Recent Publications by Richard Fitzgerald
Journalism, 2024
Along with new forms of mediated communication, social media technologies have created new forms ... more Along with new forms of mediated communication, social media technologies have created new forms of audience engagement with traditional broadcast talk formats. As forms of content creation and audience engagement continue to evolve, Chinese social media have developed innovative ways for users to engage with broadcast videos, especially through what is known as 'danmu' technology. Danmu is a popular commenting system that allows users to post text directly onto the screen, rather than below the video, creating a layer of on-screen user engagement with the video while watching it. This study examines this new form of audience engagement by drawing upon a case study of danmu-commented English-language broadcast interviews cross-posted to Bilibili, a popular video-sharing platform in China. The analysis highlights three forms of participatory practices by danmu users: engagement with the video content, engagement with characters in the video, and interaction between danmu users. The paper argues that danmu-mediated participatory practices create a sense of co-watching and quasi-synchronous interaction that evokes a distinct participation framework in the virtual community. This study contributes to the growing literature on how social media continues to reshape audience engagement with broadcast news and the complex participation frameworks mediated through Chinese danmu technology.
Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 2024
This study takes a praxiological perspective (drawing on ethnomethodology, conversation analysis ... more This study takes a praxiological perspective (drawing on ethnomethodology, conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis) to examine the working practices of food delivery service workers in China. The analysis explicates how delivery drivers deal with daily algorithm-generated information and contingencies through the production and mobilization of tacitly assumed conventions to maintain their flow of work. In other words, while the logic of the algorithm-generated information is a phenomenon exhibited in the app's delivery itinerary, actual delivery work is a reality on its own, not just a surrogate of a company's administrative designs. Three intertwined phenomena are identified: (1) coordinating pick up and deliveries involves a high degree of practical interactional work; (2) the job is practice oriented around routine contingencies of time, travel, and waiting, and (3), the job is collaborative and organized through a moral order that involves the mobilization of resources which operate alongside, but separate from the technology. The study shows how a detailed analysis of the lived work of couriers provides a powerful tool to highlight and examine what is often hidden (and lost) in studies of food delivery service.
Journal of Pragmatics, 2024
Bilmes's (2011, 2022) work in the last decade of his career was primarily concerned with the appr... more Bilmes's (2011, 2022) work in the last decade of his career was primarily concerned with the approach he developed and called Occasioned Semantics, which he defines as "the study of structures of meaningful expressions in actual occasions of conversation" (Bilmes 2011: 129). Bilmes (2011) based OS on Sacks' (1995) membership categorisation work together with components of taxonomical and componential analysis derived from ethno-semantics. While the approach was primarily aimed at the field of Semantics Bilmes regarded his approach as developing upon Sacks' original category work and subsequent developments under the heading of Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA) (Hester and Eglin 1997, Bilmes 2021). In particular, Bilmes argued that OS offered a way to situate categorial inferencing within 'occasioned fields of meaning' within which categorial definitions and descriptions evolve through a taxonomic branching texture providing both an immediate and evolving context of members category work as the interaction unfolds. In this paper we explore the potentially fruitful intersection between the two approaches by drawing together 'fields of meaning' and 'omni-relevance' (Sacks 1992) to explore how members display an orientation to gestalt contextures within which members category work shifts and evolves as the interaction unfolds. Our aim is to examine how the two approaches can be drawn upon to mutually elaborate how categorial consistency is organised within a topical field of meaning that in turn operates within an ongoing, unfolding and contingent interactional context of who-we-are-and-what-weare-doing (Butler 2008, Authors 2009).
Human Studies, 2024
Drawing on drafts and other material from the Harvey Sacks archive this paper examines the develo... more Drawing on drafts and other material from the Harvey Sacks archive this paper examines the development of one of the defining papers of Conversation Analysis, A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation (Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974). The discussion examines four drafts of the paper along with correspondence between the authors and with William Bright the editor of the journal Language where it was published. The four drafts trace the development of the paper from a 13-page draft to the final 106-page final draft submitted to the journal. By exploring the drafts as they evolved the discussion highlights the development of the central ideas in the paper, the distinctive style of the paper as it is revised, the changes of authorship, and the role of the editor of Language, William Bright, in helping to shape the paper through his own detailed reviews.
Multimodality in Translation Studies. Media, Models and Trends in China. (2024). Eds. Li Pan, Xaioping Wu, Tian Luo and Hong Qian. Routledge , 2024
This chapter examines danmu subtitling as a form of multimodal and interactive subtitling afforde... more This chapter examines danmu subtitling as a form of multimodal and interactive subtitling afforded by danmu commenting technology, a "live" commenting technology that allows its users to post comments on the screen of the video in a range of colors and fonts in either moving or static modes. It adopts concepts and methods from digital conversation analysis and multimodal discourse analysis to examine the interaction among danmu users revolving around translation issues arising in watching and understanding "raw meat", a term that refers to untranslated videos on Bilibili. The data consist of over eight thousand danmu subtitles and comments posted on the screen of three English "raw meat" uploaded to Bilibili. The analysis examines how wild subtitlers and the audience engaged in different forms of interactional exchanges and maintained coherence on the visually chaotic interface by mobilizing the technological and multi-semiotic resources of the platform in understanding and translating raw 2 videos. This study contributes to the growing research of subtitling and translation in digital space characterized by multimodality and interactivity. It also provides methodological implications for examining emerging forms of subtitling and interaction in Chinese social media.
Social Semiotics, 2023
This study examines the 2016 Diba Expedition to Facebook, a mass collective organized campaign di... more This study examines the 2016 Diba Expedition to Facebook, a mass collective organized campaign directed at independence leaning Taiwanese individuals and institutions, as an example of cyber nationalism through a highly organized meme war between users from the pro-unification Chinese Mainland and pro-independence Taiwan users on Facebook. Drawing upon a social semiotic multimodal discourse analysis of the nationalist campaign, this study examines the ways Chinese users mobilize multimodal elements of political propaganda and popular culture in the mobilization and preparation of the campaign as well as the playful memetic interaction between the two camps in the battlefield. The analysis and discussion underscore the playful and carnivalesque ecology of Chinese social media that users deployed in the 2016 expedition while also demonstrating the dilemma of undertaking a Chinese nationalism campaign beyond the Great Firewall, where those based in the Mainland needed to overcome the state's regulations of online security to defend the motherland. This study contributes to the growing research on cyber nationalism in China and adds a further dimension to the study of Chinese social media.
Books by Richard Fitzgerald
This SAGE Handbook brings together cutting edge social scientific research and theoretical insigh... more This SAGE Handbook brings together cutting edge social scientific research and theoretical insight into the emerging contours of digital society. Chapters explore the relationship between digitisation, social organisation and social transformation at both the macro and micro level, making this a valuable resource for postgraduate students and academics conducting research across the social sciences.
The topics covered are impressively far-ranging and timely, including machine learning, social media, surveillance, misinformation, digital labour, and beyond. This innovative Handbook perfectly captures the state of the art of a field which is rapidly gaining cross-disciplinary interest and global importance, and establishes a thematic framework for future teaching and research.
Part 1: Theorising Digital Societies
Part 2: Researching Digital Societies
Part 3: Sociotechnical Systems and Disruptive Technologies in Action
Part 4: Digital Society and New Social Dilemmas
Part 5: Governance and Regulation
Part 6: Digital Futures
Chapter 1: The Emerging Contours of Digital Society: Remastering, Reconsideration, Reorientation and New Socio-Digital Domains. William Housley, Adam Edwards, Roser Benito-Montagut and Richard Fitzgerald
Massimo Ragnedda and Glenn W. Muschert Chapter 2: Digital stratification: Class, status group, and party in the age of the Internet
Michael R. McGuire Chapter 3: Crime, Control, and the Ambiguous Gifts of Digital Technology
Robin Smith Chapter 4: Digital Mobilities and Digital Society
Maria José Brites and Rita Figueiras Chapter 5: Disconnection and Digital Society: Perspectives on how Citizens Deal with Media Technology
PART 2: Researching Digital Societies
Rob Procter Chapter 6: Developing Tools and Interdisciplinary Collaboration for Digital Social Research
Malcolm Williams, Charlotte Brookfield, Luke Sloan Chapter 7: Quantitative Research Methods Teaching in a Digital Age
Dennis Leeftink and Daniel Angus Chapter 8: The Research Stack: A Framework for Data-Driven Humanities and Social Science
Alexia Maddox Chapter 9: Ethnography and Digital Society
Harry T Dyer and Crystal Abidin Chapter 10: Understanding Identity and Platform Cultures
Gemma San Cornelio Chapter 11: Instagram Aesthetics for Social Change: A Narrative Approach to Visual Activism on Instagram
Joanne Meredith Chapter 12: Researching Digital Discourse and Interaction
Phillip Brooker and Michael Mair Chapter 13: Researching Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence
PART 3: Sociotechnical Systems and Disruptive Technologies in Action
Axel Bruns Chapter 14: Social Media Analytics: Boom and Bust?
