Jessica S Robles

This article presents a qualitative investigation of communication practices interactants use to manage mobile phone activity while they are engaged in a copresent conversation. Drawing from conversation analysis and a collection of naturalistic video recordings, our study of mobile phone use in situ focuses on how participants orient to the mobile text summons, the audible chimes or vibrations that indicate the receipt of a text message (or short message service [SMS]). In these moments, interactants must simultaneously manage attending to their phone and the copresent conversation. Our analysis shows how people may use nonverbal and verbal techniques to attend to their mobile phone based on their identity respective to the copresent activity. The study contributes to scholarly understandings of technology use, multitasking, and the management of attention in interpersonal communication.

This is the accepted manuscript of ROBLES, J., 2016. Constructing group membership through talk in the field. IN: Kurylo, A. (ed.) Negotiating Group Identity in the Research Process: Are you in or are you out? Lantham, MD: Lexington Books, pp. 85-102. It is reproduced by permission of Rowman & Littlefield , full details can be found: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498509206 All rights reserved. Please contact the publisher for permission to copy, distribute or reprint.

... MLA Citation: Robles, Jessica. ... APA Citation: Robles, JS and Ho, EY , 2008-11-20 "Intersecting Practices in Focus Groups: The Conditions for Social Interaction" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the NCA 94th Annual Convention, TBA, San Diego, CA Online <PDF>. ...

This article analyzes discourse, narrative, and video editing to introduce the concept of “historical coherence.” This concept is an expansion on Alessandro Duranti’s notion of “existential coherence”—the construction of an embodied narrative connecting a candidate’s past with his/her decision to run for office—from his 2006 study of a candidate’s campaign speeches. The present study examines how language and communication are linked with historical narratives through the use of a multimodal stories in which US political commercials link candidates’ present actions with historical events, dynamics, artifacts and/or figures. This “historical coherence” is constructed through several strategies: (1) constructing a narrative in which popular historical figures or archetypal figures are in agreement with the candidate; (2) preempting charges of lack of historical coherence; (3) presenting historical restrictions to freedom and casting the candidate, or the candidate’s party in general, ...

How has the phrase “social construction” been used among communication scholars over the past 45 years? This paper characterizes some of the ways in which “social construction” as an idea has been taken up in communication scholarship. In particular, the paper considers what is useful and what is problematic in the different ways social construction is used. First, this paper presents trends in usage, particularly from the early 1990s onward, in several top communication journals. Second, ways of using the concept are analyzed in published articles. Third, discourse about social construction and uses of the phrase are examined in three state-of-the art fora in light of the tensions and questions of doing social construction research. Finally, practical implications for the continuing usefulness of the term are considered.

This paper employs discourse analysis and draws on interdisciplinary approaches to examine how identity is constructed in conversation. The purpose of the paper is twofold: to present an argument for a particular exclusionary practice in everyday life; and to show how this practice is revealed through discourse analytic methods. Specifically, the analysis describes how extremely negative moral assessments about outgroup identity-related behaviour constitute a high-risk strategy for ingrouping with co-participants in ordinary face-to-face interactions. Demonstrating this strategy shows how discourse analysis can provide a frame through which to understand what interactional resources are available to people and therefore how we might reflect on the relationship between local exclusionary practices and broader social phenomena such as racism and sexism.

This project has two primary purposes. The first purpose is to formulate the key problems involved in enactments of morality in interpersonal interaction, and how these problems are constructed and managed in participants’ discursive practices. Based on a communicative perspective situated in a grounded practical theory approach (chapter 1), this project draws on literatures across the field of communication (chapter 2) and applies discourse analytic methods (chapter 3) to video recordings of interpersonal interactions. Results of these analyses indicate that doing morality involves confronting the problematic nature of difference with regard to the fundamental commitments of interaction (intersubjectivity, chapter 4); the conditions of the particular relationship and its closeness (intimacy, chapter 5); the judgment-inflected ideas and norms arising in cultural contexts (ideology, chapter 6); the impact of salient cultural differences implicated in intercultural contact (culture, c...

