Membership categorization, culture and norms in action

In this article, we examine the extent to which membership categorization analysis (MCA) can inform an understanding of reasoning within the public domain where morality, policy and cultural politics are visible (Smith and Tatalovich, 2003). Through the examination of three examples, we demonstrate how specific types of category device(s) are a ubiquitous feature of accountable practice in the public domain where morality matters and public policy intersect. Furthermore, we argue that MCA provides a method for analysing the mundane mechanics associated with everyday cultural politics and democratic accountability assembled and presented within news media and broadcast settings

'Here be dragons, here be savages, here be bad plumbing: Australian media representations of sport and terrorism

As 'Propaganda Theorists argue, an examination of key discourses can enhance our understanding of how economic, political and social debate is shaped by mainstream media reporting. In this essay we present content and discourse analysis of Australian media reporting on the nexus of sport and terrorism. Examining newspaper reports over a five-year period, from 1996-2001, which included the 11 September 2001 terrorist tragedy in the United States (9/11), provides useful insights into how public discourse might be influenced with regard to sport and terrorism interrelationships. The results of the media analysis suggest that hegemonic tropes are created around sport and terrorism. The distilled message is one of good and evil, with homilies of sport employed in metaphors for western society and its values. The reactions and responses of sport administrators and athletes to terrorist acts and the threat of terrorism to sport are used to exemplify these ideals, providing newspaper readers a context within which to localize meaning and relevance

Riding the Reciprocal Teaching Bus A teacher’s reflections on nurturing collaborative learning in a school culture obsessed by results

This article examines the author’s interactions with the teaching strategy known as Reciprocal Teaching, sometimes also called Reciprocal Reading, which involves students learning to read collaboratively in small groups. Reciprocal Teaching typically involves students teaching each other by following a rubric of activities that are aimed at primarily improving their comprehension skills. In brief, students read a text in a group and collectively try to understand it, using prescribed procedures. This article scrutinises the original research by Palinscar and Brown (1984) which created the strategy and questions some of its claims. While many other investigations into Reciprocal Teaching have aimed to prove or disprove its efficacy, this enquiry studies the discourses which inform the strategy, arguing that there are problems with its presentation in the original article which have affected subsequent representations of Reciprocal Teaching. The article shows how the author, an English teacher in a large secondary school, taught Reciprocal Teaching to teenagers for a year and argues that the presentation of Reciprocal Teaching he read in a well-regarded teaching handbook caused him to deploy Reciprocal Teaching problematically. It was only when he taught Reciprocal Teaching in a more imaginative fashion that he found greater success

FORUM: Toward a Phenomenology of Interviews

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/43940/1/11422_2005_Article_9001.pd

How breakfast happens in the café

In this article I present an ethnographic study of `breakfast in the café', to begin to document the orderly properties of an emergent timespace. In so doing, the aim is to provide a description of the local production of timespace and a consideration of a change to the daily rhythm of city life. Harold Garfinkel and David Sudnow's study of a chemistry lecture is drawn upon as an exemplary study of the collective creation of an event. Attention is drawn to the centrality of sequentiality as part of the orderly properties of occasioned places. As part of examining the sequences I chart the ongoing emergence of features of breakfast time in the café such as `the first customer', `crowded' and `quiet'. In closing the article, I consider how changes in the rhythm of the city are made apprehensible to its residents

The Uses of Stance in Media Production: Embodied Sociolinguistics and Beyond

While many conversation analysts, and scholars in related fields, have used video-recordings to study interaction, this study is one of a small but growing number that investigates video-recordings of the joint activities of media professionals working with, and on, video. It examines practices of media production that are, in their involvement with the visual and verbal qualities of video, both beyond talk and deeply shaped by talk. The article draws upon video recordings of the making of a feature-length documentary. In particular, it analyses a complex course of action where an editing team are reviewing their interview of the subject of the documentary, their footage is being intercut with existing reality TV footage of that same interviewee. The central contributions that the article makes are, firstly, to the sociolinguistics of mediatisation, through the identification of the workplace concerns of the members of the editing team, secondly showing how editing is accomplished, moment-by-moment, through the use of particular forms of embodied action and, finally, how the media themselves feature in the ordering of action. While this is professional work it sheds light on the video-mediated practices in contemporary culture, especially those found in social media where video makers carefully consider their editing of the perspective toward themselves and others

Call me mad, but...

The initiative of an organisation named 'SANE Australia' in preventing the stigmatisation of mentally ill people in the media is discussed. It is suggested that SANE is going overboard in objecting even to everyday references of mental digressions

A case of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder diagnosis: Sir Karl and Francis B. slug it out on the consulting room floor

Drawing upon Conversation Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis, and in the frame of what is currently called discursive psychology, we open up a significant macro-social problem - indeed a global problem - to inspection at a local level by reference to a naturally-occurring instance of talk-in-interaction. The problem is the documented increase in diagnoses of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in recent years - particularly for boys, particularly in Anglophone countries, and particularly by reference to school-based conduct - and its consequent ‘treatment’ by amphetamines (including Ritalin [methylphenidate]) and related medications (Singh, 2002a). The local instance of talk-in-interaction is a transcript of a diagnostic session involving a young boy, his parents and a paediatrician. We aim to show that the local instance can shed light on just how routine and mundane it is for children to be positively diagnosed and medicated merely on presentation for the possibility of the ‘disorder’, even when parents are manifestly sceptical about (even resistive to) the diagnosis and its methodological grounds

Clarifying the point: A brief response to Sharrock and Coulter

This is a short response to a particular point made by our colleagues Wes Sharrock and Jeff Coulter in their otherwise convincing and devastating critique of the ‘Theory of Mind’ (ToM) avatar of cognitivism. We think they may have misunderstood what we once said about the use of ‘mental predicates’ and wish to clarify the point in question

Re-presenting culture and the self: (Dis)agreeing in theory and in practice

We try to show that the fundamental grounds of psychological thinking about the domains of ‘culture’ and ‘the self’ (and their possible connections) are necessarily representationalist in the Cartesian sense. Rehearsing Heidegger’s critique of representationalism as the basic wrong turning taken by modern thinking generally (and by psychology in particular) with respect to what human being is, we move on to the possibility of a counter-representationalist re-specification of the concept of culture. Here we mobilize ideas from Husserl and Heidegger (again), and also from the basic ethnomethodological theory of Sacks and Garfinkel, to argue for the primacy of culture as an order of practical-actional affairs that makes conceptualizations of a putative ‘self’ always an effect of, and subsequent to, that very (cultural) order. Accordingly, we end by briefly analysing an actual case of an explicitly cultural use of a supposedly intensional term, ‘agree’