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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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."
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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."
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."
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.
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.
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.
The article examines the various ways in which 'solidarity' is invoked and signified through narr... more The article examines the various ways in which 'solidarity' is invoked and signified through narrative and categorial devices in a political debate following the UK's vote to leave the EU in 2016. Analysing a floor debate in the European Parliament concerning a white paper released by the European Commission on the future of the EU held in March 2017, we investigate how politicians deploy references to 'solidarity' in service of different political agendas. Our research highlights the strategic use of 'core' values in political debate through the way different speakers appeal to 'solidarity' as a selfevident positive value within the EU, but which is then mobilised through different relevant actors and scenarios to argue contrastive political positions. Our analysis demonstrates how narrative positioning and categorybound normative expectations are harnessed to serve the aims of political persuasion by "populating" a shared principle of governance with purposeful sets of identities and interrelations.
On Sacks. Methodology, Materials and Inspirations, 2021
This book is devoted to the re-introduction of the remarkably original approach to sociological i... more This book is devoted to the re-introduction of the remarkably original approach to sociological inquiry developed by Harvey Sacks. We intend the volume as an incitement to experts to return to the original lectures of Sacks with fresh eyes, and a provocation for those unfamiliar to read Sacks for the first time. Sacks’ remarkable analyses offer a means of doing sociology that provides for highly technical, detailed, and 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. The influence of Sacks’ work has not been widespread: something we aim to address with this collection. Yet certain areas of sociology, human geography, communication and media studies, psychology, and linguistics have been re-oriented to the sorts of analyses that are possible by starting with the lived detail of action and language-in-interaction; details that are discoverable, rather than contrived or modelled in and through social scientific theory, as they are actually produced, used, and accomplished by members engaged in actual activities. In this collection, scholars working in a range of different fields and with ranging interests, outline the ways in which their work has been inspired and influenced shaped by Sacks’ approach, and how their current research is taking those insights forward in new directions. As such, it provides both an introduction to, and an exploration of, the work and influence of Harvey Sacks.
On Sacks: Methodology, Materials, and Inspirations. (2021) Smith, Fitzgerald, Housley. , 2021
In a series of lectures during spring 1966, Sacks examines an introduction sequence from a group ... more In a series of lectures during spring 1966, Sacks examines an introduction sequence from a group therapy session where a new member is introduced (Sacks 1995, pp. 268–312). The lectures follow on from Sacks’s analysis of the beginning of a child’s story, ‘The baby cried. The mommy picked it up’ (Sacks 1995, pp. 236–259), where he first introduces the main elements of his membership categorisation apparatus (see Housley, this volume), before then introducing a section of transcript from a group therapy session and switching to examine how category and sequential work are mutually entwined. Over the course of these lectures, Sacks builds up a multilayered analysis starting from examining the introduction sequence as a sequential action before combining this with membership category work in order to demonstrate how the sequential action and category work are mutually entwined and made relevant to the overall context of the therapy session. In this chapter, I trace Sacks’s analysis over the course of the lectures to high- light the way that Sacks artfully demonstrates the analysis of sequence and category work as mutually entwined. Moreover, the discussion also emphasises the import ance of examining the way Sacks develops his analysis over the course of the lectures, highlighting an approach to reading the lectures as a series of interrelated analyses that build on each other.
Moving to a different country has become an established part of a globalised economy, and such tr... more Moving to a different country has become an established part of a globalised economy, and such transnational movement has engendered a rich genre of writing describing this phenomenon. The internet has provided a new means of making sense of this experience through 'expatriate' blogging. In these blogs the experience of dislocation and relocation, of moving from the taken for granted to uncertainty, is described from the position of being an 'expat', a 'non-local', or a 'stranger' (Schuetz 1944). Relocation provides a point of reflection as once familiar routines are questioned and initially unfamiliar ones are becoming more established. Whilst this transition is often experienced as a personal one, in the genre of expatriate blogging individuals relate their experience through personal and public self-reflection. Afforded by the chronological nature of these blogs, individuals draw on time as a resource to document their transition, highlighting an evolving identity. In this paper we use Membership Categorisation Analysis to examine expatriate blogging as a discursive practice, and we explore analytically how to approach social identity as fluid and evolving where transnational relocation is framed as categorial transition.