This article examines a productive use of communicating gender stereotypes in interpersonal conversation: to resist activities traditionally prescribed according to gender. The analyses video-taped naturally occurring US household interactions and present three techniques participants may deploy to contest gender expectations: mobilizing categories, motivating alignment and reframing action. We show how gender is an accountable category in relation to household labor, and how gender categories provide a resource by which participants can non-seriously solicit and resist participation in domestic gender-prescribed activities. Our analysis provides some insight into how participants use gender stereotypes in everyday talk and what functions such talk serves.

To say that intercultural communication –maybe more than ever – is one of the great challenges of our time is probably an understatement. While culture has both enriched and confounded us since time immemorial, there are many contemporary examples that suggest the increase of communication technologies, education, and globalization is not making such struggles disappear. Rather, people from different communities are relating and misrelating to each other in new and interesting ways that range from the delightful to the tragic. The challenge of our understanding of communication and culture continues to demand our attention. Two recent books by Donal Carbaugh and his colleagues offer theoretical, methodological, empirical, and practical insights into this challenge. This review essay summarizes these books and reflects on their contribution to our understanding of culture and communication.

This article analyzes mockery sequences among a group of friends to examine how this discursive practice mobilizes categories to manage stances toward differences and to construct group norms and boundaries. Using discourse analysis, I inspect how nonseriously tearing down or jocularly teasing/mocking participants within a peer group manages the practical problem of in-group difference by reaffirming shared stances and norms around masculinity. The analysis highlights some of the ways in which groups navigate difference and identity moment-to-moment in interaction, showing how the moral organization of in-group and out-group assessments are built in the mundane world of conversation.

In a period of only one decade in the United States, the neti pot shifted from obscure Ayurvedic health device to mainstream complementary and integrative medicine (CIM), touted by celebrities and sold widely in drug stores. We examine the neti pot as a case study for understanding how a foreign health practice became mainstreamed, and what that process reveals about more general discourses of health in the United States. Using discourse analysis of U.S. popular press and new media news (1999-2012) about the neti pot, we trace the development of discourses from neti's first introduction in mainstream news, through the hype following Dr. Oz's presentation on Oprah, to 2011 when two adults tragically died after using Naegleria fowleri amoeba-infested tap water in their neti pots. Neti pot discourses are an important site for communicative analysis because of the pot's complexity as an intercultural artifact: Neti pots and their use are enfolded into the biomedical practice...

In a period of only one decade in the United States, the neti pot shifted from obscure Ayurvedic health device to mainstream complementary and integrative medicine (CIM), touted by celebrities and sold widely in drug stores. We examine the neti pot as a case study for understanding how a foreign health practice became mainstreamed, and what that process reveals about more general discourses of health in the United States. Using discourse analysis of U.S. popular press and new media news (1999–2012) about the neti pot, we trace the development of discourses from neti’s first introduction in mainstream news, through the hype following Dr. Oz’s presentation on Oprah, to 2011 when two adults tragically died after using Naegleria fowleri amoeba-infested tap water in their neti pots. Neti pot discourses are an important site for communicative analysis because of the pot’s complexity as an intercultural artifact: Neti pots and their use are enfolded into the biomedical practice of nasal ir...

Judgments and norms infuse discourse and interaction; this is what is meant by “morality in discourse.” This article defines a discursive approach to moral concepts, reviews the research history of the topic, considers different perspectives and dimensions, and describes current and developing research on the topic. Keywords: ethics; interpersonal communication; language and social interaction

<AB>Abstract <TX>This article examines how people complain about technology. Using discourse analysis, we inspect sixteen hours of video-recorded focus-group interviews and focused one-on-one discussions where technology was topicalized. We investigate these conversations paying attention to (i) features of language and its situated delivery, including emphasis, word choice, metaphor, and categorizations; and (ii) how these accomplish social actions. We show how interactants use narratives of complaint-like activities about hypothetical categories of people and confessions of their own complainable participation to accomplish a 'bemoaning' speech act that manages competing affiliations, demands, and disagreements to construct reasonable moral identities in the situated interaction. By engaging in specific micro-level discursive practices in interaction, participants produce and reproduce what new technologies 'mean' to them and for contemporary society. This shows how important it is to examine opinions as situated actions rather than as simple facts about what people believe.