Larissa Hjorth and Ingrid Richardson Chapter 15: Games and Mediated Playful Practices
Shuaishuai Wang Chapter 16: Algorithmic Configurations of Sexuality: Theoretical Foundations and Methodological Approaches
Mike Coliandris Chapter 17: Drones as Disruptive Sociotechnical Systems: A Case Study of Drone Crime and Control
Andrés Domínguez Hernández Chapter 18: The Internet of Things and New Frontiers of Datafication
PART 4: Digital Society and New Social Dilemmas
Pamela M. Hong and Fabio G. Rojas Chapter 19: Digital Racism
Charlotte Nau Chapter 20: Social Media, Gender and Online Discrimination
Emma Bond Chapter 21: Online Safeguarding of Adults with an Intellectual Disability: How do we Ensure that Participation and Protection Rights are Adequately Met in Digital Society?
Gwyneth Peaty, Jordan Alice and Katie Ellis Chapter 22: Clickbait in the Commodification of Sympathy: Disability, Inspiration Porn and the Possibilities for New Narratives
Sharon Meraz Chapter 23: Political Communication in the Digital Age
PART 5: Governance and Regulation
Rik Peeters and Marc Schuilenburg Chapter 24: Algorithmic Governance: Technology, Knowledge, and Power
Martin Innes, David Rogers, Nora Jansen and Viorica Budu Chapter 25: Digital (Dis)information Operations and Misinformation Campaigns
Michael Levi Chapter 26: Frauds in Digital Society
Philip Inglesant, Helena Webb, Carolyn Ten Holter, Menisha Patel, Marina Jirotka Chapter 27: The Responsible Innovation of Disruptive Technologies
Ben Williamson Chapter 28: Governing through Infrastructural Control: Artificial Intelligence and Cloud Computing in the Data-Intensive State
Adam Edwards, William Housley, Roser Beneito-Montagut and Richard Fitzgerald Chapter 29: Freedom of Speech and Online Harm in Liberal Democracies: a Triadic Concept
PART 6: Digital Futures
Phillip Brown, Manuel Souto-Otero and Sahara Sadik Chapter 30: Digital Transformation and the Future of Work
Stuart Reeves and Martin Porcheron Chapter 31: Conversational AI: Respecifying Participation as Regulation
Neil Selwyn Chapter 32: Critical Data Futures Steve Fuller Chapter 33: Mediating the Message in Digital Society
On Sacks. Methodology, Materials, and Inspirations., 2021
This book is devoted to the reintroduction of the remarkable approach to sociological inquiry dev... more This book is devoted to the reintroduction of the remarkable approach to sociological inquiry developed by Harvey Sacks. Sacks’s original analyses – concerned with the lived detail of action and language-in-interaction, discoverable in members’ actual activities – demonstrated a means of doing sociology that had previously seemed impossible. In so doing, Sacks provided for highly technical, detailed, yet stunningly simple solutions to some of the most trenchant troubles for the social sciences relating to language, culture, meaning, knowledge, action, and social organisation. In this original collection, scholars working in a range of different fields, including sociology, human geography, communication and media studies, social psychology, and linguistics, outline the ways in which their work has been inspired, influenced, and shaped by Sacks’s approach, as well as how their current research is taking Sacks’s legacy forward in new directions. As such, the collection is intended to provide both an introduction to, and critical exploration of, the work of Harvey Sacks and its continued relevance for the analysis of contemporary society.
Table of Contents
1. On Sacks: Methodology, Materials, and Inspirations
Robin James Smith, Richard Fitzgerald, William Housley
2. Discovering Sacks
Rod Watson
3. Action, Meaning and Understanding: Seeing Sociologically with Harvey Sacks
Michael Mair and Wes Sharrock
4. Sacks’ Plenum: The Inscription of Social Orders
Andrew P. Carlin
5. From Ethnosemantics to Occasioned Semantics: The Transformative Influence of Harvey Sacks
Jack Bilmes
6. Sacks, Categories, Language, and Gender
Elizabeth Stokoe, Bogdana Huma, Derek Edwards
7. A Most Remarkable Fact, for All Intents and Purposes: The Practical Matter of Categorical Truths
Jessica Robles
8. Sacks: On Omni-relevance and the Layered Texture of Interaction
Richard Fitzgerald
9. Membership Categorization and the Sequential Multimodal Organisation of Action: Walking, Perceiving, and Talking in Material-spatial Ecologies
Lorenza Mondada
10. Revisiting Sacks’s Work on Greetings: the "First Position" for Greetings
Christian Licoppe
11. Sacks, Silence, and Self-(de)selection
Eliot M. Hoey
12. Using Observation as a Basis for Theorising: Children’s Interaction and Social Order
Susan Danby
13. Membership Categorisation and the Notion of "Omni-relevance" in Everyday Family Interactions
Sara Keel
14. Sacks and the Study of the Local Organisation of Second Language Lessons
Ricardo Moutinho
15. Categorisation Practices, Place, and Perception: Doing Incongruities and the Commonplace Scene as ‘Assembled Activity’
Robin James Smith
16. On Sacks and the Analysis of Racial Categories-in-Action
Kevin A. Whitehead
17. Harvey Sacks, Membership Categorisation, and Social Media
William Housley
How do we interact in and with social networks? How do they affect politics and journalism? How d... more How do we interact in and with social networks? How do they affect politics and journalism? How do we build a space and an interactive space? How do users of digital platforms define themselves as members of a community?
Through ten contributions the authors explore the discourse of digital communication and offer an innovative look at the hybrid and multimodal forms of speech of social networks. This volume includes contributions in both French and English through qualitatively and quantitatively studies from Canada, UK, France, Italy and Switzerland and sits at the intersection of several interests:
• Describing the communication work and affordances of social networks.
• Highlighting the importance of combined methodological approaches in the study of the discourse of social networks.
• Examining issues of identity within and between digital communication and citizenship.
• Examining evolving policies in relation to the responsibility of the media in the digital age.
This book is particularly intended for researchers and teachers of digital humanities and communication sciences through a reflection on the issues of new media and citizenship.
This is an exciting addition to the dynamic, multidisciplinary field of membership categorization... more This is an exciting addition to the dynamic, multidisciplinary field of membership categorization analysis. Bringing together the biggest names in MCA this landmark publication provides a contemporary analysis of the field and a platform for emerging researchers and students to build upon.
The book sets out the current methodological developments of MCA highlighting its analytic strength – particularly when examining social identity and social knowledge. It provides a sophisticated tool of qualitative analysis and draws from a wide range of empirical studies provided by global scholars.
The culmination of years of international research this agenda-setting text will be essential reading for academics and advanced students using membership categorization across the social sciences; particularly in media and communication studies, sociology, psychology, education, political science and linguistics.
Contents.
Chapter 1: Introduction to Membership Categorization Analysis. William Housley and Richard Fitzgerald
Chapter 2: De Reifiying Categories. Rod Watson
Chapter 3: Prospective and Retrospective Categorization: Category proffers and inferences in social interaction and rolling news media. Elizabeth Stokoe and Frederick Attenborough
Chapter 4: Categorization Work in the Courtroom: The ‘foundational’ character of membership categorization analysis. Christian Licoppe
Chapter 5: Challenging Normativity: re-appraising category, bound, tied and predicated features. Edward Reynolds and Richard Fitzgerald
Chapter 6: Omnirelevance in Technologized Interaction: Couples coping with video calling distortions.. Sean Rintel
Chapter 7: Membership Categorization and Methodological Reasoning in Research Team Interaction. William Housley and Robin Smith.
"MCA provides an orientation, set of questions, and identification of discrete discourse devices to aid understanding of the moral work being accomplished by speakers’ and writers’ as they select category terms and tie them to descriptions. Fitzgerald and Housley’s Advances in Membership Categorization Analysis brings together cutting edge theoretical explication with fascinating examples ( YouTube posts, intimates video chatting, a review board assessing parole, a research team meeting, online breaking news updates) and is a must-read for anyone interested in identities and interaction."
Karen Tracy
Professor and Chair. Department of Communication,
"A state of the art collection which is essential reading for anyone interested in social identity and social order."
David Silverman
Goldsmiths' and King's College, London, and University of Technology, Sydney
"Membership categories are central to the organization of culture. They set up inferential relations between classes of people, they implicate actions and thoughts, and they mark moral statuses. Membership categorization analysis develops the tradition of work started by Harvey Sacks and shows that the issues he explored are still urgent and significant. In this volume an A-list of contributors provide state of the art analyses that illustrate the ongoing vitality of membership categorization analysis. It is essential reading for anyone interested in this topic."
Jonathan Potter
Professor of Discourse Analysis, Loughborough University
"Richard Fitzgerald and William Housley are to be congratulated for further developing the field. In taking up such questions as the ethnomethodology of categorization (a masterful discussion by Rod Watson), the omni-relevance of categories, the precise nature of the connections between categories and predicates, the temporal reference of category usage, the relationship of categorization to “doing being ordinary” and the place of categorization in the “social life of methods,” the contributors truly bear out the promise expressed in the title of advancing membership categorization analysis."
Peter Eglin
Wilfrid Laurier University
Situated within the field of discourse-oriented approaches to policy and media, this collection e... more Situated within the field of discourse-oriented approaches to policy and media, this collection explores the interface between government, media and the public, highlighting the increasing importance placed on media channelled 'public opinion' as part of a democratic process.
The authors use a variety of discourse analytic methods including CA/MCA, Discourse Analysis and Interactionism, to provide discussions around the social organization of policy debate in media sites including news interviews, public access broadcasts, broadcast debates, panel discussions, mediated government initiatives, newspapers and news broadcasts. The book's geographical coverage spans the USA, Canada, the UK, Europe, Asia and Australia.