Contrary to its typical presentation in scientific publications as a certain and linear process, ... more Contrary to its typical presentation in scientific publications as a certain and linear process, in reality the experimental method, not least the design aspect of it, requires a great deal of trial-and-error and ad hoc decision-making on the part of the researchers. This uncertain and contingent aspect of research, although little known outside of the circle of experts, has important implications for our understanding of the nature of science and scientific findings. This paper offers a backstage perspective to experiment design, where the uncertain and contingent nature of experimental research is at its starkest. It draws on insights from the sociological perspective of ethnomethodology through the auto-ethnographic first-hand experience of one of the author's own social psychology experiment (Ting, 2018). Based on detailed lab notes and planning documents on how and why design changes were made, the analysis focuses on the evolution of the experiment design, particularly the researcher's in situ practical reasoning for how to make the experiment work. From this we show how ethno-methods shape experiment results and highlight the inseparability of social science experimentation from in situ practical reasoning Keywords: behavioral experiment, lab ethnography, ethnomethodology, social life of methods 2
Membership categorisation analysis (MCA) is a qualitative sociological approach which studies mem... more Membership categorisation analysis (MCA) is a qualitative sociological approach which studies membership categorisation practices—how social members achieve, use, and orient to membership categories in the process of performing some social action. Using a range of data including texts, talk-in-interaction, and video recordings, the approach focuses on unpacking members’ routine categorisation practices in everyday and institutional contexts. The approach provides qualitative researchers with a rigorous and data-led perspective to examine the way membership categorisation practices are used to achieve social actions in the contexts of their use. Through its commitment to naturalistic data, grounded observations, and flexibility in scope, MCA is able to also contribute to other disciplines, such as linguistics, sociology, psychology, management studies, communication, cultural studies, politics and political media, gender studies, and social ...
Abstract
On December 2, 2015, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik attacked a Christmas gathering in Sa... more Abstract 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.
Despite Harvey Sacks' death over 40 years ago, his work continues to be a major influence gaining... more Despite Harvey Sacks' death over 40 years ago, his work continues to be a major influence gaining ever more attention across the social sciences. Although he published relatively few papers during his lifetime, Sacks' work was central to the establishment and continued development of a number of major research approaches. While his published work continues to provide a rich resource for contemporary research there remains much within his published lectures which has not received attention, even less attention has been given to his archive. However, Sacks' published lectures and archive provide, not only a fascinating window into the early development of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, they also provide a valuable point of reflection for contemporary research and disciplinary debates. While the lectures and archive remain of historical interest the focus of this paper is not so much on these as historical artifacts but in how these resources provide a timely contribution to contemporary methodological challenges in the face of new forms of data and phenomena across the social sciences. In drawing on his lectures and archive the discussion focuses on Sacks as an imaginative, innovative and wide-ranging methodologist-inaction interested in the study of social life, wherever that could be captured.
Abstract
In this paper we seek to contribute to methodological discussions within ethnomethodolog... more Abstract 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.
Despite the emergence of newer forms of web-based political engagement, radio phone-ins continue ... more Despite the emergence of newer forms of web-based political engagement, radio phone-ins continue to have a significant role in the enactment of the democratic process, providing a live forum for direct encounters between members of the public and politicians, beyond the professional forms of mediated encounters between studio journalists and politicians. In this paper, drawing on data from the BBC’s 2015 phone-in Election Call, we use Membership Categorisation Analysis to examine the ways in which political engagement is configured within this forum in the run up to the UK General Election in 2015. In particular, we examine how callers and politicians engage in live political debate through transforming personal experiences into politicised social categories. What emerges most significantly here is that, whereas in previous Election Call series participants configured political categories through personal social identities, in 2015 there is a particular emphasis on callers’ geographical locations as political categories.
Abstract Developing novices’ proficiency in skilful activities is central to the reproduction of ... more Abstract Developing novices’ proficiency in skilful activities is central to the reproduction of human societies. The interactional practices through which instruction is accomplished have provided a rich focus for ethnomethodological and conversation analytic studies examining classroom settings, and, more recently, non-classroom environments of instruction in practical and manual skills. This paper examines the work of instruction in basketball training and in particular the correction of player performances, which are a ubiquitous and central feature of instruction in basketball training sessions. A central part of this instructional action relies on the coach observing training activities to determine players’ competencies and to extract relevant correctables from the players’ embodied displays, which are in turn embedded within complex arrangements of rapidly moving bodies situated in material environments. In this paper we examine the visual-analytic work involved in both organizing and observing a basketball training activity, demonstrating the sequential layering of multiple membership categorization devices drawn upon in producing and recognizing actions in this setting. We argue that the coach deploys spatial orientations which function analogously to membership categorization devices, with players’ bodily positions relative to one another and the material structure of the surround generating category-like sets of rights, responsibilities, and sequential relevancies. As we demonstrate, these orientations provide crucial resources for the identification of players’ errors and thereby for the organization of instruction in interaction in this setting.
In this talk I sketch out my academic career in Ethnomethodology and reflect on the development o... more In this talk I sketch out my academic career in Ethnomethodology and reflect on the development of ethnomethodology (EM), Conversation Analysis (CA) and Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA).
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
Stephen Hester died in 2014 having been an influential figure in the field of Eth-nomethodology (... more Stephen Hester died in 2014 having been an influential figure in the field of Eth-nomethodology (EM) and particularly in the development of the approach of membership categorization analysis (MCA). During his lifetime, he published prolifically in MCA and, at the time of his death was working on this manuscript. The work of finishing the book was undertaken by two of Stephen's closest collaborators Peter Eglin and Dave Francis. In doing this, they had to make a number of decisions in respect to Stephen's wishes. One of these, as discussed in the introduction, was whether to work up some of the analysis that had not been thoroughly examined by Stephen or tidy up what was there and so allowing his style to come through as it was. Deciding to tidy up what was there means early analytic work sits alongside more fully worked up analysis and also that the book could be made freely available rather than through a commercial publisher. The decision means that the analysis remains at different stages and through this provides the reader with a valuable insight into the way Stephen approached his data and analysis from the early observations to the rich complexity of his more developed and more integrated analysis. Overall, the work comprises a number of interrelated intellectual threads that interested him throughout his career. His interests in educational psychology and the sociology of deviance are combined with his interest in EM and Sacks' work on category analysis and which evolved into MCA. The organization of the book begins with an Editors' introduction followed by ten chapters. This begins with two chapters discussing EM and MCA, seven chapters of analysis, and a final summary chapter where he also addresses some contemporary critiques of MCA. While the discussions of EM and the sociology of deviance provide a broad background and the discussion of MCA has a level of clarity and accessibility that is a hallmark of Stephen's writing.
