During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, before vaccines became available, some hospitals were forced to quickly transition to using telephone calls for interactions with patients’ families. This shift included, among other changes, the delivery of death notification – a type of news that had previously been communicated exclusively in person. This talk reports on a research study that emerged within that scenario (Ostermann, Konrad, Goldim, in press). Drawing on a corpus of 528 calls recorded by the doctors themselves between 2020 and 2021 in a hospital Intensive Care Unit (ICU) in Brazil, the paper investigates how the communication of death to families of COVID-19 patients happens over the phone. We rely on Conversation Analysis (Sacks, Schegloff, Jefferson 1974; Sacks 1992) from an interactional history perspective (Beach, Dozier, Gutzmer 2018, Deppermann & Pekarek Doehler 2021; Wagner, Pekarek Doehler & González-Martínez 2018) to analyze how an action, sequential, and longitudinal analysis of naturally-occurring interactions can illuminate our understanding of the communication of death over the phone. While we find support for some of the claims made in the literature, the empirical, emic, and longitudinal interactional approach gives us new insights into the different shapes that the communication of death can take. 

The emergency call is the first step in a larger process of requesting and sending help. That is, the caller’s request ends with a promise of fulfilment, projecting additional steps beyond the initial emergency call. In this talk, I open the domain of emergency call research by considering the next two steps in request fulfilment, dispatching first responders to the emergency, and the officer’s report back to the agency which concludes the activity. Through a series of projects using conversation analysis, I show how interactions between emergency dispatchers (9-1-1) and their callers shape police action in the field, and how findings are incorporated into training, policy making, and improving communication between call takers and first-responders.

Emergency departments are key settings for the management of mental health crises. After being triaged in the Emergency Department (ED) and having their medical needs attended to, people are referred for a mental health psychosocial assessment by the psychiatric liaison team also located in the ED. Patients seeking emergency care report varying experiences from being believed and taken seriously and supported to not being believed, taken seriously or supported. Epistemic injustice provides a conceptual framework to explore how peoples’ experiences of serious distress (e.g. self-harm and suicidality) are believed or not. I will discuss the application of conversation analysis to analyze epistemics in clinical communication, focusing on how knowledge is claimed, contested and negotiated. I will focus on how certain communication practices either (1) undermine, imply implausibility and recharacterize or (2) accept peoples’ experiences of distress. I will explore how this occurs in the context of risk assessment and how evidence from conversation analysis of clinical interactions can be triangulated with patient and carer interviews, clinical entries in medical records and ED discharge letters. Finally, I will show how undermining or accepting peoples’ experiences is linked to treatment decisions and how practitioners are required to act as gatekeepers, rationing under-resourced mental health services. This significantly undermines early intervention and patient recovery.

In university student supervision, communicating troubles and concerns with supervisors to solicit advice or other kind of support constitutes a fundamental part of a meeting. However, it can prove interactionally problematic, due to face concerns (Brown & Levinson, 1987) or other sources of delicacy (Jian, 2022).

In this study, I will, first, present how members of supervisions achieve expressions of troubles in different sequential environments: supervisory open questions like “how are things” and queries that solicit a course experience like “how did it go” make trouble relevant. However, more frequently, students respond to various supervisory questions and create the relevance of trouble expressions. The second part is how they are realised, such as utterances that centralise the lack of knowledge and negative emotional states. When the topic of trouble relates to the institution, supervisors complete the turns started (and left unfinished) by the student to collaborate on the formulation of trouble. The third part of the study will show how supervisory advice-giving is delivered in response to specific troubles to minimise advice resistance (Jian, in press), one of the most prominent features in advice-giving (Vehviläinen, 2009; West, 2021; 2023).

This study focuses on how students act as an agentic role in supervision interaction, rather than simply a receipt or respondent of activities. It shows that expressing trouble is not just a means of requesting needed support, it is more of a way in which students exercise their autonomy and co-construct the interaction. Despite supervisors initiating most of the activities, they are able to maneuver the interaction in the responding turns via expressions of troubles. 