This volume offers a major contribution to discourse analysis and its emphasis on policy substance will appeal to a broad audience in social and public policy, political communication, journalism and politics.
Contents
1. Media, Policy and Interaction: Introduction.
Richard Fitzgerald and William Housley
2. Membership Category Work in Policy Debate.
William Housley and Richard Fitzgerald
3. Configuring a television debate: Categorisation,
questions and answers.
Alain Bovet
4. Asserting Interpretive Frames of Political Events:
Panel Discussions on Television News.
Emo Gotsbachner
5. Staging Public Discussion: Mobilizing Political
Community in Closing Discussion Programmes.
Hanna Rautajoki
6. Doing public policy’ in the Political News Interview
Johanna Rendle-Short
7. Press Scrums: Some Preliminary Observations.
Patrick Watson and Christian Greiffenhagen
8. Styling for hegemony: The West as an enemy (and
the ideal) in Belarusian television news.
Marián Sloboda
9. Scandal and Dialogical Network: What does morality
have do to politics. About the Islamic headscarf within
the Egyptian parliament
Baudouin Dupret, Enrique Klaus, Jean-Noël Ferrié
10. Moving teachers: Public texts and institutional
power
Susan Bridges and Brendan Bartlett
11. Newspapers on education policy: constructing an
authoritative public voice on education
Sue Thomas"
"Abstract
The aim of this research is to examine the lived work of a radio broadcast. Within... more "Abstract
The aim of this research is to examine the lived work of a radio broadcast. Within this two main aims are undertaken: the first methodological the second analytic. The methodological discussion takes the form of a critical examination of conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis as separate methods for analysing members interaction. It is argued that, rather than any one method being applied to the exclusion of others, the analysis of members’ methods should be able to demonstrate a sensitivity to the mutually elaborative combination of methods drawn upon and used as a resource by members in situ. A methodological approach which combines an appreciation of various participant methods is then advanced and used in an initial examination of a radio phone-in. This initial examination of the data is then developed upon in the second section. Here, calls are examined in more detail documenting a variety of categorial and sequential resources, both routine and specialised, used and relied upon by participants when offering their opinions and debating a topic. From this it is suggested that, rather than these methods being seen as a modification of mundane methods, the methods used can be seen as common resources drawn upon to make this situation what it is."
Journal Special Issues by Richard Fitzgerald
Discourse, Context & Media, 2022
The aim of this article collection is to examine Chinese social media technology and culture as a... more The aim of this article collection is to examine Chinese social media technology and culture as a distinctive form of mediated communication and practice. The Internet and social media have grown and become an essential part of the society and economy in China in ways that are increasingly dissimilar from that of the social media platforms outside of China. From the early roll out of the Internet, to the now pervasive presence of social media, Chinese Internet culture continues to reflect the unique interplay of technological changes, language affordances (i.e. Chinese as a character-based script), software development, user- generated interactional practices, and government censorship. Social media platforms and practices provide a rich, yet surprisingly under-explored source for the analysis of new and innovative practices within the distinct context of communication technologies and platforms for nearly one billion users. The papers in this article collection contribute further to examining how the technologies and technological affordan-ces of Chinese social media interact to afford distinctive discursive and linguistic practices across a range of interactional contexts.
The origin of this special issue was a panel organised at the International Institute of Ethnomet... more The origin of this special issue was a panel organised at the International Institute of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (IIEMCA) on Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA), held at Kolding in Denmark in 2015. The panel, in memory of Stephen Hester who died in 2014, brought together a number of researchers to discuss the current state of the field and present new directions in research in MCA. Building on the pioneering work of Harvey Sacks and the later work of Hester and others the special issue highlights the contemporary development of MCA as a rigorous
empirical approach to the study of situated identity within the flow of social interaction. The papers, placed at the intersection between pragmatics and sociology in examining multiple sequentially organised layers of category work, examine the organisation of social knowledge and knowledge entitlement, of moral ordering and the deployment of social norms, but also new and emergent areas of interest around spatial and embodied social action within the frame of technology and technologies of interaction.
The interface between technology and talk has always been understood as a multi-faceted relation. Technology in the guise of portable tape recorders was pivotal in the development of conversation analysis and the study of talk while the increasingly ubiquitous recording devices and the explosion in communicative practices and media in the digital age has generated new domains for the study of talk-in-interaction and new ways for recording and approaching these practices as ‘data’. At the same time, although not an uncontroversial analogy, talk and interaction can be understood to exhibit
technological characteristics; a ubiquitous methodological apparatus through which social life is both organised and accomplished. The ethnomethodological paradigm, including CA and MCA, as a ‘primitive natural science’ (Sacks, 1995; Lynch and Bogen, 1994), embraced both naturalism and technical descriptions in order to render visible the highly
organised and granular features of this shared ‘technological’ apparatus.
The idea for this special themed edition of Discourse, Context & Media grew out of a symposium th... more The idea for this special themed edition of Discourse, Context & Media grew out of a symposium that was co-hosted and co-funded by Griffith University’s School of Humanities and CQUniversity in April 2014.
The symposium was prompted by an earlier workshop we held in 2012, which focused on the theme of disaster talk. After the 2012 symposium we felt that we had more work to do on the theme of media talk and hence the seeds for the 2014 symposium with its theme of media talk, were planted.
The media talk symposium, held in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, featured the three internationally recognised ‘fore- fathers’ of broadcast media talk, Paddy Scannell, Andrew Tolson and Martin Montgomery. It was great to have three distinguished leaders in the media talk field together in Brisbane.
We were joined by scholars from a variety of disciplines, with the common link being that we were all researching discursive aspects of talk that occurs in and through various forms of media, including broadcast, print, online and social media. Participants presented their works in progress at the two-day event. The symposium was designed so that presenters received extensive feedback on their works in progress and the collegiality and gen- erosity of the participants and presenters was much appreciated.
A number of common threads emerged from the symposium, including news media talk and so we invited those participants whose papers fitted that theme to submit their papers for con- sideration for this special themed edition of Discourse, Context & Media.
Australian Journal of Communication. Vol 40, No 2 (2013) http://austjourcomm.org/index.php/ajc
This special issue brings together research from the 2012 Conference of the Australasian Institut... more This special issue brings together research from the 2012 Conference of the Australasian Institute of Ethnomethodology (EM) and Conversation Analysis (CA) (AIEMCA). The theme of the conference was the analysis of knowledge and asymmetrical organisation in interactions—in other words, the business of who knows what, and who has the rights and responsibilities to know things .
Papers in the Special Issue.
Alan Blum / Motive, desire, drive: the discourse of force.
Kie... more Papers in the Special Issue.
Alan Blum / Motive, desire, drive: the discourse of force.
Kieran Bonner / Reason giving, city icons and the culture of cities: data from a radical interpretive perspective.
Roxana Bratu / Vocabularies of happiness.
Miriam Cihodariu and Lucian-Ştefan Dumitrescu / The motives and rationalizations of the European right-wing discourse on immigrants. Shifts in multiculturalism?.
Jennifer Doyle and Rose Melville / Good caring and vocabularies of motive among foster carers.
Oltion Kadaifçiu / Vocabularies of motives in the education of deaf students.
Alina Petra Marinescu-Nenciu / The rhetoric of a former corporate job. How people construct their working experience in conversation
This special issue developed out of the 6th Australasian Symposium on Conversation Analysis and M... more This special issue developed out of the 6th Australasian Symposium on Conversation Analysis and Membership Categorisation Analysis (CAMCA) held in Brisbane, Australia in November 2008. Conversation analysis (CA) and membership categorisation analysis (MCA) are approaches that fall under the rubric of ethnomethodology (EM) in that they explore the methods and practices people use to produce and make sense of the social world.
Papers. MCA/EM/CA by Richard Fitzgerald
Philosophia Scientiae, 2022
In his PhD proposal, now published as Seeing Sociological, Garfinkel [2006] formulated action in t... more In his PhD proposal, now published as Seeing Sociological, Garfinkel [2006] formulated action in terms of a mutually constitutive structure—the Noesis-Noema Structures. This structure can be traced to Aaron Gurwitsch’s gestalt psychology and Law of Good Gestalt which theorises how participants prioritise functional Gestalts over other possible meanings of what is perceivable in their surroundings. While Gurwitsch illustrated his theory using images, in this paper we revisit Gurwitsch’s theory in light of the advances in recording real-time interaction to consider Gestalt in spatio-temporality of real-time interaction. We consider the Law of Good Gestalt in terms of the dimensions of time and space, and postulate two analytical principles—the Principle of Good Momentary Gestalt and the Principle of Good Temporal Gestalt—for analysing a multi-angle video segment of a monologue taken from a training event. The analysis examines how the monologue was embedded in a multi-layer projection structure, so that during the time of the monologue, the trainer and trainees can be seen as achieving a transition between one activity to another while sustaining the frame of the training event. Through this, the analysis highlights the multi-layered structure of participants’ field of perception that constitutes their experience of the social activity, and explores a “method” to reconstruct such a structured field of perception through re-coupling meanings to the assemblages of multimodal resources recoverable on video.