In this paper we examine how physical and verbal actions are constituted as morally accountable w... more In this paper we examine how physical and verbal actions are constituted as morally accountable within an institutional context. Through the detailed examination of a video recording of the aftermath of an on-court altercation between players in a basketball training session, we explore how the members work to establish a locally organized institutional context for an action within which in situ moral reasoning practices are then brought to bear to make sense of the players’ actions and render them as morally accountable or not. In examining the moral organization of institutional accountability in an instance of basketball training activity, the paper develops a further level of detail to understand the reflexive organization of membership categories and the institutional moral order.
Edwards’ paper, ‘Categories are for talking’ (1991), is a critical dissection of the static role ... more Edwards’ paper, ‘Categories are for talking’ (1991), is a critical dissection of the static role of categories as conceived in traditional Cognitive Psychology and the then-recent work of Lakoff’s Women, Fire and Dangerous Things (1987) through the use of Harvey Sacks’ (1974; 1992) work on membership categorisation. Edwards uses Sacks to take aim at the prominent theoretical and methodological trends at the time, seeking to liberate members’ category work from ironically external conceptions of a shrouded realm located inside the head. However, while the focus for Edwards was on psychology, his detailed under- standing of Sacks’ work served to open a conceptual space for those working in discursive psychology to engage with members categorisation work as fundamental to the epistemological and methodological repertoires of Discursive Psychology (DP) in ways that ally with the emergence of Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA: Eglin and Hester, 1992; Watson,1994; Hester and Francis, 1994).
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 Gail Jefferson archive have now been completed and is available at UCLA.
The archive consist... more The Gail Jefferson archive have now been completed and is available at UCLA.
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.
Introduction
This book is about an ethnomethodological approach to the study of talk-in-interact... more Introduction
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.
Research in Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA) has illustrated a wide and varied use of a... more Research in Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA) has illustrated a wide and varied use of activities, rights and obligations, variously related to categories and mem- bership devices (Hester and Eglin, 1992b; Jayyusi, 1984). As discussed in the Introduction to this volume, while these were initially described by Sacks (1974) as ‘category bound activities’ and later developed by Watson (1983) as ‘category bound predicates’, little recent attention has been paid to the subtle differences in the ways cat- egory features (rights, knowledge, activities, etc.) are deployed. While the term ‘category bound predicate’ has proven immensely useful it has also tended to serve as a catch-all term for all relationships between category features and categories, obscuring the action involved in the use of this category resource. In this chapter we touch off from Sacks’s initial discussion of predicates introduced in the Introduction to this volume and subsequent discussions to explore this relationship further by developing levels of sophistication to understanding the relationship between membership categories and locally invoked associated features. In this instance we examine the way in which par- ticipants engaged in a number of public arguments orient to three distinct differences in the types of relationship between categories and category features.
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, 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.
While the proliferation of social media technologies in China has empowered the public with new o... more While the proliferation of social media technologies in China has empowered the public with new opportunities for public expression and political engagement in a virtual public sphere (Su, 2016), Chinese Internet censorship has meant that users have to develop creative ways to engage in political criticism. In a context where both mechanical and human censors are employed, Chinese users have become adept at utilizing the affordances of technology, Chinese language and cultural resources to express their opinions through social media. Drawing upon data from the Chinese micro-messaging app Weibo surrounding the major chemical explosions in 2015 in Tianjin, the study explores three discursive techniques of indirection by Chinese social media users to express political criticism in the context of censorship. The study highlights that through the creative use of quotation, allusion and irony, users challenged the authority's official narratives of the event. The study not only demonstrates the pluralization and dynamics of Chinese online expression, but also points to a better understanding of Chinese censoring as a continuingly evolving interplay between technology and cultural forms and between layers of government and users.
This study explores mediated forms of creativity and multi-platform affordances used by Chinese s... more This study explores mediated forms of creativity and multi-platform affordances used by Chinese social media users and producers in a ‘one-star’ rating campaign aimed at DingTalk, an online teaching platform. In February 2020, in response to delays to resuming in-person instruction due to the COVID 19 pandemic, DingTalk launched a new feature called ‘Zaixianxuexi’ (online learning) which was then used across the country. However, users became increasingly critical of the platform and mounted a ‘one-star’ campaign through the Apple’s App Store rating system to try to have the platform removed. In response, the produc- ers of DingTalk released a short-animated video and promotion campaign through Weibo and Bilibili, rather than the DingTalk platform. The video literally begged users to give it more stars. Adopting a social semiotic multimodal analytical approach, we examine the mediated interaction between users and the producers of DingTalk across three Chinese social media platforms. In particular, we examine the medi- ated forms of creativity and technological affordances across multiple social media platforms during the three stages of the event. The analysis focuses on the creative strategies adopted by both users and the producers of DingTalk as they engaged with each other across platforms. The study highlights Chinese social media as rich spaces where technological and cultural resources are creatively co-ordinated across platforms. In situating modality within a cross-media environment, the research underscores the creativ- ity that characterises Chinese social media within an interconnected multi-platform social media ecology.