Towards the end of his preface to Interaction Ritual, Goffman (1982, p. 3) famously proposed a vision for the study of interaction that emphasized the investigation of (interactional) moments, rather than the individuals who happen to ‘pass through’ them—a proposal which Conversation Analysts have always taken seriously (Schegloff, 1988). In recent years, Goffman’s proposal has received a fresh impetus from, among others, research on the recruitment of assistance (Kendrick & Drew, 2016; Floyd et al., 2020) and large-scale cross-linguistic studies which followed Schegloff’s (2009) recommendation for comparative investigations to focus on the management of recurrent interactional tasks and contingencies (Schegloff, 2006), such as locating and repairing problems in speaking, hearing and understanding (e.g., Dingemanse et al., 2015; Dingemanse & Enfield, 2015).

In this presentation, we take up a similar stance with respect to the study of everyday normativity and its enforcement in ordinary, informal social interaction. We do this by examining moments in which departures from socio-normative expectations for conduct momentarily become the focal business of the ongoing interaction, because one or more participants demonstrably orient to someone else’s or their own conduct as (potentially) problematic in terms of its socio-normative acceptability. As such, these are moments in which the normative acceptability of social conduct is being problematized and negotiated, as a practical concern, by the participants themselves in, and as part of, the ongoing interaction. 

For the participants, the potential or actual engagement in such socio-normatively questionable conduct constitutes what we call a (dis)approval-relevant event, or (D)ARE for short. Such (D)AREs can be handled through an array of different practices and methods, all of which have in common that they foreground the normative and moral accountability of the targeted conduct (Heritage, 1990; Robinson, 2016; Sterponi, 2003, 2009). These sets of practices and methods are organized around the (D)ARE in systematic ways, yielding a temporal-sequential structure of action that furnishes part of the bedrock for how social conduct is continuously streamlined into more or less acceptable trajectories.

The first part of our presentation will offer an overview account of this temporal-sequential organization and the various possibilities for action it affords for managing the occurrence of (D)AREs. The second part aims at initiating a data-driven discussion of how, and to what extent, this overarching organization may be inflected by various elements of social context, as well as further aspects of social organization that may relevantly inform the selection of specific practices and methods on particular occasions of its instantiation.

Data come from the Parallel European Corpus of Informal Interaction (PECII) (Küttner et al., forthcoming; Kornfeld et al., 2023) and consist of video-recordings of informal interactions in a range of European languages (English, German, Italian, and Polish) during three types of mundane activities: (1) joint car rides, (2) adults playing board games together, and (3) family mealtimes.

Offers have been described in CA, by mostly highlighting their linguistic formats (Couper-Kuhlen 2014, Curl 2006, Raymond et al. 2021) and categories such as ‘benefactor’/‘beneficiary’ (by contrast to requests, Schegloff 2007; Clayman/Heritage 2014; Kendrick/Drew 2014). The embodied formatting of offers has been less considered (but see Kärkkäinen/Keisanen 2012).

This talk shows how the action of offering an object here and now (vs. offers to do a future action) is multimodally produced, involving the body manipulating the offered material objects, and is recognized on the basis of its visible-audible features. The paper also reveals offers’ potential ambiguities, both from the perspective of action formation and action ascription: the study focuses on possible “genuine” offers vs. offers that are treated as preliminaries to other actions, and accepted/refused in relation to them. This multiple-barreled nature of offers contributes to current debates and thoughts about action formation and action ascription. It also shows how the distinction between benefactor/beneficiary is questioned and even subverted, in relation to the way offers index and create specific rights and obligations. Finally, the paper discusses several sequential environments that might favor certain action ascription over others, making e.g. genuine offers unproblematically accepted or rather making offers in service of another action legitimate (or not).

The analyses focus on offers of food samples in markets (see Mondada 2022), with some references to (and differences with) similar offers in shops (see Mondada, 2021). Despite their similarities, offers of samples to taste diverge importantly in the way they are recognized and (dis)aligned, inviting to reflect about the details that make an offer acceptable or not and about the comparability of actions in context. While offering food can be seen as a gift, in commercial encounters it can be made and interpreted as part of a larger activity (selling) and in service of its progressivity (offers as conducive to buying). Participants orient to these distinctions, shaping the sequential trajectory of offers and their responses, as well as the sequential environment within the larger activity in which they are produced. Video data are in French and German, collected in various markets in Alsace.