Sociological Review, 2022
Time is regarded as the immanent dimension for the social experience. This phenomenologically inf... more Time is regarded as the immanent dimension for the social experience. This phenomenologically informed perspective of time is built into the ethnomethodological programme jointly proposed by Garfinkel and Sacks as they set out to uncover social orders through examining the temporal sequence in practical activity. However, Garfinkel and Sacks took different paths from this initial proposal in their separate development of Ethnomethodological Studies of Work and Conversation Analysis. Focusing on different forms of data, the two programmes adopted different approaches to time and action in constructing the time structures in their sociological description of activity. However, the difference has seldom been subjected to discussion and much less attempt to explore a possible synthesis of the two programmes from there. This article attempts to address this gap by proposing a perspective of multi-layered temporality in social interaction. The analysis examines three extracts from a university communication workshop for students and explicates different modes of how simultaneous sequences can constitute participants' action in situ: (1) simultaneous sequences by different actors; (2) simultaneous sequences by the same actor; (3) simultaneous sequences within a participatory framework. Contending the social actors' phenomenological potential to perceive simultaneous sequences in different time frames, we conclude that the 'situational time' in EM and 'conversational time' in CA can be commensurable. Interweaving different layers of temporality into an ethnomethodological description, practitioners can better reconstruct a 'reasonable total picture' of social activity to manifest its complex, seen-but-unnoticed endogenous social order. Beyond ethnomethodology, the multi-layered perspective of time provides the basis for a holistic approach to time, allowing the enquiry of broader social time through studying social life in vivo.
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Recent Publications by Richard Fitzgerald
Books by Richard Fitzgerald
The topics covered are impressively far-ranging and timely, including machine learning, social media, surveillance, misinformation, digital labour, and beyond. This innovative Handbook perfectly captures the state of the art of a field which is rapidly gaining cross-disciplinary interest and global importance, and establishes a thematic framework for future teaching and research.
Part 1: Theorising Digital Societies
Part 2: Researching Digital Societies
Part 3: Sociotechnical Systems and Disruptive Technologies in Action
Part 4: Digital Society and New Social Dilemmas
Part 5: Governance and Regulation
Part 6: Digital Futures
Chapter 1: The Emerging Contours of Digital Society: Remastering, Reconsideration, Reorientation and New Socio-Digital Domains. William Housley, Adam Edwards, Roser Benito-Montagut and Richard Fitzgerald
Massimo Ragnedda and Glenn W. Muschert Chapter 2: Digital stratification: Class, status group, and party in the age of the Internet
Michael R. McGuire Chapter 3: Crime, Control, and the Ambiguous Gifts of Digital Technology
Robin Smith Chapter 4: Digital Mobilities and Digital Society
Maria José Brites and Rita Figueiras Chapter 5: Disconnection and Digital Society: Perspectives on how Citizens Deal with Media Technology
PART 2: Researching Digital Societies
Rob Procter Chapter 6: Developing Tools and Interdisciplinary Collaboration for Digital Social Research
Malcolm Williams, Charlotte Brookfield, Luke Sloan Chapter 7: Quantitative Research Methods Teaching in a Digital Age
Dennis Leeftink and Daniel Angus Chapter 8: The Research Stack: A Framework for Data-Driven Humanities and Social Science
Alexia Maddox Chapter 9: Ethnography and Digital Society
Harry T Dyer and Crystal Abidin Chapter 10: Understanding Identity and Platform Cultures
Gemma San Cornelio Chapter 11: Instagram Aesthetics for Social Change: A Narrative Approach to Visual Activism on Instagram
Joanne Meredith Chapter 12: Researching Digital Discourse and Interaction
Phillip Brooker and Michael Mair Chapter 13: Researching Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence
PART 3: Sociotechnical Systems and Disruptive Technologies in Action
Axel Bruns Chapter 14: Social Media Analytics: Boom and Bust?
Larissa Hjorth and Ingrid Richardson Chapter 15: Games and Mediated Playful Practices
Shuaishuai Wang Chapter 16: Algorithmic Configurations of Sexuality: Theoretical Foundations and Methodological Approaches
Mike Coliandris Chapter 17: Drones as Disruptive Sociotechnical Systems: A Case Study of Drone Crime and Control
Andrés Domínguez Hernández Chapter 18: The Internet of Things and New Frontiers of Datafication
PART 4: Digital Society and New Social Dilemmas
Pamela M. Hong and Fabio G. Rojas Chapter 19: Digital Racism
Charlotte Nau Chapter 20: Social Media, Gender and Online Discrimination
Emma Bond Chapter 21: Online Safeguarding of Adults with an Intellectual Disability: How do we Ensure that Participation and Protection Rights are Adequately Met in Digital Society?
Gwyneth Peaty, Jordan Alice and Katie Ellis Chapter 22: Clickbait in the Commodification of Sympathy: Disability, Inspiration Porn and the Possibilities for New Narratives
Sharon Meraz Chapter 23: Political Communication in the Digital Age
PART 5: Governance and Regulation
Rik Peeters and Marc Schuilenburg Chapter 24: Algorithmic Governance: Technology, Knowledge, and Power
Martin Innes, David Rogers, Nora Jansen and Viorica Budu Chapter 25: Digital (Dis)information Operations and Misinformation Campaigns
Michael Levi Chapter 26: Frauds in Digital Society
Philip Inglesant, Helena Webb, Carolyn Ten Holter, Menisha Patel, Marina Jirotka Chapter 27: The Responsible Innovation of Disruptive Technologies
Ben Williamson Chapter 28: Governing through Infrastructural Control: Artificial Intelligence and Cloud Computing in the Data-Intensive State
Adam Edwards, William Housley, Roser Beneito-Montagut and Richard Fitzgerald Chapter 29: Freedom of Speech and Online Harm in Liberal Democracies: a Triadic Concept
PART 6: Digital Futures
Phillip Brown, Manuel Souto-Otero and Sahara Sadik Chapter 30: Digital Transformation and the Future of Work
Stuart Reeves and Martin Porcheron Chapter 31: Conversational AI: Respecifying Participation as Regulation
Neil Selwyn Chapter 32: Critical Data Futures Steve Fuller Chapter 33: Mediating the Message in Digital Society
Table of Contents
1. On Sacks: Methodology, Materials, and Inspirations
Robin James Smith, Richard Fitzgerald, William Housley
2. Discovering Sacks
Rod Watson
3. Action, Meaning and Understanding: Seeing Sociologically with Harvey Sacks
Michael Mair and Wes Sharrock
4. Sacks’ Plenum: The Inscription of Social Orders
Andrew P. Carlin
5. From Ethnosemantics to Occasioned Semantics: The Transformative Influence of Harvey Sacks
Jack Bilmes
6. Sacks, Categories, Language, and Gender
Elizabeth Stokoe, Bogdana Huma, Derek Edwards
7. A Most Remarkable Fact, for All Intents and Purposes: The Practical Matter of Categorical Truths
Jessica Robles
8. Sacks: On Omni-relevance and the Layered Texture of Interaction
Richard Fitzgerald
9. Membership Categorization and the Sequential Multimodal Organisation of Action: Walking, Perceiving, and Talking in Material-spatial Ecologies
Lorenza Mondada
10. Revisiting Sacks’s Work on Greetings: the "First Position" for Greetings
Christian Licoppe
11. Sacks, Silence, and Self-(de)selection
Eliot M. Hoey
12. Using Observation as a Basis for Theorising: Children’s Interaction and Social Order
Susan Danby
13. Membership Categorisation and the Notion of "Omni-relevance" in Everyday Family Interactions
Sara Keel
14. Sacks and the Study of the Local Organisation of Second Language Lessons
Ricardo Moutinho
15. Categorisation Practices, Place, and Perception: Doing Incongruities and the Commonplace Scene as ‘Assembled Activity’
Robin James Smith
16. On Sacks and the Analysis of Racial Categories-in-Action
Kevin A. Whitehead
17. Harvey Sacks, Membership Categorisation, and Social Media
William Housley
Through ten contributions the authors explore the discourse of digital communication and offer an innovative look at the hybrid and multimodal forms of speech of social networks. This volume includes contributions in both French and English through qualitatively and quantitatively studies from Canada, UK, France, Italy and Switzerland and sits at the intersection of several interests:
• Describing the communication work and affordances of social networks.
• Highlighting the importance of combined methodological approaches in the study of the discourse of social networks.
• Examining issues of identity within and between digital communication and citizenship.
• Examining evolving policies in relation to the responsibility of the media in the digital age.
This book is particularly intended for researchers and teachers of digital humanities and communication sciences through a reflection on the issues of new media and citizenship.
The book sets out the current methodological developments of MCA highlighting its analytic strength – particularly when examining social identity and social knowledge. It provides a sophisticated tool of qualitative analysis and draws from a wide range of empirical studies provided by global scholars.
The culmination of years of international research this agenda-setting text will be essential reading for academics and advanced students using membership categorization across the social sciences; particularly in media and communication studies, sociology, psychology, education, political science and linguistics.
Contents.