Understanding Chinese internet and social media: The innovative and creative affordances of technology, language and culture, 2019
In this chapter we set out to briefly sketch out a description of Chinese internet culture from i... more In this chapter we set out to briefly sketch out a description of Chinese internet culture from its historical development through to some of its current characteristics. From the early roll out of the internet through to the use of social media Chinee internet culture should be understood as emerging from the interplay of a number of forces: technological changes, software development, user-generated interactional practices, and government censorship. The discussion goes onto highlight how increasingly divergent forms of Chinese social media use provide a rich source of analysis of new and innovative practices as well as an awareness of the distinct context of communicative technological and social environment of its 772 million users.
In this chapter we set out to briefly sketch a description of Chinese internet culture from its h... more In this chapter we set out to briefly sketch a description of Chinese internet culture from its historical development through to some of its current characteristics. From the early roll out of the internet through to the use of social media Chinese internet cutlture should be understood as emerging from the interplay of a number of forces: technological changes, software development, user-generated interactional practices, and government censorship. The discussion goes onto highlight how increasingly divergent forms of Chinese social media use provide a rich source of analysis of new and innovative practices as well as an awareness of the distinct context of communicative technological and social environment of it its 772 million users.
The Great Exhibition of 1851 held at the Crystal Palace in London was a showcase of the British E... more The Great Exhibition of 1851 held at the Crystal Palace in London was a showcase of the British Empire designed to demonstrate to the world Britain’s role as an industrial powerhouse. Britain was at the height of its power and the event attracted exhibits of art and colonial raw materials from around the world, but most prominently from the four corners of the British Empire. The showcase of industry and cultures of the Empire bore testament to the power of Britain and its dominion around the globe where the sun never set, and it was always over the yardarm in some corner of the empire. The essence of the Great Exhibition was to display the power of Britain by bringing the world to London. In doing so the exhibition showcased Britain as the powerhouse of the global industrial economy, and to present its citizens and the newly emerging wealthy this power through the range of the goods produced. 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.
Discourse, Context & Media was launched in 2012 under the editorship of Greg Myers. As the journa... more Discourse, Context & Media was launched in 2012 under the editorship of Greg Myers. As the journal nears its first decade, it seems a good time to take stock of where the journal has come and where it might go. In less than ten years, under the exceptional editorships of Greg Myers, Ruth Page and Richard Fitzgerald, DCM has grown to become an internationally renowned journal, with six volumes a year and an impact factor of 1.380, and is now the place to go to for debates and ideas around mediated discourse in context. The journal’s primary interest in the three keywords in its title, broadly defined and of increasing relevance to a tumultuous world, means that it has never been tied to a particular set of methodologies, theories or ideologies, but has been able to move with the times, exploring diverse discourses mediated by a growing range of technologies in rapidly changing political and social contexts. Importantly, the ways in which it has done so have not been determined solely by the editors – despite their outstanding leadership over the last nine years – but emerges instead from multiple ongoing dialogues between the editorial team (there are now five of us co-authoring this Editorial), the editorial board, authors, reviewers, readers, and the guest editors who imagine and put together the journal’s article collections. The journal is what it is today as a result of intellectual conversations between editors, authors and reviewers – and whatever it will become in the next few years will emerge similarly from such dynamics. And yet, it would be remiss of us, the editorial team, not to lay out what we see as the aims and remit of the journal and to consider where we might try to steer such conversations.
This article advances a critical approach to the analysis of social policy texts drawing on the p... more This article advances a critical approach to the analysis of social policy texts drawing on the philosophical perspectives of hyperrealism, surrealism, ethics, and critical discourse analysis. Drawing on official government texts and speeches on the continuing development of Singapore's education policy, the paper examines the way metaphors of flexibility, diversity, choice, and opportunity are used within an evolving ideological context that work to continually produce truth conditions as justifications for inequality. In doing this, the analysis foregrounds a functional aspect of policy metaphors as divisive mechanisms of neo-liberalism through associating individuals with the appearance of discriminatory forms of economic materiality which does not in fact exist in reality.
ABSTRACT
In this paper, we are interested in the decision making and use of an invented questione... more ABSTRACT 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.
