Ethno/CA News: Conferences

Panels at the 12th International Pragmatics Conference, Manchester, 3-8 July, 2011

Constructing collectivity: ‘we’ in interaction.

Organizer: Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou

For the 12th International Pragmatics Conference (to be held in Manchester, 3-8 July, 2011) I plan to organize a panel entitled Constructing collectivity: ‘we’ in interaction. The first person plural, represented here for convenience through the pronoun ‘we’ –the prototypical marker of group indexicality (cf. Mühlhäusler & Harré 1990)–, offers itself to various strands of linguistic/pragmatic inquiry, including the study of subjectivity, speaker deixis, personal pronouns, person reference/formulation, etc. However, the topic has been given equally little attention in all these areas, especially with respect to languages other than English. Only recently, research on ‘we’ seems to have gained some impetus (cf. e.g. Assouline 2010, Bazzanella 2009, Borthen 2010, Duszak 2002, Lerner & Kitzinger 2007, Pavlidou 2008, Stewart 2001, Temmerman 2008); no coherent picture, though, is yet emergent.

The aim of the panel is to bring together scholars who will explore the workings of ‘we’ in interaction, in particular, how speakers present themselves as members/part of a group or collectivity by exploiting the means that different languages have to offer. At the intersection of pragmatics with grammar, the panel will focus on the following issues: (a) What can speakers do referentially with the first person plural ‘we’ (cf. e.g. the so-called impersonal, royal, directive uses of ‘we’) in different languages? (b) What is the role of the free-standing subject pronoun ‘we’ in null-subject languages? Does this pronoun preserve the referential uses of ‘we’? Is there something specific to ‘we’ as compared to other free-standing subject pronouns? (c) What is the contribution of the plural number to the construction of the ‘we’-collectivity as opposed to ‘they’ or ‘you-PLURAL’? How does ‘we’ as a minimal recognitional form relate to other phrases that allow collective reference (e.g. ‘we, Europeans,’ or ‘Mary, Ann and I’)? (d) How do speakers manage self-representation as individual vs. collective subjects (of varying degrees of abstraction, e.g. subset of participants vs. general social categories)? How is inclusion/exclusion of others achieved? What does self- or other-repair (from e.g. ‘we’ to ‘I’) tell us about e.g. claiming collective agency, dispersing personal responsibility, maintaining allegiances?

What is ultimately of interest is the dynamic process of delineating and (re-)constructing collective subjects that arises, among other things, from the inherent fluidity and vagueness of ‘we’ (as opposed to ‘I’, within the same stretch of discourse), and how this process gets accomplished across different interactional contexts and languages.

Presentations addressing (some of) the above or similar issues, especially with respect to non-Indo-European languages, are invited. Given the panel’s orientation to interaction, contributions based on naturalistic data, adopting a Conversation Analysis perspective, are most welcome, although other theoretical approaches are not excluded either.

Abstracts (not exceeding 500 words) should be sent as an email attachment to Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou (pavlidou [at] lit.auth.gr) before September 10, 2010. Notifications of acceptance/rejection will be sent out by the beginning of October 2010.

Please note that:

- abstracts should not be programmatic and, if accepted by the organizer of the panel, they will also have to be submitted individually via the IPrA conference site before October 29, 2010 (http://ipra.ua.ac.be/main.aspx?c=.CONFERENCE12&n=1403 ),

- IPrA membership is presupposed both for submitting an abstract to the organizers of the IPrA conference and for participating in the conference,

- multiple contributions by the same person as first or single author are not accepted.

Quoting From the Case File: Intertextual Practices in Courtroom Discourse

Organizers: Sigurd D'hondt (Ghent University) & Fleur van den Houwen (VU University, Amsterdam)

Criminal trial hearings are communicative events which are densely intertextually structured. Documents in the case file such as police records of the arrest, witness statements and expert records are extensively referred to, quoted, requoted, and recontextualized in the course of the trial - which is inevitable because demonstrating the defendant's criminal liability and the establishment of a binding legal reality crucially hinge on the transformation of these discourses into lawful evidence. For this panel, we invite contributions from various angles that explore how quoting in the courtroom is actually done, including - but not limited to - conversation analysis, linguistic anthropology, and interactional sociolinguistics. Rather than tracing the intertextual trajectory of these various discourses throughout the legal institutions (which we rather consider as a general background to our enterprise), we seek papers that specifically focus on the question how quoting and related intertextual practices are sensitive to the particulars of the courtroom environment. Questions that come to mind are for example:

* What form do intertextual practices take (direct/indirect quote, summarizing etc.)?
* Who is quoted (e.g. suspect or witness?) how, and in what interactional environment?
* To what extent is quoting intertwined with the projection of institutional identities? (For example, do prosecutors and defense attorneys quote differently?)
* How is quoting responded to by the other parties?
* How does the legal system (accusatorial vs. inquisitorial) affect intertextual practices?
* ...
 