Empowerment self-defence training is a preventative intervention for violence against women and girls.  It is distinctive for presenting a gender analysis of violence alongside imparting skills to better pre-empt and ward off attacks.  Unlike other interventions there is good evidence that participation in empowerment self-defence classes reduces risk of future assaults and increases feelings of self-confidence.  In this talk, I will present a feminist research project that investigates what happens in the classes in order to further advance knowledge about violent encounters and how they can be interrupted.   The research includes a video study of ten classes delivered by Kia Haumaru, a feminist, bi-cultural, non-governmental organisation in Aotearoa, New Zealand.   The data are examined using conversation analysis.  The findings establish various responses to violence are possible that may alter the progression of violent encounters in different ways.   The results are used to further develop a consideration of the sequential organisation of violent actions and the socially constituted forces shaping their realisation.

My paper is based on the study of rhythm tuition in dance classes from an EMCA perspective. It understands tuition to be an interactive process that centres upon the training of the body to move in particular ways at particular times through demonstration and direction.

For some time I’ve been interested in what might be called embodied intersubjectivity. The manner in which we understand and experience the body of others. Arguably, this is the most fundamental and foundational aspect of human experience and sociality. As humans we are continually on the move - whether that be in terms of ambulation (walking down the street) or in terms of body mechanisms (breathing, heart beat, and the like). Within this, a fundamental question is how 'duration' becomes 'moments' of meaning (to misread the relationship between Bergson and Lefebvre) or, more precisely, how we find rhythm in movement. To that end I draw on the work on interaction rhythms and the ongoing achievement of 'interactional synchrony' to foreground the procedural and practical manner in which bodies are taught to move together. The argument being that broader processes of interaction and coordination rest upon such foundations. 

In this presentation I will primarily be concerned with the routine and interactive manner in which this occurs in online ballroom dance tuition videos - identifiable in the visible embodied practices of dance tutors. However, I will root the analysis in a reflexive appreciation of the 'everyday analytics' of dance training, given my own history as a professional dance teacher.

This study explores aspects of experiencing space by focusing on uses of the Japanese proximal spatial deictic term koko (“this place”) and its variants, including kotchi (“in this direction”) and kono (“this”) plus a place term (e.g., “road”). These deictic expressions are often accompanied by a pointing gesture, and many preceding studies investigated how pointing is achieved with a proximal spatial deictic term. However, the use of proximal spatial deictic expressions (pronouns, proadverbs, etc.) unaccompanied by pointing gestures is still underexplored. This study compares two uses of proximal spatial deictic terms, accompanied and unaccompanied by a pointing gesture, and proposes how participants manage their spatial experiences in their interactions. I analyzed several videotaped interactions captured during car driving.

I made the following observations: When accompanied by a pointing gesture, a proximal spatial referential act visually discriminates a specific feature in the environment. One should also note that the way in which the feature is discriminated depends on what action the referential act is embedded in. The feature is discriminated from the environment as affording a subsequent action that is made more or less expectable by the first action. In contrast, when unaccompanied by a pointing gesture, a proximal spatial deictic term refers to the place currently occupied by the participants. This reference is distinguishable in the temporal unfolding of the ongoing driving activity.

Different uses of proximal spatial deictic terms serve as a lens through which aspects of the interactional organization of spatial experience become visible. How spatial experience is organized varies according to how the speaker constructs their action in the ongoing activity. Spatial experiences are not just visual but are essentially multimodal, incorporating the sensing of the temporal unfolding of the ongoing activity.

Misgendering refers to a set of practices through which people are miscategorised in terms of their gender. Whilst this can happen to anybody, being misgendered has profoundly negative and exclusionary outcomes for people whose gender self-designations do not align to the ‘sex’ assigned to them at birth (including transgender and non-binary people). Previous research carried out on textual media (Ansara & Hegarty, 2013; Capuzza, 2015; Gupta, 2019; Ingram, 2019) showed how practices of misgendering embody and reproduce several cisgenderist assumptions—cisgenderism being “the ideology that delegitimises people’s own designations of their genders and bodies” (Ansara & Hegarty, 2014, p. 260).