Taking off from the Media Talk approach, this paper examines the communicative work of a Swedish ... more Taking off from the Media Talk approach, this paper examines the communicative work of a Swedish sports webcast football show, Superlive, as an emerging form of web-based media format called Web-TV. This analysis is situated in a context in which broadcasting is going through fundamental changes, and broadcasters are rethinking their content in order to face the challenges arriving with recent decades' technological developments, and especially the fact that television is no longer restricted to being broadcast but can be distributed through the web and be received on PCs, tablets and mobile phones. In this 'post-broadcasting era' producers are searching for new ways of reaching audiences through creating new forms of audience address. Superlive is a good example of these changes and how broadcasters now explore the possibilities of producing television exclusively for the Web. The analysis shows that what is taking place in Superlive is clearly in contrast to the performances one could expect in the conventional broadcast. Through the participants' favoring of an interactional style characterized by informality and spontaneity, this show situates itself as backstage to the conventional forms of airings. As a result, this discursive space implies an interactional orientation to " co-presence " with the audience.
This paper explores how philosophical inquiry and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) can mutually ... more 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.
Cette étude de cas traite de quelques aspects du travail journalistique
en tant que contraint par... more Cette étude de cas traite de quelques aspects du travail journalistique 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.
The Internet generally, and social media particularly, provide rich and varied
environments for i... more The Internet generally, and social media particularly, provide rich and varied 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.
This article explores the role of media in Freedom of Information (FOI) policy transfer, using a ... more This article explores the role of media in Freedom of Information (FOI) policy transfer, using a case study of Queensland's 2009 FOI reforms. A multi-dimensional analysis was used to discover how newspapers reported changes in Queensland's public sector information (PSI) policy to identify whether stories on PSI policy were reframed over time. At a quantitative level, the text analytics software Leximancer was used to identify key concepts, issues and trends in 786 relevant articles from national, metropolitan and regional newspapers. At a qualitative level, discourse analysis was used to identify key themes and patterns from the newspaper articles. Both qualitative and quantitative shifts in the media reporting of Right to Information (RTI) and FOI were revealed across three time periods representing the periods before, during and after the reform implementation. The findings offer insights into the role of newspapers in policy diffusion, revealing how Queensland media reports framed the shift in PSI policy from pull model FOI to push model RTI.
During the 2011 UK public sector protests, controversy ignited over the ‘Miliband Loop’, an unedi... more During the 2011 UK public sector protests, controversy ignited over the ‘Miliband Loop’, an unedited video from a pool interview showing Labour 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.
This paper presents detailed methods for constructing a flexible philosophical–analytical model t... more This paper presents detailed methods for constructing a flexible philosophical–analytical model through which to apply the analytic principles of CDA for the interpretation of metaphors across policy texts. Drawing on a theoretical framing from Foucault and the augmentation of Nietzsche’s views on valuation, we sketch a framework for examining ways in which evaluative semantic categories can be linked to sociological theories in order to bring out their relevance for the purpose of critical discourse analysis. This multi-level research framework draws upon a relationship between language analysis, the philosophical study of valuation, and political economy as a composite formulation of values through which neo-liberalism is discursively entwined and progressed through a system of principles of e/valuation.
Broadcast interview hosts are increasingly adopting hybrid forms of interview through the utiliza... more Broadcast interview hosts are increasingly adopting hybrid forms of interview through the utilization of interview techniques from different genres within the one interview (Ekström and Kroon Lundell, 2011; Montgomery, 2008). Methods that can visually represent interviews in their entirety have the potential to assist in tracking and tracing genre shifts within a single interview. In this paper we examine traditional genres and hybrid forms of broadcast interviewing using a visual text analytic software Discursis (Angus et al., 2013, 2012a, 2012b). Discursis provides visual representations of whole interviews at-a-glance as well as the ability to focus into particular sections for closer analysis. Drawing on a corpus of 101 interviews from a single television program, this study examines if Discursis can meaningfully visually represent forms of interviewing genres (Montgomery, 2008) and highlight where shifting techniques (Ekström and Kroon Lundell, 2011) are used within a single interview.
Abstract
During the 2011 UK public sector protests, controversy ignited over the “Miliband Loop”,... more Abstract 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.
This paper examines the way the metaphor of diversity provides a moral basis for inequality in Si... more This paper examines the way the metaphor of diversity provides a moral basis for inequality in Singapore’s meritocratic education system. Based upon a collection of policy texts from 2002 to 2012, our analysis illustrates that the metaphor of diversity in policy texts provides ways for systemic discrimination within the education system and that this inequality is given legitimacy as necessary through various moral discourses. The paper employs a critical discourse analysis that draws upon the relationship between language analysis, the philosophical study of valuation, and political economy as a composite formulation of values to highlight the ways in which an argument for inequality permeates policy from within a frame of meritocracy, and to analyse how changes associated with new modes of value determination serve to legitimize inequality.
"Abstract
In this paper we focus on the use of extended repetitions in political news interviews... more "Abstract
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."
Abstract: The potentially controversial science of nanotechnology is only now beginning to infilt... more Abstract: The potentially controversial science of nanotechnology is only now beginning to infiltrate mainstream public consciousness through media channels. This article suggests the infiltration is taking different forms, depending on the nationality of journalists reporting on the science. Having completed analysis of a large longitudinal international sample of news and feature articles about nanotechnology, we report that journalists in Australia and New Zealand deploy sources 'direct from the lab' to highlight scientific advancements; those in Asia emphasise the nation-building potential of nanotechnology; US journalists provide positive coverage across all areas; and those in the United Kingdom offer the most critical analysis and risk reporting. These messages have also evolved over time in each region. Results are integrated with existing research about public perceptions of nanotechnology, and suggest several themes common to all media reporting of nanotechnology, the most important of which reflects positive reporting or acceptance, although safety concerns and health risks also arise.
