Exclusion in gossipy talk: Highjacking the preference structure for ingroup belonging

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

Misunderstanding as a resource in interaction

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

Building up by tearing down

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

Constructing group membership through talk in the field

Constructing group membership through talk in the fiel

A discourse analysis of “social construction” in communication scholarship

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

“Let’s have the men clean up”: Interpersonally-communicated stereotypes as a resource for resisting gender-role prescribed activities

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

Complaints about technology as a resource for identity-work

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

Historical and existential coherence in political commercials

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

Providing epistemic support for assessments through mobile-supported sharing activities

This paper examines how participants in face-to-face conversation employ mobile phones as a resource for social action. We focus on what we call mobile-supported sharing activities, in which participants use a mobile phone to share text or images with others by voicing text aloud from their mobile or providing others with visual access to the device’s display screen. Drawing from naturalistic video recordings, we focus on how mobile-supported sharing activities invite assessments by providing access to an object that is not locally accessible to the participants. Such practices make relevant co-participants’ assessment of these objects and allow for different forms of co-participation across sequence types. We additionally examine how the organization of assessments during these sharing activities displays sensitivity to preference structure. The analysis illustrates the relevance of embodiment, local objects, and new communicative technologies to the production of action in co-present interaction. Data are in American English

Doing being an ordinary technology and social media user

This paper uses discourse and conversation analysis of naturally-occuring conversations to describe how participants construct themselves as “ordinary” users of communication technologies—devices such as mobile phones, their communicative affordances, and the mediated interaction they enable (e.g., access to online communication via social media platforms). The three practices analyzed are (1) managing motivations by downplaying interest and stake in using technology and participating in online activities; (2) calibrating quantities of one's time and involvement using social media; (3) identifying investments in social media use through categories and identities that position users as appropriate or inappropriate. These techniques comprise an accounting practice that accomplishes identity construction in service of situated social actions to manage the moral implications of communication technology use