Our research aims to advance understandings in this area by investigating misgendering in social interaction. We examine a collection of instances of misgendering from openly accessible video sharing platforms and podcasts featuring different types of interaction (for the most part, broadcast interviews and debates, and interactions in public spaces). Drawing upon ethnomethodology, we consider misgendering as a breaching moment in which otherwise smooth and unnoticed practices of gender attribution fail or are subject to contestation. We then focus on participants’ orientations to the accountability of those breaches. By analysing participants’ accounts, we hope to gain access to publicly displayed understandings of the bases of misgendering. These bases are the normative considerations that participants invoke to account for, and normalise, the gender (mis)attribution that a misgendering embodies. We show that these accounts embody normative understandings of gender grounded in two sets of assumptions: the mapping of gender onto cues associated with external appearance; and the mapping of present gender designations onto former gender designations. We further draw on feminist conversation analysis to investigate not only what participants say, but also what they appear to omit from their accounts, thus tacitly reproducing taken for granted assumptions about gender. In these ways, we hope to contribute to understandings of how gender is reproduced in social interaction.

References

Ansara, Y. G., & Hegarty, P. (2013). Misgendering in English language contexts: Applying non-cisgenderist methods to feminist research International Journal of Multiple Research Approaches, 7(2), 160–177.

Ansara, Y. G., & Hegarty, P. (2014). Methodologies of misgendering: Recommendations for reducing cisgenderism in psychological research. Feminism & Psychology, 24(2), 259-270.

Capuzza, J. C. (2015). What’s in a name? Transgender identity, metareporting, and the misgendering of Chelsea Manning In L. G. Spencer & J. C. Capuzza (Eds.), Transgender Communication Studies: Histories, Trends, and Trajectories (pp. 173–186). Lexington Books.

Gupta, K. (2019). Response and responsibility: Mainstream media and Lucy Meadows in a post-Leveson context. Sexualities, 22(1-2), 31-47.

Ingram, M. B. (2019). YouTube Commentaries on Trans Time-lapse Videos: Transforming Misgendering Stances into Pedagogical Moments. Somatechnics, 9(1), 32-57.

This talk presents conversation analytic research into a collection of extracts where participants produce negative formulations of their affective stances. Explicit negative assessments of emotional state are rare in the wider corpus of ordinary talk, and evidence suggests they may be in interaction more generally. According to Ruusuvuori, (2013: 330), "Although all talk is affective to some extent, emotion is seldom the central focus of the ongoing activity".

Analysis of these actions reveals commonalities in terms of:

1. their design - for example, as well as including negative assessments of the speaker's state such as "miserable" and "despondent", they also include mitigating components such as "a bit", "sometimes" and laughter;

2. the sequence to which they contribute - they occur at points of possible transition to a new matter, or closing, and are followed by talk that pursues the matter raised in the formulation of state, but in pragmatic terms rather than addressing the emotion itself.

Thus, I show how brief, multi-faceted references to negative emotional states evoke troubles, while at the same time doing some "troubles-resistance" (Jefferson, 2015), at moments of transition.

References

Jefferson, G. (2015). Talking about Troubles in Conversation. Edited by P. Drew, J. Heritage, G.H. Lerner & A. Pomerantz. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ruusuvuori, J. (2013). Emotion, affect, and conversation. In J. Sidnell & T. Stivers (eds.), The Handbook of Conversation Analysis. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 330-349.

We begin with this simple observation: Taking food can present an occasion for offering food. The sheer visibility of mealtime self-service to other diners (reflexively) furnishes both a context and an account for these offers of service. Not only does mealtime self-service furnish a public launching pad for offering service to others, but the placement of that offer – either on the way to serving oneself or just after having done so – can frame the offer, casting it as a ‘no bother, while I’m at it’ offer. Furthermore, an Offerer can modify the path of their self-service so as to overtly promote the offer: The self-service Manual Action Pathway can be fashioned so as to incorporate visible preparation to serve the Offeree, just before or just after their own self-service. The report then takes up those offers made just as the actual transfer of food or drink is carried out. These offers are recurrently coterminous with the transfer, and thereby become fulfilment-ready just as the transfer reaches its material completion. In sum, in this report, we are able to specify just how practical embodied conduct can contribute to the formation of communicative action – thus providing a way to ground the concept of social solidarity, when applied to offers and their acceptance/declination, in the visible practices of self-service organization. 