In this paper we analyse the discursive frameworks for interaction in a UK political radio phone-... more In this paper we analyse the discursive frameworks for interaction in a UK political radio phone-in between 2001 and 2010, and the implications of those frameworks for public engagement with politicians. The BBC Radio 4 phone-in program Election Call, broadcast in the run-up to a general election, has experimented with ‘new’ interactive technology (TV simulcast, web broadcasting and e-mail) in its attempt to provide listeners with the opportunity to engage with politicians and political parties live on air. By 2010 however, the program had returned to the original ‘old’ media format of telephone interaction only. Building on previous research in the discourse of radio phone-in broadcasts (Hutchby 1996; Thornborrow 2001a, 2001b, 2002; Hester & Fitzgerald 1999; Fitzgerald & Housley 2002; Thornborrow & Fitzgerald 2002), our analysis focuses on the empirical implementation of the 2010 shift in editorial policy which explicitly invited callers to engage with issues rather than just giving opinions. We will argue that while interactivity may broaden access to democratic debate, it is through live interaction that callers are best able to challenge politicians and hold them to account.
In this paper we examine contemporary news presentation, noting some of the discursive and textua... more In this paper we examine contemporary news presentation, noting some of the discursive and textual features as broadcasters endeavour to capture and hold target audiences in an intensely competitive and connected environment. Drawing on Bolter and Grusin’s (1999) notion of ‘remediation’ we examine how the news studio and presentation style has begun to borrow artefacts and language styles that resemble the domestic sphere in layout and discourse. We begin by noting the increasing use of domestic furniture from which news is presented before then examining how the presenters in a particular news program present a newspaper review section during the program. What is notable here is the way the presenters do not stick to the topical news stories of the day but use the stories to touch off further personal stories about themselves, and which take up most of the allocated time slot. In the final section we examine how this level of informality is utilised in integrating viewer comments and feedback into the going interaction maintaining a level of synchronicity of topical comment.
Although the past plays a large part in election campaigns, predictions and promises are its life... more Although the past plays a large part in election campaigns, predictions and promises are its lifeblood, with the various parties promising great things if elected and predicting doom if not. Indeed the ‘manifestos’ usually published at the beginning of an election campaign are a study in pledges, promises and wishes that parties use to entice the electorate to vote for them. Whilst talk of the future often dominates election discourse, one aspect of the future that is largely passed over without comment is the actual make up of the result, despite the relentless publication of opinion polls results. However, towards the end of the general election campaign in Britain in 2001 the Conservative Party began to warn of the dangers of the Labour Party winning the election by a large majority. If this were to happen, they argued, the new government would be in a position to push through almost any legislation and policy it saw fit to do so and in this way was almost unaccountable to the checks and balances of the Parliamentary process. Whilst the media gave wide prominence to this event, seen as tantamount to conceding defeat to the Labour Party, the reaction of all the political parties was to downplay its significance. In this paper, we explore the way the three main UK political parties treated and reacted to the media’s interpretation of the warning and the way the political discourse utilised temporal play in taking up their positions. Through this, we suggest that the warning offered by the Conservative Party was a ‘breach’ in the routine election prediction structure and that this particular ‘breach’ was a temporal one.
Abstract
Politicians increasingly treat radio talkback as a valuable resource through which to c... more Abstract
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.
ABSTRACT
This paper explores how philosophical inquiry and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) can ... more ABSTRACT 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
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.
This paper examines a single case of story telling between a couple in a long-distance relationsh... more This paper examines a single case of story telling between a couple in a long-distance relationship conducted via video calling. Drawing on Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA) we examine the way the teller incrementally reveals information about a character in order to build a story of coincidences. In doing this, however, the recipient begins to treat the evolving character as relevant to a different device, that of their relationship. Our discussion develops on the analysis of omnirelevance devices (Sacks, 1995) by examining how categories can be shifted between devices. In so doing, we highlight the way categories introduced for one task may be put to other uses; that is, how categories may become ‘promiscuous’.
Journal of Studies in International Education 2013
Internationalization of the curriculum points to the interdependent and interconnected (globalize... more Internationalization of the curriculum points to the interdependent and interconnected (globalized) world in which higher education operates. However, while international awareness is crucial to the study of journalism, in practice this often means an Anglo-American curriculum based around Western principles of journalism education and training that are deeply rooted in Western values and traditions. This tendency to privilege Western thought, practice, and values obscures from view other journalism practices and renders Western models of journalism desirable, replicable, and transplantable to any part of the world. This article discusses the engagement of a small group of staff in the process of thinking through the meaning of internationalization of the curriculum in their particular disciplinary and institutional context. The staff are located in a school of journalism and communication at a large research intensive university in Australia. The article describes the thinking behind their decision to focus internationalization of the curriculum on “critical de-Westernization” and social imaginaries. This was a gestalt shift resulting from discussion of the way in which “taken for granted” disciplinary canons had hitherto been uncritically embedded into the curriculum. It is argued that treating internationalization of the journalism curriculum as critical de-Westernization has conceptual and practical benefits in a globalized world.