Deception and manipulation are expected in strategic gameplay, but how do players negotiate what counts as acceptable kinds of manipulation? We compare three examples from a corpus of 30 hours of competitive board game play, using conversation analysis to examine how players orient to the reasonableness of manipulations. We show that contingencies of timing of the attribution and receipt of the manipulation are as morally concerned as manipulation itself. Players organize their negotiations of acceptability around the concept of a " sporting " player or move. The " sporting " resource shows one situated members' method for collaboratively managing fairness and morality in play. A video abstract is available at https://youtu.be/IlaE-w6FUxw.

The phenomenon of misunderstanding is a recurrent feature of everyday life—sometimes a source of frustration, sometimes a site of blame. But misunderstandings can also be seen as getting interactants out of (as well as into) trouble. For example, misunderstandings may be produced to deal with disaffiliative implications of “not being on the same page,” and as such they may be deployed as a resource for avoiding trouble. This paper examines misunderstanding as a pragmatic accomplishment, focusing on the uses to which it is put in interactions as a practice for dealing with threats to intersubjectivity: the extent to which persons are aligned in terms of a current referent, activity, assessment, etc. A multimodal discourse analysis of audio and video recordings of naturally-occurring talk inspects moments in which misunderstandings are purported or displayed (rather than overtly invoked) as well as how such misunderstandings are oriented to as simply-repairable references, versus inferential matters more misaligned and potentially fraught. Rather than being a straightforward reflection of an experience of trouble with understanding, misunderstanding may also be collaboratively produced to manage practical challenges to intersubjectivity.

This article investigates the interactional organization of racism through participant
production and uptake of explicit racial membership categories across a corpus of
50+ hours of audio-/video-recorded interaction in three U.S. states. The discourse
analysis examines one participant method for addressing “hearably racist” talk:
echoing extreme versions of the problematic utterance to provide opportunities for
repair work on inferable associations between membership categories and categorybound
activities. Orienting to implicit inferential material as the source of trouble
licenses participant account-seeking; treating the racism as a repairable downgrades
its status as an overt instance of racism.

In this article I analyze talk in a political setting to demonstrate how disagreement-relevant practices are fitted to context to accomplish a kind of argumentative strategy. I propose that in the British Parliament’s House of Lords, interlocutors deal with dilemmas of disagreement by doing something I refer to as ‘talking around the issue’, a practice involving 1) institutional positioning , 2) display of emotionality, and 3) orientation to the issue . I suggest that these practices are indicative of institutional norms, but also comprise some of the argumentative resources available to interactants in everyday argumentative practice. These practices also reflect key areas of interest in disagreement and conflict research related to context, style, and issues in conflict.

In our day-today lives, we position ourselves in relation to groups of others: we contribute to collaborative projects at work, we root for our favorite sports teams, call our fizzy drinks " soda " or " pop " , and spend more time with certain people than others. Through our communicative contexts and choices we form identifications and memberships, relating with others in constellations that shift, grow, reconfigure and disintegrate over time. Discursive strategies simultaneously seek to produce an authentic valued group identity and build up the sense that the group is, indeed, " a group " —a real, enduring collective with significant meaning for members. Talk is one of the main ways in which people communicate group identity. This chapter considers how discourse is used to manage group membership in talk to and about others, in research subjects' and researchers' communicative practice. A central case study uses examples of transcribed audio-recordings to examine details of discourse that show how participants construct group membership moment-to-moment in interaction. Drawing on experience in discourse analytic research and ethnographically-informed case studies, the chapter discusses a social constructionist perspective on groups, considers methodological contingencies, and focuses on participating in group research, indexing cultural and group identities, and the acts and ethics of membering. Discourse researchers do not always count themselves among the research participants, especially when operating as outsiders to the community under study. Most discourse analysts use video recordings to separate themselves from the participants in the data, and conversation analysts actively try to remove any analysis that is too rooted in their own perspective. However,

Critical discourse analysis is an approach to the analysis of discourse that examines the relationship between language and power. This approach uses features of language to examine abuses of power in text and talk, and relates this analysis to social and critical theory.