In order to diagnose and monitor a patient’s condition, patients and clinicians routinely have to establish how the patient’s body feels or should feel for the patient, the sense through which they establish the location, movement, and actions of the patient’s body. These experiences are inherently internal for the patient.

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, physiotherapy services have routinely started to use video consultations to monitor and assess patients. This poses a new challenge to participants. Patients still do exercises and physical assessments, but accurate assessment cannot be supported through physical touch. They have to rely on other means to establish the patient’s experiences of their body. This paper explores how patients and physios rely on the physio’s professional vision and the patient’s body awareness (or proprioception) to establish the patient’s abilities (e.g., strength, flexibility, skills) and feelings (e.g., pain, stretch) in the context of monitoring and assessment, and instructing the patient in new exercises.

The paper is part of an NIHR-funded project: Supporting Consultations in Remote Physiotherapy. Analysis is based on 15 video-recorded video consultations, collected across two NHS Trusts in three specialist physiotherapy settings: long-term pain, neurorehabilitation, and orthopaedics. 

Turn-taking is a fundamental and universal feature of conversation. A central question in research on turn-taking is how speakers recognize the points of possible turn completion where transitions occur. Over the last 50 years, a cumulative body of research in conversation analysis (CA) has investigated turn-taking through naturalistic observation and rigorous qualitative description, identifying the precise linguistic cues that signal the relevance of transition. In the CA model of turn-taking, visible bodily actions play a minimal role. Quantitative research outside the CA tradition has, however, argued that visual cues are in fact central to the organization of turn-taking, but these studies have tended to employ relatively coarse measures that lack the emic validity required by CA. In this talk, we begin to reconcile these disparate strands of research and present new quantitative evidence for the role that gaze and gesture play in the organization of turn-taking. The data come from a corpus of dyadic conversations in which participants wore eye-tracking glasses for direct measurement of their gaze while they were also recorded by multiple cameras for a fine-grained analysis of their gestures. Combining quantitative and conversation-analytic methods, we show how the direction of a speaker’s gaze and the temporal organization of their gestures influence the relevance of transition between speakers. The findings, we will argue, demonstrate the fundamentally multimodal nature of the human turn-taking system and bring us one step closer to a model of turn-taking in which visible bodily actions play a central role.

Scholarship on the contours of violent conduct has taken on renewed urgency in light of recent social commentary documenting the increasing prominence of threats and uses of violence across a range of political, institutional, and other social conflicts (see, e.g., Homans 2021; Osnos 2020; Palmer and Zick 2021). While contemporary scholarship in this area has converged in focusing on, “Not violent individuals, but violent situations ...” (Collins 2008:1-2), researchers have offered seemingly contradictory accounts for the situated production of violent conduct. Collins (2008, 2009, 2012, 2013, 2019) proposes that violence is difficult to carry out by describing psychological and situational barriers against its enactment, and argues that violence “run right against the conventional morality of normal situations” (Collins 2008:4). In contrast, Fiske and Rai (2015) draw on an approach rooted in moral psychology to contend that most violence is “morally motivated to regulate social relationships” (Fiske and Rai 2015:301) and thus that moral injunctions propel participants toward acting violently. To address these apparent contradictions, we use a conversation analytic approach to identify the situated reasoning and actions through which participants in video recorded conflicts manage, moment-by-moment, the potentially variable morality of violent conduct. Specifically, we document two normative preferences that have “cross-cutting” implications for the realization (or not) of violence once one or more parties have projected its possible use. As we show, participants orient to a difference between the moral legitimacy of producing violent actions that are, or claim to be, responsive to another’s violent action and thus defensive, as compared with initiating violence. In addition, however, we find that participants orient to a second, cross-cutting preference that privileges progress toward the realization of physical violence once it has been projected: Once at least one party has threatened or invited it, progress toward violence is treated as expected and movement away from it is treated as an accountable alternative. As our analysis shows, much of what is readily observable in (potentially) violent encounters (including what previous scholars have observed) can be understood in terms of participants simultaneously managing these countervailing preferences, and the practices they deploy in the course of struggling to do so. In this way, our analysis both elucidates some systematic features of the interactional and moral organization of (potentially) violent conflicts and extends conversation analytic findings regarding preference organization. 