This paper examines the way the metaphor of diversity provides a moral basis for inequality in Si... more This paper examines the way the metaphor of diversity provides a moral basis for inequality in Singapore’s meritocratic education system. Based upon a collection of policy texts from 2002 to 2012, our analysis illustrates that the metaphor of diversity in policy texts provides ways for systemic discrimination within the education system and that this inequality is given legitimacy as necessary through various moral discourses. The paper employs a critical discourse analysis that draws upon the relationship between language analysis, the philosophical study of valuation, and political economy as a composite formulation of values to highlight the ways in which an argument for inequality permeates policy from within a frame of meritocracy, and to analyse how changes associated with new modes of value determination serve to legitimize inequality.
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.
Research Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA) has illustrated a wide and varied used of activ... more Research Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA) has illustrated a wide and varied used of activities, rights and obligations, variously related to categories and membership devices (Hester and Eglin, 1992b; Jayyusi, 1984). As discussed in the Introduction to this volume, while these were initially described by Sacks (1974) as ‘category bound activities’ and later developed by Watson (1983) as ‘category bound predicates’, little recent attention has been paid to the subtle differences in the ways category features (rights, knowledge, activities, etc.) are deployed. While the term ‘category bound predicate’ has proven immensely useful it has also tended to serve as a catch-all term for all relationships between category features and categories, obscuring the action involved in the use of this category resource. In this chapter we touch off from Sacks’s initial discussion of predicates introduced in the Introduction to this volume and subsequent discussions to explore this relationship further by developing levels of sophistication to understanding the relationship between membership categories and locally invoked associated features. In this instance we examine the way in which participants engaged in a number of public arguments orient to three distinct differences in the types of relationship between categories and category features. In order to explore the use of category features we draw on data taken from public arguments posted on the social media website engaged in what has been described as ‘enticing a challengeable’ (Reynolds, 2011, 2013). The first of these adopts Sacks’s (1995) term ‘category tied’ to refer to the link between category and category feature which is treated by participants as not taken for granted and needing to be made explicit. The second relationship examines the way in which features are treated by members as naturally related to a category, in a taken-for-granted, but nevertheless explicit way. For this link we use Sacks’s (1972a, 1972b) term ‘category-bound’. Thirdly we examine where a category feature is directly implied, by the operation of a membership device or category. For this type of relationship we use ‘category-predicate’ (Hester and Eglin, 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.
Developing novices’ proficiency in skilful activities is central to the reproduction of human soci... more Developing novices’ proficiency in skilful activities is central to the reproduction of human societies. The interactional practices through which instruction is accomplished have provided a rich focus for ethnomethodological and conversation analytic studies examining classroom settings, and, more recently, non-classroom environments of instruction in practical and manual skills. This paper examines the work of instruction in basketball training and in particular the correction of player performances, which are a ubiquitous and central feature of instruction in basketball training sessions. A central part of this instructional action relies on the coach observing training activities to determine players’ competencies and to extract relevant correctables from the players’ embodied displays, which are in turn embedded within complex arrangements of rapidly moving bodies situated in material environments. In this paper we examine the visual-analytic work involved in both organizing and observing a basketball training activity, demonstrating the sequential layering of multiple membership categorization devices drawn upon in producing and recognizing actions in this setting. We argue that the coach deploys spatial orientations which function analogously to membership categorization devices, with players’ bodily positions relative to one another and the material structure of the surround generating category-like sets of rights, responsibilities, and sequential relevancies. As we demonstrate, these orientations provide crucial resources for the identification of players’ errors and thereby for the organization of instruction in interaction in this setting.
This paper presents detailed methods for constructing a flexible philosophical–analytical model t... more This paper presents detailed methods for constructing a flexible philosophical–analytical model through which to apply the analytic principles of CDA for the interpretation of metaphors across policy texts. Drawing on a theoretical framing from Foucault and the augmentation of Nietzsche’s views on valuation, we sketch a framework for examining ways in which evaluative semantic categories can be linked to sociological theories in order to bring out their relevance for the purpose of critical discourse analysis. This multi-level research framework draws upon a relationship between language analysis, the philosophical study of valuation, and political economy as a composite formulation of values through which neo-liberalism is discursively entwined and progressed through a system of principles of e/valuation.
In this paper we examine how physical and verbal actions are constituted as morally accountable w... more In this paper we examine how physical and verbal actions are constituted as morally accountable within an institutional context. Through the detailed examination of a video recording of the aftermath of an on-court altercation between players in a basketball training session, we explore how the members work to establish a locally organized institutional context for an action within which in situ moral reasoning practices are then brought to bear to make sense of the players’ actions and render them as morally accountable or not. In examining the moral organization of institutional accountability in an instance of basketball training activity, the paper develops a further level of detail to understand the reflexive organization of membership categories and the institutional moral order.
The aim of this research is to examine the lived work of a radio broadcast. Within this two main ... more 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 ...