Chapter 1: Introduction to Membership Categorization Analysis. William Housley and Richard Fitzgerald
Chapter 2: De Reifiying Categories. Rod Watson
Chapter 3: Prospective and Retrospective Categorization: Category proffers and inferences in social interaction and rolling news media. Elizabeth Stokoe and Frederick Attenborough
Chapter 4: Categorization Work in the Courtroom: The ‘foundational’ character of membership categorization analysis. Christian Licoppe
Chapter 5: Challenging Normativity: re-appraising category, bound, tied and predicated features. Edward Reynolds and Richard Fitzgerald
Chapter 6: Omnirelevance in Technologized Interaction: Couples coping with video calling distortions.. Sean Rintel
Chapter 7: Membership Categorization and Methodological Reasoning in Research Team Interaction. William Housley and Robin Smith.
"MCA provides an orientation, set of questions, and identification of discrete discourse devices to aid understanding of the moral work being accomplished by speakers’ and writers’ as they select category terms and tie them to descriptions. Fitzgerald and Housley’s Advances in Membership Categorization Analysis brings together cutting edge theoretical explication with fascinating examples ( YouTube posts, intimates video chatting, a review board assessing parole, a research team meeting, online breaking news updates) and is a must-read for anyone interested in identities and interaction."
Karen Tracy
Professor and Chair. Department of Communication,
"A state of the art collection which is essential reading for anyone interested in social identity and social order."
David Silverman
Goldsmiths' and King's College, London, and University of Technology, Sydney
"Membership categories are central to the organization of culture. They set up inferential relations between classes of people, they implicate actions and thoughts, and they mark moral statuses. Membership categorization analysis develops the tradition of work started by Harvey Sacks and shows that the issues he explored are still urgent and significant. In this volume an A-list of contributors provide state of the art analyses that illustrate the ongoing vitality of membership categorization analysis. It is essential reading for anyone interested in this topic."
Jonathan Potter
Professor of Discourse Analysis, Loughborough University
"Richard Fitzgerald and William Housley are to be congratulated for further developing the field. In taking up such questions as the ethnomethodology of categorization (a masterful discussion by Rod Watson), the omni-relevance of categories, the precise nature of the connections between categories and predicates, the temporal reference of category usage, the relationship of categorization to “doing being ordinary” and the place of categorization in the “social life of methods,” the contributors truly bear out the promise expressed in the title of advancing membership categorization analysis."
Peter Eglin
Wilfrid Laurier University
The authors use a variety of discourse analytic methods including CA/MCA, Discourse Analysis and Interactionism, to provide discussions around the social organization of policy debate in media sites including news interviews, public access broadcasts, broadcast debates, panel discussions, mediated government initiatives, newspapers and news broadcasts. The book's geographical coverage spans the USA, Canada, the UK, Europe, Asia and Australia.
This volume offers a major contribution to discourse analysis and its emphasis on policy substance will appeal to a broad audience in social and public policy, political communication, journalism and politics.
Contents
1. Media, Policy and Interaction: Introduction.
Richard Fitzgerald and William Housley
2. Membership Category Work in Policy Debate.
William Housley and Richard Fitzgerald
3. Configuring a television debate: Categorisation,
questions and answers.
Alain Bovet
4. Asserting Interpretive Frames of Political Events:
Panel Discussions on Television News.
Emo Gotsbachner
5. Staging Public Discussion: Mobilizing Political
Community in Closing Discussion Programmes.
Hanna Rautajoki
6. Doing public policy’ in the Political News Interview
Johanna Rendle-Short
7. Press Scrums: Some Preliminary Observations.
Patrick Watson and Christian Greiffenhagen
8. Styling for hegemony: The West as an enemy (and
the ideal) in Belarusian television news.
Marián Sloboda
9. Scandal and Dialogical Network: What does morality
have do to politics. About the Islamic headscarf within
the Egyptian parliament
Baudouin Dupret, Enrique Klaus, Jean-Noël Ferrié
10. Moving teachers: Public texts and institutional
power
Susan Bridges and Brendan Bartlett
11. Newspapers on education policy: constructing an
authoritative public voice on education
Sue Thomas"
The aim of this research is to examine the lived work of a radio broadcast. Within this two main aims are undertaken: the first methodological the second analytic. The methodological discussion takes the form of a critical examination of conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis as separate methods for analysing members interaction. It is argued that, rather than any one method being applied to the exclusion of others, the analysis of members’ methods should be able to demonstrate a sensitivity to the mutually elaborative combination of methods drawn upon and used as a resource by members in situ. A methodological approach which combines an appreciation of various participant methods is then advanced and used in an initial examination of a radio phone-in. This initial examination of the data is then developed upon in the second section. Here, calls are examined in more detail documenting a variety of categorial and sequential resources, both routine and specialised, used and relied upon by participants when offering their opinions and debating a topic. From this it is suggested that, rather than these methods being seen as a modification of mundane methods, the methods used can be seen as common resources drawn upon to make this situation what it is."
Journal Special Issues by Richard Fitzgerald
empirical approach to the study of situated identity within the flow of social interaction. The papers, placed at the intersection between pragmatics and sociology in examining multiple sequentially organised layers of category work, examine the organisation of social knowledge and knowledge entitlement, of moral ordering and the deployment of social norms, but also new and emergent areas of interest around spatial and embodied social action within the frame of technology and technologies of interaction.
The interface between technology and talk has always been understood as a multi-faceted relation. Technology in the guise of portable tape recorders was pivotal in the development of conversation analysis and the study of talk while the increasingly ubiquitous recording devices and the explosion in communicative practices and media in the digital age has generated new domains for the study of talk-in-interaction and new ways for recording and approaching these practices as ‘data’. At the same time, although not an uncontroversial analogy, talk and interaction can be understood to exhibit
technological characteristics; a ubiquitous methodological apparatus through which social life is both organised and accomplished. The ethnomethodological paradigm, including CA and MCA, as a ‘primitive natural science’ (Sacks, 1995; Lynch and Bogen, 1994), embraced both naturalism and technical descriptions in order to render visible the highly
organised and granular features of this shared ‘technological’ apparatus.
The symposium was prompted by an earlier workshop we held in 2012, which focused on the theme of disaster talk. After the 2012 symposium we felt that we had more work to do on the theme of media talk and hence the seeds for the 2014 symposium with its theme of media talk, were planted.
The media talk symposium, held in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, featured the three internationally recognised ‘fore- fathers’ of broadcast media talk, Paddy Scannell, Andrew Tolson and Martin Montgomery. It was great to have three distinguished leaders in the media talk field together in Brisbane.
We were joined by scholars from a variety of disciplines, with the common link being that we were all researching discursive aspects of talk that occurs in and through various forms of media, including broadcast, print, online and social media. Participants presented their works in progress at the two-day event. The symposium was designed so that presenters received extensive feedback on their works in progress and the collegiality and gen- erosity of the participants and presenters was much appreciated.
A number of common threads emerged from the symposium, including news media talk and so we invited those participants whose papers fitted that theme to submit their papers for con- sideration for this special themed edition of Discourse, Context & Media.
Alan Blum / Motive, desire, drive: the discourse of force.
Kieran Bonner / Reason giving, city icons and the culture of cities: data from a radical interpretive perspective.
Roxana Bratu / Vocabularies of happiness.
Miriam Cihodariu and Lucian-Ştefan Dumitrescu / The motives and rationalizations of the European right-wing discourse on immigrants. Shifts in multiculturalism?.
Jennifer Doyle and Rose Melville / Good caring and vocabularies of motive among foster carers.
Oltion Kadaifçiu / Vocabularies of motives in the education of deaf students.
Alina Petra Marinescu-Nenciu / The rhetoric of a former corporate job. How people construct their working experience in conversation
Papers. MCA/EM/CA by Richard Fitzgerald
The topics covered are impressively far-ranging and timely, including machine learning, social media, surveillance, misinformation, digital labour, and beyond. This innovative Handbook perfectly captures the state of the art of a field which is rapidly gaining cross-disciplinary interest and global importance, and establishes a thematic framework for future teaching and research.
Part 1: Theorising Digital Societies
Part 2: Researching Digital Societies
Part 3: Sociotechnical Systems and Disruptive Technologies in Action
Part 4: Digital Society and New Social Dilemmas
Part 5: Governance and Regulation
Part 6: Digital Futures
Chapter 1: The Emerging Contours of Digital Society: Remastering, Reconsideration, Reorientation and New Socio-Digital Domains. William Housley, Adam Edwards, Roser Benito-Montagut and Richard Fitzgerald
Massimo Ragnedda and Glenn W. Muschert Chapter 2: Digital stratification: Class, status group, and party in the age of the Internet
Michael R. McGuire Chapter 3: Crime, Control, and the Ambiguous Gifts of Digital Technology
Robin Smith Chapter 4: Digital Mobilities and Digital Society
Maria José Brites and Rita Figueiras Chapter 5: Disconnection and Digital Society: Perspectives on how Citizens Deal with Media Technology
PART 2: Researching Digital Societies
Rob Procter Chapter 6: Developing Tools and Interdisciplinary Collaboration for Digital Social Research
Malcolm Williams, Charlotte Brookfield, Luke Sloan Chapter 7: Quantitative Research Methods Teaching in a Digital Age
Dennis Leeftink and Daniel Angus Chapter 8: The Research Stack: A Framework for Data-Driven Humanities and Social Science
Alexia Maddox Chapter 9: Ethnography and Digital Society
Harry T Dyer and Crystal Abidin Chapter 10: Understanding Identity and Platform Cultures
Gemma San Cornelio Chapter 11: Instagram Aesthetics for Social Change: A Narrative Approach to Visual Activism on Instagram
Joanne Meredith Chapter 12: Researching Digital Discourse and Interaction
Phillip Brooker and Michael Mair Chapter 13: Researching Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence
PART 3: Sociotechnical Systems and Disruptive Technologies in Action
Axel Bruns Chapter 14: Social Media Analytics: Boom and Bust?