This presentation investigates how participants’ bodies are engaged in the instruction and learning of an embodied skill (singing). The paper interrogates the concept of ‘depiction’ (Clark, 2016; Streeck, 2009) and introduces a distinction between ‘depictions’ and ‘demonstrations’. The two differ in their turn design and recipient uptake. Depictions reference mental concepts and are offered up for interpretation. They are embodied actions that are part of the instruction of conceptualised learnables; for example, the gestural drawing of a rising-falling shape while teaching ‘portamento’. Where recipients respond to depictions, they do so by showing understanding, for example, through nodding and/ or okay and similar response tokens. Demonstrations reference the embodied actions of others and make them accountable. They either imitate others’ previous actions or are themselves offered up for imitation. Demonstrations are part of the instruction of embodied learnables; for example, performing a gesture as part of an instruction to perform that gesture. Demonstrations implicate the body directly and make relevant responses performed through the body. The paper will present video recorded data and adopt a conversation analytic framework.

Clark, Herbert H. (2016). Depicting as a method of communication. Psychological Review 123(3), 324-347.

Streeck, Jürgen (2009). Gesturecraft. The manu-facture of meaning. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: Benjamins.

In this data session we will explore how people answer two different questions about recent events, "What did you do last weekend?" and "What has been in the news recently?" The data comes from videorecorded responses to questions asked by an avatar, a talking head on a computer screen. The questions are pre-recorded, and the avatar does not understand spoken language or react to the co-participants talk in any way. Therefore, one could say that the responses are all perfectly comparable; the sequence leading up to them is held constant across different speakers. Because this is a data session, I don't want to exert too much influence over what we analyse or discuss, but I do have a few 'tricks' up my sleeve. If you think you recognise this data from the description, I'd thank you not to talk too much about it with other attendees who might not, at least until we start the session.  

Acknowledgment of wrongdoing is considered necessary for relationship transformation in processes of transitional justice. However, the concept has only been studied in the institutional and legal context. Its social and interpersonal dimensions remain poorly understood. This talk addresses this gap by studying interactions between ordinary citizens across ethnic lines in response to war crimes trials. The talk proposes a novel typology that is used to identify meaningful acknowledgement in 162 inter-ethnic exchanges derived from focus groups in four former Yugoslav countries. The study also identifies what triggers this ideal type and finds that the triggers are related to conversational changes in identity constructions and knowledge claims. But the triggers only occur when individuals also endorse each other’s views across ethnic lines. The article thus shows how relationships transform in inter-ethnic interactions, even when individuals hold differing views and arguments about transitional justice.

Engagement is a substratum of social encounters. It involves the orientation by the interaction participants to each other physically and through perception, their collaboration in joint actions, and their sharing of the local moral order of the encounter. Goffman's early work pointed out a paradox of engagement: Engagement on one hand is a moral obligation for the interaction participants, but on the other, engagement is always shadowed by tendencies towards disengagement through withdrawal and side involvements. In my presentation, I will show how a young patient in psychiatric evaluation interviews oscillates between engagement and disengagement in her interactions with the clinicians interviewing her. I will also show how patients in couple therapy disengage posturally and through bodily side involvements during the talk where their spouses complain about them. I will suggest that it is analytically worthwhile to consider (dis)engagement as a multimodal Gestalt, where action, bodily participation and sharing of the moral order go together and index each other.

In this presentation, I offer some methodological reflections on the study of morphology as participants’ resource in social interaction. I begin by calling attention to morphology as a comparatively underexamined level of linguistic structure by conversation analysts and interactional linguists, in that it has yet to receive the same dedicated consideration that (for example) phonetics in interaction has received. I discuss a few potential reasons for this, highlighting in particular some of the methodological issues that analysts of real-time language use must consider in targeting morphology in action. I then introduce an ongoing study of suffixes/suffixation in Spanish—namely, diminutives (e.g., -ito/a; carro ‘car’ à carrito ‘little car’ [lit.]), augmentatives (e.g., -ote; abrazo ‘hug’ à abrazote ‘big hug’ [lit.]), and superlatives (e.g., ísimo/a; caro ‘expensive’ à carísimo ‘super expensive’ [lit.])—and review how the sequentiality of interaction can offer analysts a window into participants’ use of these morphological resources in the service of social action. I conclude by offering some thoughts as to how the sequentiality of talk might inform the future exploration of other sorts of morphological operations in interaction across languages. ­­­