Politicians increasingly treat radio talkback as a valuable resource through which to communicate... more 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 United States, United Kingdom 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 for public opinion and political engagement by those who produce and host the programs.
ABSTRACT: Within conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis, the warrant for an... more ABSTRACT: Within conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis, the warrant for any instance of analytic interest is always the demonstrable relevance and consequentiality of the phenomena to the interactants. Demonstrating participants' orientations to social structural contexts poses methodological difficulties, as such orientations are often fragmentary, which weakens the possibility of exploring social structural features as omnipresent and influencing the understandings and actions of ...
This paper explores the relationship between the audience of commercial talkback radio and the ac... more This paper explores the relationship between the audience of commercial talkback radio and the actual existing democratic public sphere in Australia. Drawing upon Anderson's (1987) notion of an imagined community and Warner's (2002) discussion of publics, the paper suggests that two different but entwined modes of address operate around the talkback audience. The first centres on the active creation of an imagined community brought into being and maintained through host and caller interaction, whilst the second, ...
During the 2011 UK public sector protests, controversy ignited over the “Miliband Loop”, an unedi... more During the 2011 UK public sector protests, controversy ignited over the “Miliband Loop”, an unedited video from a pool interview showing Labour 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.
Broadcast interview hosts are increasingly adopting hybrid forms of interview through the utiliza... more Broadcast interview hosts are increasingly adopting hybrid forms of interview through the utilization of interview techniques from different genres within the one interview (Ekstrom and Kroon Lundell, 2011, Montgomery, 2008). Methods that can visually represent interviews in their entirety have the potential to assist in tracking and tracing genre shifts within a single interview. In this paper we examine traditional genres and hybrid forms of broadcast interviewing using a visual text analytic software Discursis (Angus et al., 2013, Angus et al., 2012a, Angus et al., 2012b). Discursis provides visual representations of whole interviews at-a-glance as well as the ability to focus into particular sections for closer analysis. Drawing on a corpus of 101 interviews from a single television program, this study examines if Discursis can meaningfully visually represent forms of interviewing genres (Montgomery, 2008) and highlight where shifting techniques (Ekstrom and Kroon Lundell, 2011) are used within a single interview.
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.
This article is a commentary by Richard Fitzgerald and Mark R. Johnson, written for the Philosoph... more This article is a commentary by Richard Fitzgerald and Mark R. Johnson, written for the Philosophy and Gambling: Reflections from Macao special issue of Critical Gambling Studies.
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.
Cahiers du Centre de Linguistique et des Sciences du Langage
In this chapter we set out to briefly sketch out a description of Chinese internetculture from it... more In this chapter we set out to briefly sketch out a description of Chinese internetculture from its historical development through to some of its current characteristics.From the early roll out of the internet through to the use of social media Chineseinternet cutlture should be understood as emerging from the interplay of a numberof forces: technological changes, software development, user-generated interactionalpractices, and government censorship. The discussion goes onto highlight howincreasingly divergent forms of Chinese social media use provide a rich source ofanalysis of new and innovative practices as well as an awareness of the distinct contextof communicative technological and social environment of it its 772 million users.
On 2 December 2015, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik attacked a Christmas gathering in San Bernardi... more On 2 December 2015, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik attacked a Christmas gathering in San Bernardino, California, killing 14 people and wounding 22. On 4 December, 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 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 it 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.
Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, Dec 1, 2007
Helena Austin, Griffith University Helena Austin is a lecturer in Communication and Research at G... more Helena Austin, Griffith University Helena Austin is a lecturer in Communication and Research at Griffith University. Previous publications include an analysis of the achievement of the categories child and student in the context of the classroom Schooling the Child: The Making of Students in Classrooms (Routledge Falmer, 2003). Her current work investigates the achievement of the category Mother, especially in the context of mothering children with disability. Correspondence to Helena Austin: h.austin@griffith.edu.au Richard Fitzgerald, University of Queensland ...
To cite this article: Fitzgerald, Richard. Discourse and Identity [Book Review] [online]. Media I... more To cite this article: Fitzgerald, Richard. Discourse and Identity [Book Review] [online]. Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture & Policy, No. 121, Nov 2006: 202-203. Availability: <http://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=094382667226938;res=IELHSS> ISSN: 1329-878X. [cited 06 Dec 11].
During the course of this article we intend to explore some issues surrounding government policy ... more During the course of this article we intend to explore some issues surrounding government policy and actions and the moral organisation of political discourse surrounding the recent enquiry into the BSE crisis and the publication of the Phillips Report in the UK. More specifically, we wish to develop the concept of moral discrepancy and it's use in politically accountable settings, in this case the political interview. The paper, through the use of membership categorisation analysis, explores issues surrounding the social organisation of interview settings, the discursive management of policy decisions and ‘bureaucratic mistakes’ and the allocation of blame in situated media/political formats. The paper then relates these issues to notions of democracy-in-action, public ethics and the respecification of structure and agency as a members phenomenon.
ABSTRACT "This is an exciting addition to the dynamic, multidisciplinary field of member... more ABSTRACT "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.
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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
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.
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.