Larissa Hjorth and Ingrid Richardson Chapter 15: Games and Mediated Playful Practices
Shuaishuai Wang Chapter 16: Algorithmic Configurations of Sexuality: Theoretical Foundations and Methodological Approaches
Mike Coliandris Chapter 17: Drones as Disruptive Sociotechnical Systems: A Case Study of Drone Crime and Control
Andrés Domínguez Hernández Chapter 18: The Internet of Things and New Frontiers of Datafication
PART 4: Digital Society and New Social Dilemmas
Pamela M. Hong and Fabio G. Rojas Chapter 19: Digital Racism
Charlotte Nau Chapter 20: Social Media, Gender and Online Discrimination
Emma Bond Chapter 21: Online Safeguarding of Adults with an Intellectual Disability: How do we Ensure that Participation and Protection Rights are Adequately Met in Digital Society?
Gwyneth Peaty, Jordan Alice and Katie Ellis Chapter 22: Clickbait in the Commodification of Sympathy: Disability, Inspiration Porn and the Possibilities for New Narratives
Sharon Meraz Chapter 23: Political Communication in the Digital Age
PART 5: Governance and Regulation
Rik Peeters and Marc Schuilenburg Chapter 24: Algorithmic Governance: Technology, Knowledge, and Power
Martin Innes, David Rogers, Nora Jansen and Viorica Budu Chapter 25: Digital (Dis)information Operations and Misinformation Campaigns
Michael Levi Chapter 26: Frauds in Digital Society
Philip Inglesant, Helena Webb, Carolyn Ten Holter, Menisha Patel, Marina Jirotka Chapter 27: The Responsible Innovation of Disruptive Technologies
Ben Williamson Chapter 28: Governing through Infrastructural Control: Artificial Intelligence and Cloud Computing in the Data-Intensive State
Adam Edwards, William Housley, Roser Beneito-Montagut and Richard Fitzgerald Chapter 29: Freedom of Speech and Online Harm in Liberal Democracies: a Triadic Concept
PART 6: Digital Futures
Phillip Brown, Manuel Souto-Otero and Sahara Sadik Chapter 30: Digital Transformation and the Future of Work
Stuart Reeves and Martin Porcheron Chapter 31: Conversational AI: Respecifying Participation as Regulation
Neil Selwyn Chapter 32: Critical Data Futures Steve Fuller Chapter 33: Mediating the Message in Digital Society
Table of Contents
1. On Sacks: Methodology, Materials, and Inspirations
Robin James Smith, Richard Fitzgerald, William Housley
2. Discovering Sacks
Rod Watson
3. Action, Meaning and Understanding: Seeing Sociologically with Harvey Sacks
Michael Mair and Wes Sharrock
4. Sacks’ Plenum: The Inscription of Social Orders
Andrew P. Carlin
5. From Ethnosemantics to Occasioned Semantics: The Transformative Influence of Harvey Sacks
Jack Bilmes
6. Sacks, Categories, Language, and Gender
Elizabeth Stokoe, Bogdana Huma, Derek Edwards
7. A Most Remarkable Fact, for All Intents and Purposes: The Practical Matter of Categorical Truths
Jessica Robles
8. Sacks: On Omni-relevance and the Layered Texture of Interaction
Richard Fitzgerald
9. Membership Categorization and the Sequential Multimodal Organisation of Action: Walking, Perceiving, and Talking in Material-spatial Ecologies
Lorenza Mondada
10. Revisiting Sacks’s Work on Greetings: the "First Position" for Greetings
Christian Licoppe
11. Sacks, Silence, and Self-(de)selection
Eliot M. Hoey
12. Using Observation as a Basis for Theorising: Children’s Interaction and Social Order
Susan Danby
13. Membership Categorisation and the Notion of "Omni-relevance" in Everyday Family Interactions
Sara Keel
14. Sacks and the Study of the Local Organisation of Second Language Lessons
Ricardo Moutinho
15. Categorisation Practices, Place, and Perception: Doing Incongruities and the Commonplace Scene as ‘Assembled Activity’
Robin James Smith
16. On Sacks and the Analysis of Racial Categories-in-Action
Kevin A. Whitehead
17. Harvey Sacks, Membership Categorisation, and Social Media
William Housley
Through ten contributions the authors explore the discourse of digital communication and offer an innovative look at the hybrid and multimodal forms of speech of social networks. This volume includes contributions in both French and English through qualitatively and quantitatively studies from Canada, UK, France, Italy and Switzerland and sits at the intersection of several interests:
• Describing the communication work and affordances of social networks.
• Highlighting the importance of combined methodological approaches in the study of the discourse of social networks.
• Examining issues of identity within and between digital communication and citizenship.
• Examining evolving policies in relation to the responsibility of the media in the digital age.
This book is particularly intended for researchers and teachers of digital humanities and communication sciences through a reflection on the issues of new media and citizenship.
The book sets out the current methodological developments of MCA highlighting its analytic strength – particularly when examining social identity and social knowledge. It provides a sophisticated tool of qualitative analysis and draws from a wide range of empirical studies provided by global scholars.
The culmination of years of international research this agenda-setting text will be essential reading for academics and advanced students using membership categorization across the social sciences; particularly in media and communication studies, sociology, psychology, education, political science and linguistics.
Contents.
Chapter 1: Introduction to Membership Categorization Analysis. William Housley and Richard Fitzgerald
Chapter 2: De Reifiying Categories. Rod Watson
Chapter 3: Prospective and Retrospective Categorization: Category proffers and inferences in social interaction and rolling news media. Elizabeth Stokoe and Frederick Attenborough
Chapter 4: Categorization Work in the Courtroom: The ‘foundational’ character of membership categorization analysis. Christian Licoppe
Chapter 5: Challenging Normativity: re-appraising category, bound, tied and predicated features. Edward Reynolds and Richard Fitzgerald
Chapter 6: Omnirelevance in Technologized Interaction: Couples coping with video calling distortions.. Sean Rintel
Chapter 7: Membership Categorization and Methodological Reasoning in Research Team Interaction. William Housley and Robin Smith.
"MCA provides an orientation, set of questions, and identification of discrete discourse devices to aid understanding of the moral work being accomplished by speakers’ and writers’ as they select category terms and tie them to descriptions. Fitzgerald and Housley’s Advances in Membership Categorization Analysis brings together cutting edge theoretical explication with fascinating examples ( YouTube posts, intimates video chatting, a review board assessing parole, a research team meeting, online breaking news updates) and is a must-read for anyone interested in identities and interaction."
Karen Tracy
Professor and Chair. Department of Communication,
"A state of the art collection which is essential reading for anyone interested in social identity and social order."
David Silverman
Goldsmiths' and King's College, London, and University of Technology, Sydney
"Membership categories are central to the organization of culture. They set up inferential relations between classes of people, they implicate actions and thoughts, and they mark moral statuses. Membership categorization analysis develops the tradition of work started by Harvey Sacks and shows that the issues he explored are still urgent and significant. In this volume an A-list of contributors provide state of the art analyses that illustrate the ongoing vitality of membership categorization analysis. It is essential reading for anyone interested in this topic."
Jonathan Potter
Professor of Discourse Analysis, Loughborough University
"Richard Fitzgerald and William Housley are to be congratulated for further developing the field. In taking up such questions as the ethnomethodology of categorization (a masterful discussion by Rod Watson), the omni-relevance of categories, the precise nature of the connections between categories and predicates, the temporal reference of category usage, the relationship of categorization to “doing being ordinary” and the place of categorization in the “social life of methods,” the contributors truly bear out the promise expressed in the title of advancing membership categorization analysis."
Peter Eglin
Wilfrid Laurier University
The authors use a variety of discourse analytic methods including CA/MCA, Discourse Analysis and Interactionism, to provide discussions around the social organization of policy debate in media sites including news interviews, public access broadcasts, broadcast debates, panel discussions, mediated government initiatives, newspapers and news broadcasts. The book's geographical coverage spans the USA, Canada, the UK, Europe, Asia and Australia.
This volume offers a major contribution to discourse analysis and its emphasis on policy substance will appeal to a broad audience in social and public policy, political communication, journalism and politics.
Contents
1. Media, Policy and Interaction: Introduction.
Richard Fitzgerald and William Housley
2. Membership Category Work in Policy Debate.
William Housley and Richard Fitzgerald
3. Configuring a television debate: Categorisation,
questions and answers.
Alain Bovet
4. Asserting Interpretive Frames of Political Events:
Panel Discussions on Television News.
Emo Gotsbachner
5. Staging Public Discussion: Mobilizing Political
Community in Closing Discussion Programmes.
Hanna Rautajoki
6. Doing public policy’ in the Political News Interview
Johanna Rendle-Short
7. Press Scrums: Some Preliminary Observations.
Patrick Watson and Christian Greiffenhagen
8. Styling for hegemony: The West as an enemy (and
the ideal) in Belarusian television news.
