that mitigate the pernicious implications of category attribution, I consider how category attribution serves as a speaker resource in efforts to identify and critique racism. This participant work is then considered in relation to ethnomethodology's efforts to re-specify the foundational postulates that inform the investigation of social order production and the place that the examination of participant meaning-making has in the pursuit of that endeavor.

This paper explores how the temporal disjunction established in the production of narrative affords a way of managing the tension between competing demands for accountability in settings where the issue of cultural difference features as a participant concern. Specifically, in speculating upon the nature of cultural variation and cross-cultural contact, interview participants employ narrative accounts to manage the tension between the demand to formulate their concerns in an impartial and unprejudiced fashion on the one hand while displaying an appreciation of and sensitivity to cultural difference on the other. Such interactional work is considered for its theoretical significance to recent developments in discursive psychology. The deployment of narrative is therefore examined for how it relates to the situated production of social scientific investigation itself as a form of social activity in which speakers manage the reflexive implications of their own participation in an undertaking where knowledge of cultural difference is worked up as the outcome of the situated activity in which they are engaged.

This paper explores how speakers manage the dilemmatic tension between competing demands for accountability in mundane explanations of humanitarian assistance in settings of armed conflict. Taking as analytic data talk recorded in interviews with the personnel of aid agencies and various non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who work in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), we examine how demands for both non-partisan impartiality, on the one hand, and sympathetic alignment with the victims (or losing parties) of armed conflict, on the other, feature in the explanations that humanitarian aid workers formulate to account for their professional activities. While non-partisanship features as a source of legitimacy given that humanitarian assistance is regarded as a response to universal human suffering, the source of that suffering in armed conflict necessitates recognition of the antagonist-protagonist and victim relationship in order for aid recipients to be identified. Everyday accounts of aid work function to mitigate the otherwise mutually exclusive relationship between competing assumptions that inform the logic of humanitarian assistance.

This paper addresses a range of theoretical issues which are the topic of recent social psychological and related research concerned with the “new racism.” We critically examine examples of such research in order to explore how analyst concerns with anti-racist political activism are surreptitiously privileged in explanations of social interaction, often at the expense of and in preference to the work of examining participants’ own formulations of those same activities. Such work is contrasted with an ethnomethodologically-informed, discursive psychology which seeks to the explore how participants’ talk is responsively oriented to fore- closing the same sort of critique implicitly made available in new racism research as a way for speakers to account for their own and others’ activities within the controversy which that same body of research seeks to settle. More specifically, we examine how the rhetorical context of controversy surrounding race and racism is imminent to the situated activities whereby speakers provide for its relevance and not, as assumed in new racism research, some independent factor affecting that interaction. Finally, we conclude with an analysis of an episode of talk recorded in a social science interview having as its topic the nature of cross-cultural contact in which the participants take up the issue of racism as a way of managing the conflicting demands with which they are confronted in accounting for their involvement as Western expatriates living in the Middle East. Throughout our analysis of these materials, the issue of racism is approached for how it features as a participant concern, raised by speakers in the course of attending to the immediate situated interactional business in which they are engaged.

This paper explores the argumentative work undertaken in talk and text about conspiracy theory (CT), relating this to recent scholarly debate regarding the significance of critical inquiry in the context of developments in poststructuralist and postmodern social theory. We examine discussion of CT as a site where the transformation between deconstructive, depth analytic critique and its opposite, realist claims takes place. Meta-theoretical formulations attempting to accommodate both such argumentative gestures in a coherent program for the pursuit of dialogue are shown to be inconsistent with the nature of argumentation as an undertaking to resolve ambiguity in accounts. the sharing of concerns on which agreement is to be founded are the outcome, rather than the basis, of dialogue, even if such an encounter is pursued on the grounds of shared presupposition distinct from the shared concerns which emerge from dialogue. Discussion concerning CT is a site where the formulation of motivation is made to bear on the question of an argument's validity in virtue of either depth analytic or realist assumptions.

Recent scholarly and practitioner research on the work of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) has been concerned with questions about the moral legitimacy of humanitarian aid in settings of armed conflict. At issue is the extent to which NGO activities are said to affect the conduct and outcome of warfare, thereby potentially implicating humanitarian aid in the partisan interests which it has traditionally eschewed as a condition of its legitimacy. This paper explores how such issues are taken up in the explanations offered by humanitarian aid operatives in descriptions of the work they carry out in settings of armed conflict. Drawing on a corpus of conversational material recorded in open-ended interviews with representatives of various NGOs that operate in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), I examine how speakers work to make themselves accountable to demands for sympathetic affiliation with the losing (or vanquished) parties in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict while maintaining a non-aligned stance relative to the partisan considerations that animate that conflict’s conduct. Both in first-hand narrative accounts of personal transformation and in descriptions of contrastive examples where professional colleagues are said to maintain a too-sympathetic affiliation with the partisan concerns of the Palestinian population whose needs they service, speakers work to provide for the legitimacy of their professional activities in the context of otherwise conflicting demands for moral accountability.

That the issue of racism is a pressing social concern which requires serious and detailed attention is, for ethnomethodology, not a first principle from which its own inquiry is launched but rather a matter to be considered in light of how mundane actors (both professional and lay) treat that very topic. This paper explores how the assumption of an ontological distinction between social structure and individual agency is integral to the intelligibility of racism as formulated in scholarly accounts. In particular, I explore how recent scholarly treatments of racism pose as problematic the diverse formulations of racial identity assembled through the deployment of various measures, and then seek to adjudicate upon the resulting inconsistency with an analytic heuristic that assumes an underlying or foundational source for the various expressions it seeks to resolve. Further, I explore examples of analytic work that makes use of first-person accounts of racially significant episodes and experiences as a means to document the formulation of the events and actions those accounts describe in terms that warrant a reading informed by the assumption of the structure-agency distinction. I relate the corroborative work that takes place in the research relationships between students and teachers with ethnomethodology’s own project to explore how the efficaciousness of analytic readings of racism entail the pervasive assumption of the structure-agency distinction in order to be rendered them with the sense they have for the various participants involved.

This paper explores how what is both appropriate to and excluded from consideration in a given episode of talk involving question-and-answers between a speaker and audience is the outcome of complex negotiation. We consider the details of such collaborative work in talk at a press conference with the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, in discussion concerning his own and other countries’ military involvement in the Middle East. What gets excluded from consideration in the talk is itself established in dialogic inter- action where the problematic nature of inferences potentially made relevant to the discussion is highlighted by reporters and brought to account by the Prime Minister. This feature of dialogue is related to recent scholarly debate regarding the place that context of controversy and the implicit availability of meaning should play in an analysis of talk, where what does not get said features as of equal importance as what does get said. We explore how the questions at issue in just such debates get taken up as participant concerns, pursued as a practical order of business in efforts where principal speakers work to foreclose the inferential potential otherwise opened up by audience scrutiny.