In this paper I explore how cultural identities are talked into being by examining how participants manage displayed gaps in what they might be obliged to know. Building on a rich tradition of research into error correction and conversational repair (e.g., Drew, 1997; Jefferson, 1974, 1987, 2007; Kitzinger 2013; Raymond & Sidnell, 2019; Robinson, 2006; Schegloff, Jefferson, Sacks, 1977), I show how error correction practices – from “non-correction” (Jefferson, 1987 [2018]) to  “embedded correction” (Jefferson, 1987) to “aggravated correction” (Goodwin, 1983) – can be used to negotiate identity-bound knowledge so as to ascribe or disavow particular cultural identities. I analyze how error correction practices are shaped by and adapted to the local interactional context in which an error is made, on the one hand, and to the identity ascribed to the error producer, on the other hand. Overall, the paper develops our understanding of epistemics (Heritage, 2013) as a resource for enacting identities in interaction, and elaborates the concept of epistemic responsibility.

The presented research examines the sequential organisation of treatment-related preferences expressed by patients and their co-present romantic partners during clinical consultations for people with low or intermediate risk localised prostate cancer. A conversation analysis of 28 diagnostic and treatment consultations was carried out with data collected from four clinical sites across England. When healthcare professionals challenged, rejected, or dismissed expressions of preference, it caused a sequential pattern of discordance and activity contamination, pivoting the interaction toward an adversarial configuration. This pivot led to patients and partners silencing themselves. Two deviant cases were identified that did not contain this structural pivot. These findings highlight the immediate consequences of expressions of preference being resisted, rejected, and dismissed in a context that should be sensitive to such expressions. The adversarial configuration of these moments contaminated the interactions during a time where cooperation is desirable. The deviant case analysis offers an alternative to the salient pattern observed across the collection.

This presentation will review the findings (and many remaining questions) of my doctoral research on the interactional practice I have called co-animation, i.e. the joint voicing, or (re- )enactment of the same figure in adjacent sequential positions (cfr. Niemelä 2011; Guardiola & Bertrand, 2013; Mathis & Yule, 1994). I have found that during the development of particular social activities - namely, troubles-tellings and indirect complaint stories on the one hand, and teasing and mockery episodes on the other- a participant’s first animation is often completed or continued in responsive position by the co-participant. Drawing on the theoretical and methodological insights of Conversation Analysis (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson, 1974) and multimodal approaches to Interactional Linguistics (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 2001), I will discuss my description of the multimodal and sequential organisation of co-animation based on 89 cases identified in 10 hours of video-recordings of naturalistic English interaction between friends, relatives, and co-workers. I will focus on the defining characteristics of the practice, as well as on some of the relational consequences of the situated deployment of the practice, specifically the display of association (Lerner, 1993). 

During the presentation I will address two aspects of co-animation: 

a) How co-participants multimodally design their responsive turns in a way that they are seen and heard as coherent with prior animations, and at the same time, as fitted affiliative responses that collaboratively further an ongoing course of action, making it a joint endeavour. 

b) How participants deploy (co-)animation at particular points in the development of specific social activities to deal with (emerging) moral matters, thus interactionally defining what constitutes a shared stance, values, and identity, and teaming up against absent but invoked transgressive behaviours or parties. 

There is little doubt that Sacks’ (1987) notion of the 'preference for agreement' is generally valid. However, that it is valid does not tell us how it is valid. This article further unpacks the preference for agreement by conversation-analytically grounding one of its many underlying mechanisms. Specifically, this article examines the practice of formatting an action – in this case, a type of information seeking – as a positively formatted polar interrogative without polarity items (e.g., Did you go fishing?). This article demonstrates that doing so enacts a speaker stance that the question's proposed state of affairs (e.g., that the recipient went fishing) is probable, and thus that a response is more likely to constitute affirmation than disaffirmation. Additionally, this article demonstrates the preference-organizational effects of such formatting on some aspects of response construction. Data are gathered from videotapes of unstructured, face-to-face conversations, included 289 interrogatives, and are in American English.