Marián Sloboda
9. Scandal and Dialogical Network: What does morality
have do to politics. About the Islamic headscarf within
the Egyptian parliament
Baudouin Dupret, Enrique Klaus, Jean-Noël Ferrié
10. Moving teachers: Public texts and institutional
power
Susan Bridges and Brendan Bartlett
11. Newspapers on education policy: constructing an
authoritative public voice on education
Sue Thomas"
The aim of this research is to examine the lived work of a radio broadcast. Within this two main aims are undertaken: the first methodological the second analytic. The methodological discussion takes the form of a critical examination of conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis as separate methods for analysing members interaction. It is argued that, rather than any one method being applied to the exclusion of others, the analysis of members’ methods should be able to demonstrate a sensitivity to the mutually elaborative combination of methods drawn upon and used as a resource by members in situ. A methodological approach which combines an appreciation of various participant methods is then advanced and used in an initial examination of a radio phone-in. This initial examination of the data is then developed upon in the second section. Here, calls are examined in more detail documenting a variety of categorial and sequential resources, both routine and specialised, used and relied upon by participants when offering their opinions and debating a topic. From this it is suggested that, rather than these methods being seen as a modification of mundane methods, the methods used can be seen as common resources drawn upon to make this situation what it is."
empirical approach to the study of situated identity within the flow of social interaction. The papers, placed at the intersection between pragmatics and sociology in examining multiple sequentially organised layers of category work, examine the organisation of social knowledge and knowledge entitlement, of moral ordering and the deployment of social norms, but also new and emergent areas of interest around spatial and embodied social action within the frame of technology and technologies of interaction.
The interface between technology and talk has always been understood as a multi-faceted relation. Technology in the guise of portable tape recorders was pivotal in the development of conversation analysis and the study of talk while the increasingly ubiquitous recording devices and the explosion in communicative practices and media in the digital age has generated new domains for the study of talk-in-interaction and new ways for recording and approaching these practices as ‘data’. At the same time, although not an uncontroversial analogy, talk and interaction can be understood to exhibit
technological characteristics; a ubiquitous methodological apparatus through which social life is both organised and accomplished. The ethnomethodological paradigm, including CA and MCA, as a ‘primitive natural science’ (Sacks, 1995; Lynch and Bogen, 1994), embraced both naturalism and technical descriptions in order to render visible the highly
organised and granular features of this shared ‘technological’ apparatus.
The symposium was prompted by an earlier workshop we held in 2012, which focused on the theme of disaster talk. After the 2012 symposium we felt that we had more work to do on the theme of media talk and hence the seeds for the 2014 symposium with its theme of media talk, were planted.
The media talk symposium, held in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, featured the three internationally recognised ‘fore- fathers’ of broadcast media talk, Paddy Scannell, Andrew Tolson and Martin Montgomery. It was great to have three distinguished leaders in the media talk field together in Brisbane.
We were joined by scholars from a variety of disciplines, with the common link being that we were all researching discursive aspects of talk that occurs in and through various forms of media, including broadcast, print, online and social media. Participants presented their works in progress at the two-day event. The symposium was designed so that presenters received extensive feedback on their works in progress and the collegiality and gen- erosity of the participants and presenters was much appreciated.
A number of common threads emerged from the symposium, including news media talk and so we invited those participants whose papers fitted that theme to submit their papers for con- sideration for this special themed edition of Discourse, Context & Media.
Alan Blum / Motive, desire, drive: the discourse of force.
Kieran Bonner / Reason giving, city icons and the culture of cities: data from a radical interpretive perspective.
Roxana Bratu / Vocabularies of happiness.
Miriam Cihodariu and Lucian-Ştefan Dumitrescu / The motives and rationalizations of the European right-wing discourse on immigrants. Shifts in multiculturalism?.
Jennifer Doyle and Rose Melville / Good caring and vocabularies of motive among foster carers.
Oltion Kadaifçiu / Vocabularies of motives in the education of deaf students.
Alina Petra Marinescu-Nenciu / The rhetoric of a former corporate job. How people construct their working experience in conversation
On December 2, 2015, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik attacked a Christmas gathering in San Bernardino, California, killing 14 people and wounding 22. On December 4, the news media were granted access to the couple’s home by the landlord. The ensuing news scrum entering the house was broadcast live to air, with reporters in the house identifying objects. In this paper we use Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA) and particularly categorial inferencing to examine the way journalists, on being granted access to the house for the first time, and under pressure to produce news live on air,
resorted to various forms of speculation and assumptions to generate news within the liminal zone. In particular, we examine how objects found in the home were used to
occasion newsworthy discourses through categorial reasoning around why and how these objects were used and what they might indicate about the people and events. It is through these routine social categorial reasoning practices that is possible to examine journalists’ routine work as displaying a ‘news-culture-in-action’ whereby individuals and their actions are rendered as news relevant categories and articulated through categorial inferred reasoning practices.
Key words. Live News Broadcasting, Liminal Zone, Membership Categorisation Analysis, Categorial Inferencing, Occasioned Objects, News-Culture-in-Action.
In this paper we seek to contribute to methodological discussions within ethnomethodology and conversation analysis related to the integration of sequential and categorial orders of organization within analysis. We suggest that while video has facilitated the expansion of the analytic frame to include embodied conduct and the material environment as features of sequential order, there has been less systematic engagement with the categorial order as part of a multilayered flow of action formation. In this paper we use video data to explore social action within a multi-layered categorial and sequential flow in which multiple ‘layers’ of categorization become relevant as coordinated action unfolds sequentially. In doing this we seek to extend the analysis of categorial and sequential work to incorporate both embodied conduct and the material structure of the environment into empirical analyses. The analysis, based on video data recorded during basketball training sessions, describes the reflexive sequential and categorial organization of embodied activities in basketball coaching sessions, focusing on the organization of talk and conduct between the coach and players during correction activities. Specifically, we examine in detail the coach's use of ‘embodied mapping’ through spatial categorization devices in the process of correcting players’ conduct. In exploring the actions of the coach the paper highlights the contribution of membership categorization analysis for analyzing the systematic and situated organization of sense-making in instructed activities. We conclude by suggesting that further understanding of the organization of embodied activities may be gained by attending to the ways in which categorization devices may be invoked, maintained, and replaced not only through participants’ talk-in-interaction, but also through their bodily movements and employment of material structure in the environment.
Keywords
Membership categorization analysis; Conversation analysis; Multimodality; Embodied mapping; Multi-layered sequential flow; Sports coaching
Keywords Ethnomethodology Conversationanalysis Membershipcategorization
analysis Multimodal interaction Visual perception Instruction Correction
My interest is not so much in describing my own intellectual biography/career in much personal detail but rather use my biography in two ways. The first way will be to give an idea of the satisfactions and trials, the rewards and risks of taking on a career in EM/CA/MCA, and the second will be to illustrate how those approaches themselves developed over time.
Consequently, I hope to offer a view of what the major themes and methodological choices in those approaches were and how and why they emerged in their historical context, and how choices and ways of working in those approaches often changed accordingly. Included in this will be scattered recollections of major figures such as Harold Garfinkel, Harvey Sacks and and Emanuel Schegloff in the late 1960’s as well as discussing the contributions of lesser-known contributors to those approaches whose work is important and when undertaking research.
I hope that this will cast some (new) light on how these approaches came to be practiced as they currently are. Overall, I hope to furnish a historical view of the history and rationale of these approaches rather than a history and rationale of myself, providing a context for current work and future directions
In this discussion we focus on how the paper shows three areas of intersection in the emergence of DP and MCA. First, we outline how the initial use of Sacks’ category work in the paper was directed towards psychological topics at a time when his ideas were largely confined to the sociological fields of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. Second, we trace Edwards’ work to embed Sacks’ categorial work as an analytic method for DP while running parallel to the emergence and development of MCA. Finally, we situate the contemporary influence of Edwards’ paper and use of Sacks’ work in the creation of a rich confluence and openness to ideas that have become a hallmark of the contemporary DP approach – an approach that not only incorporates a deep understanding of Sacks’ categorisation work but, in turn, contributes significantly to the further development of MCA.
The archive consists of 36 Boxes, the Title of the archive is
Gail Jefferson Papers (Collection 2319). Library Special Collections,
Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.
While it looks as though the actual list of 'boxes' has not yet been
uploaded to the UCLA site as yet (and so not searchable online) pdfs of
the catalogue are available. There are two pdfs - the second, smaller one, documents boxes 30 to 36 as these are audio visual material and needed to be re boxed and so expanded from the original archive list.
This book is about an ethnomethodological approach to the study of talk-in-interaction that is gaining wider popularity and interest from across the social sciences. Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA) refers to the study of the range of prac- tices that members of a given speech community deploy alongside complementary and aligned ethnomethods in the routine accomplishment of everyday social interaction. A core principle here is the anthropological notion of membership and its relationship to the categories of culture and society that form the stock in trade for the routine accom- plishment and co-ordination of social life. Categories are central to social life and experience and an empirical understanding of their actual use in real-time at the situ- ated and granular level can generate insights into a wide spectrum of social behaviours and problems. This book draws from the pioneering work of Harvey Sacks and his concern with membership categorisation (in addition to other aligned forms of conver- sational practice) and the wide range of rich and fecund studies that have followed. Many of these studies have explored the relationship between membership categorisa- tion practices, language and identity in a variety of settings and through the study of a diverse set of activities. Of course membership categorisation practices are more than the study of identities and identity work-in-action but this is a convenient place to begin our journey. Identity matters have been and continue to be an important site for sociological and related inquiry; not least because they represent a field through which individual and collective life intersect.
technology and culture as a distinctive form of mediated communication
and practice. The Internet and social media have grown and become an
essential part of the society and economy in China in ways that are
increasingly dissimilar from that of the social media platforms outside of
China. From the early roll out of the Internet, to the now pervasive
presence of social media, Chinese Internet culture continues to reflect
the unique interplay of technological changes, language affordances (i.e.