As indicated, the proposed panel is open to researchers from different approaches. We envisage two 90-minute sessions, each including three to four presentations.

Some important deadlines:

* Sept. 15, 2010     send abstracts (500 words) to Sigurd.Dhondt [at] Ugent.be
* Oct. 29, 2010      authors must have submitted their abstracts to IPrA (n.b.: IPrA membership required!)
* July 3-8, 2011     IPrA Conference, Manchester

Panel on ‘Emotion displays as social action’

Organizers:

Our panel currently has 2 x 90-minute slots reserved, giving us some limited spare capacity.

We welcome contributions that use Conversation Analysis to investigate emotion displays in interaction. Basic questions include

  1. What counts as an 'emotion display’ to interactants?
  2. How is emotion to be specified analytically?
  3. How are displays of emotion fitted to ongoing social activity?
  4. What are the observable features of doing emotion? This might include turn design (emotion displays in how the turn is delivered: syntactical and lexical choices, prosody and other phonetic features), and sequential placement (e.g. the role of emotion displays within different types of action sequence).
  5. How do institutional agents (doctors, therapists, call-takers etc.) deal interactionally with emotion displays?
If you wish to contribute, please contact us asap for further details: Note that we will need abstracts no later than mid-September to allow us to conclude the panel’s line-up before the IPrA deadline (29th October).

Thanks! Alexa and Tom

information provided by Dr Alexa Hepburn, Social Sciences, Loughborough University.

http://www-staff.lboro.ac.uk/~ssah2/index.htm

‘Restricted interactional activities in institutional talk’

Organiser: Fabienne Chevalier

There is limited space available on the above panel for the 2011 IPRA conference (see panel blurb below). I welcome contributions that use Conversation Analysis to investigate restricted interactional activities in any institutional setting and on any language.

If you are interested in contributing, please email your abstract to fabienne.chevalier [at] nottingham.ac.uk no later than Friday 10 Sept so that the panel line-up can be finalised in time for the IPrA deadline (29th October).

Thanks, Fabienne Chevalier

Restricted interactional activities in institutional talk

Conversation-analytic research has shown that institutional talk is characterised by a selective reduction of the range of practices that may be found in ordinary conversation and by a specialisation and possible respecification of the practices that are in use (Drew and Heritage, 1992). It has also been shown that constraints and imperatives external to the talk such as policy, remit, technology etc are manifested and evidenced in the talk (see Pilnick et al., 2009). This panel examines, from a conversation-analytic perspective, one particular type of institutional constraint and specialisation: restrictions on interactional activities. ‘Restricted interactional activities’ are understood as activities that institutional representatives are banned or discouraged from engaging in by the institutions’ policies, remits or core values (for example, call takers in information helplines may not give advice etc) as well as activities whose avoidance may facilitate the work of the institutions. Drawing upon conversation analysis and presenting data from a range on institutional settings and a range of languages, the contributions to this panel will seek to explore the ways in which these activities are both demonstrably oriented to as restricted and managed as restricted in the course of the interaction as well as the ways in which the construction of the institution might be shaped by the participants’ orientation to, and implementation of, such restricted interactional practices.

 

IPrA 2011 panel on Exploring online health talk

Organizers:


We invite contributions that use conversation analysis and discursive psychology to study interaction in the domain of online health, focusing on synchronous (chat) or nonsynchronous environments (online forums, blogs, interaction via personal webpages). We like to invite scholars who have explored the interactional practices of people who present themselves as lay persons or peers, as well as work on institutional (professional-client) interaction online.
Contributions for the panel may include - but are not limited to -  work that addresses the following themes:
-  how do interactants engage in practical reasoning about health matters?
-  how is health information treated as a negotiable matter?
-  how do interactants attend to matters of accountability in managing their discursive health identities online?
-  how do interactants attend to the structural features of communication when interacting online, i.e. by orienting to turn-taking, sequential placement and message design.

Please contact the organizers before Wednesday, September 1 for further details or any questions you may have. Note that abstracts have to be submitted before September 25th, to allow for the definite panel line up to be decided (IPrA deadline is 29 October).

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