Chinese as a character-based script), software development, usergenerated
interactional practices, and government censorship. Social
media platforms and practices provide a rich, yet surprisingly underexplored
source for the analysis of new and innovative practices within
the distinct context of communication technologies and platforms for
nearly one billion users. The papers in this article collection contribute
further to examining how the technologies and technological affordances
of Chinese social media interact to afford distinctive discursive and
linguistic practices across a range of interactional contexts.
Some one hundred and seventy years later China is now experiencing a similar boom, with the economy experiencing sustained growth and projected to overtake the US before 2030. The resulting rise in incomes lifting many out of poverty and creating a new middle class has also created an empire- sized population with money to spare, and a thirst for international travel, high end shopping, and gambling.
In this paper, we are interested in the decision making and use of an invented questioner by a journalist during a live televised political debate in Switzerland. By adopting a combined methodological perspective: between an ethnographic approach to journalism augmented with Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA), we consider in detail the preparation for the debate by the journalists behind the scenes as they raise and negotiate journalist ethics in relation to inventing an audience member to ask a question during the debate. Our analysis highlights how and why an “ideal” intervention (all the debaters agree the relevance of the question) is balanced against the journalism apparent ethics in using fictitious identities in the name of public interest.
en tant que contraint par des enjeux liés à la généralisation
de la communication digitale dans les espaces sociaux contemporains.
Nous nous intéressons à l’intervention par SMS d’un
membre de l’audience durant un débat politique télévisé en Suisse,
dans le contexte d’une votation importante en 2013. En adoptant
une perspective méthodologique combinée : entre une approche
ethnographique du journalisme et une analyse des interactions
au travail, nous considérons dans le détail la préparation au
débat depuis les coulisses de la rédaction. De fait, il s’avère que
l’intervention d’un téléspectateur adressée aux politiciens est une
pure invention journalistique, savamment configurée dans le souci
sinon de contrôler la teneur du débat, du moins de contraindre la
discussion. S’il s’agit d’une intervention « idéale » (tous les débatteurs
saluent d’ailleurs unanimement sa pertinence), il se pose
la question de la légitimité du journaliste à mettre en scène des
identités fictives fût-ce au nom d’une préoccupation citoyenne.
Mots-clés : journalisme, ethnographie des médias, public cible,
analyse des interactions au travail, débat télévisé.
environments for interactional encounters and exchanges between increasingly inter-connected networks of users. The consequences of this continuing evolution in and between digital communicative spaces are far-reaching. With the arrival of Web 2.0, and the imminent potential of Web 3.0 and 4.0, internet users have been able to routinely engage with each other through and across multiple sites and platforms which contain massive amounts of multi-modal content, uploading photos, videos and other formats that are shared across the spaces of the net. As these exchanges become more and more commonplace, and deeply embedded as social practice within and across contexts, one of the consequences has been the steady erosion of the boundaries between on line ‘virtual’ and off line ‘real life’ spaces for communicative actions. These spaces are becoming increasingly fluid: indeed, the terms barely seem appropriately delimited now as the ‘virtual’ environment is ever more tightly threaded through and interwoven with the ‘real’, and the very concepts of ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ become problematic1. This is the contextual backdrop to the analysis and discussion offered in this volume.
During the 2011 UK public sector protests, controversy ignited over the “Miliband Loop”, an unedited video from a pool interview showing Labor leader Ed Miliband to have provided largely the same answer in response to six questions. The interviewer subsequently complained in a TwitLonger that the incident epitomized the clash of public relations and journalism. In this paper we unpack the practical production of the pool interview as a delamination of the interview-as-lived from the interview-as-media-production-mechanism. We then explore professional and public understanding (or lack thereof) of exposure of this delamination issue and its relation to politics. While the controversy did not directly affect Miliband׳s position as leader, it is clear that the Internet is a dangerous place for the old rules of mediatization.
In this paper we focus on the use of extended repetitions in political news interviews. Drawing on conversation analysis and discourse analysis we examine a corpus of examples where particular forms of repeated questions and/or answers appear within two main practices of political interviewing. We refer to these as the spectacular live interview and the non-live interview. Our analysis shows that the design of repetitions, which we describe as either “stripped” or “embedded”, differs significantly in these practices as they are oriented to differing political/media communication work. We argue that the use of repeated repetition highlights a locally organized powerful form of control of the interactional event with implications for the professional status of the parties involved."
Keywords
Broadcast news; Remediation; Discourse; Furniture"
Politicians increasingly treat radio talkback as a valuable resource through which to communicate directly with the public. Whilst research has examined the role of talkback in the public sphere in the USA, UK and recently Australia, little is known about the use of talkback in Asia. This paper begins an initial examination of the role of talkback in Singapore and Hong Kong as a vehicle of public opinion and political engagement by those who produce and host the programs.
This paper explores how philosophical inquiry and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) can mutually benefit from each other to produce new methodological and reflexive directions in neo-liberal policy research to examine the phenomenon of ‘What is (going on here)’. Through this we argue that augmenting linguistic analysis with philosophical perspectives develops and supports CDA scholarship more broadly by accommodating the shifting complexity of social problems of ideologically driven inequality that are inbuilt through, in our case, social policy texts. In discussing philosophical-methodological issues, the paper argues for the need to continually adapt CDA to the particular data so as to remain sensitive to and avoid hegemonic tendencies in analysis. Through adopting the principles of a working methodology, we discuss a micro-meso-macro CDA framework that draws on the analytical concepts of movement, metaphorical superfluidity, thematic condensation, and surrealism to conceive of a research approach capable of examining and comprehending evolving discourses of political economies. The most immediate benefit of this framework is its capacity to illustrate how forms of valuations perpetuated by and through policy discourse are the motivational locus of meaning making insofar as they strongly inform the moral underpinning the ideology of economic growth.
KEYWORDS: Critical Discourse Analysis, philosophy, data-led methodology, valuation, evaluation, political economy, neo-liberalism, social policy, metaphor, surrealism
1. The article questions and challenges the official meritocratic principle of ‘equal opportunities’ (Wong, 2000) in Singapore's education system. Drawing on Foucault's and Nietzsche's philosophical perspectives, there is an explicit illustration through an in-depth analysis of how inequality is inbuilt in policy report/speech.
2. Discourse builds in/tangible structures in society and greatly determines the possibilities of the now. As such, I am also arguing that it would be more difficult to 'help' any 'community' if the structural discrimination which has been deeply embedded, is not made explicit through national policies, and by this I mean an explicit illustration through an in-depth policy analysis of how inequality is inbuilt in Singapore's education policies. It may be through this that discriminatory structures could be substantially challenged.
An initial analysis of the original 1979 policy on primary school streaming which I conducted illustrates how dichotomous (arbitrary) categorization of pupils, i.e. 'slow' and 'fast' learners legitimates and sustains increasing institutional/structural access (over the years terms like 'talents' have been employed in policy discourse), of who gets privileged knowledge access. Through this, I also ask then to what ends do forms of 'categorization' or conventional designation entail? By this, given that categorization legitimizes structural access, my question is, what is 'Malay/Muslim community' and how is this categorization necessary?
3. Even though the analysis in the article was based on Singapore's education system, it provides possible ways of understanding how inequality is continuously being inbuilt through policies on the basis of the ideology that economic growth is the (only) way forward. A way to critique this ideology is to expose its underlying assumptions. I believe the findings have much resonance with the widening inequality across many developed nations, as Singapore's policies have parallels with that of the U.K., U.S., and international organizations such as the World Bank.
4. Economically considered, the transliteration of meritocratic discourse into the metaphor of diversity pinpoints how the appeal of development for all necessarily also demands the advance of inequity for the sake of the whole, i.e. advancing the 'growth with inequity' principle.
5. The analysis highlights that value judgments are continually at work in the policy discourse and that despite the strong discourse of meritocracy that the Singapore education system promotes, it is argued that it is in the interests of the Singapore people that 'talents' should get privileged access to knowledge as it is through this that more 'opportunities' for the rest of the population are created. The findings demonstrate that although the underlying assumptions of this 'logic' that has been constructed in policies are unsubstantiated, the logic is continuously legitimated through forms of e/valuations.
This article has been featured in websites such as: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150428105815.htm
http://www.eurasiareview.com/28042015-what-is-value-of-inequality-within-singapores-education-system/
1992b). These three different relationships between category features and categories/membership devices are explored through an analysis of the operation of the practice of ‘enticing a challengeable’ (Reynolds, 2013). This term refers to an adversarial method of enacting a strategic manipulation of social knowledge (often using categories and category ties) as a basis for later challenging an opponent’s normativity (again,
using norms related to a membership device). This chapter uses the description of these three different forms of relationship between category features and categories/devices
to develop the argument that a new level of technical sophistication in the labelling of phenomena is now possible in MCA.