Pre-conference workshops

Schedule Overview

Monday (full-day workshops):

1. Sequence Organization (Geoff Raymond)

Geoffrey Raymond (University of California, Santa Barbara) - graymond@soc.ucsb.edu

This workshop is designed to foster new lines of research focused on what Schegloff (2006:73) describes as “The ‘sequence organizational’ problem: How are successive turns or actions formed up to be ‘coherent’ with the prior one (or some prior one) and constitute a “course of action?” The workshop will offer sufficient background information to allow for beginning researchers’ active involvement in discussions and data sessions while also providing advanced researchers with opportunities to develop new analytic skills. The main focus of the workshop will be to develop observations and descriptions of practices that help us to understand the reflexive relationship between actions (and action formation and ascription), epistemics, and other aspects of context, including who the parties are for one another and whatever social relations, categories or identities may be relevant for them, and the range of other social, cultural, and institutional matters that may be consequential for the courses of action they conduct. Workshop participants are encouraged to bring their own data, questions and projects. The facets of action sequencing focused on in the workshop are generic, and so should be of interest (and use) to researchers working on data collected in a variety of ordinary and institutional settings.

2. CA and Psychotherapy/Psychiatry (Anssi Peräkylä)

Anssi Peräkylä (University of Helsinki) - anssi.perakyla@helsinki.fi

We will start with a lecture, laying out the contribution that conversation analysis has made to understanding psychotherapy. The themes touched upon in the lecture include sequential organization in psychotherapeutic interaction, management of referential worlds, and negotiation of emotion and affiliation. Particular attention will be paid to the conversation-analytic take on long-term processes (i.e., processes extending beyond single sequences or sessions) in psychotherapy. Finally, we will discuss the distinctive interactional features that psychiatric consultations have, as compared to psychotherapy, focusing on the design and interactional uses of references to diagnosis in psychiatric interviews.

The lecture will be followed by be three rounds of data sessions. The data sessions will focus on the key themes discussed in the lecture: management of emotion, referential words, and the momentary relation between participants, in and through sequentially organized actions. The aim of the data sessions is two-fold: especially for participants close to the clinical practice, they will be an exercise to learn more about the sequential organization of psychotherapeutic / psychiatric interactions, while for the participants close to conversation analysis, they will offer an opportunity to better understand the distinctive character of psychotherapy and psychiatric interviews as institutional interaction. The workshop leader will bring along one set of data coming from psychiatric assessment interviews in Finland. Participants will be invited to contribute video-recorded psychotherapeutic data to be examined in the data sessions, from which two will be selected for group analysis. Some preliminary readings will be circulated as preparation prior to the workshop.

3. Grammar (Barbara Fox & Chase Raymond)

Barbara Fox and Chase Raymond (University of Colorado, Boulder) - Barbara.Fox@colorado.edu / Chase.Raymond@colorado.edu

In early work, Harvey Sacks commented: “The roughest message you might pick out of what I shall say is that, in dealing analytically with conversations, you must be at least cautious in the use of what you’ve been taught about grammar” (1992: 334). Heeding Sacks’s advice, this introductory-level workshop is designed to familiarize participants with some concrete ways of working with grammatical phenomena from a conversation-analytic perspective—not only as the central focus of an analysis, but also as a means of support for claims in projects that do not have a grammar-specific scope. We conceive of grammar broadly, incorporating not only morphosyntactic phenomena, but also phonetics and other levels of linguistic structure, as well as bodily-visual practices. Moreover, our approach is cross-linguistic in nature, and as such, the workshop will incorporate examples from a range of typologically distinct languages, with an eye toward recent and ongoing debates concerning grammatical units, ‘default’ grammatical structures, and the potential ‘universality’ of grammatical phenomena. Throughout our discussion, we’ll see ample evidence that grammar has as its fundamental work the construction and interpretation of action in temporally unfolding courses of interaction.

4. Classroom Interaction (Rod Gardner)

Rod Gardner (University of Queensland) - r.gardner@uq.edu.au

In this workshop, we will consider some of the aims and challenges for CA researchers working on classroom interaction. The first session will briefly introduce some of the broad goals of classroom interaction research, followed by a consideration of data collection and how to ensure high quality audio and video recordings in classes with up to 25 students. Next we will look at the challenges around transcription and analysis of such classes, focusing on multimodal analysis of verbal, other vocal, non-verbal (especially gaze, facial expression, gesture, posture, body orientation) features, and the use of artefacts. The final session will consider some of the outcomes that a researcher might be working towards, in the two broad areas of:

  • sequential organization of classroom talk (e.g., turn-taking, action sequences, repair and correction, turn design); and
  • (orientation to) learning (e.g., embodied attention behaviors, demonstrations of understanding, instruction following, and successful task completion. The focus here will be on evidence for learning within single classes, rather than over the long term.

There will be time for discussion and sharing experiences of working on classroom interaction.

5. Social Interaction Research: What Can We Compare and How? (Tanya Stivers)

Tanya Stivers (University of California, Los Angeles) - Stivers@soc.ucla.edu

In social interaction research we can wonder whether a given practice varies systematically by factors as diverse as age, gender, race/ethnicity, language, culture or national context. In this workshop I will be discussing the methodological challenges that conversation analysts face when tackling comparative questions. I focus on the different sorts of solutions available for particular sorts of research questions. We will also discuss when, why, and which mixed methods approaches work best to address such research questions.

6. Multimodality (Lorenza Mondada)

Lorenza Mondada (University of Basel) - lorenza.mondada@unibas.ch

This workshop deals with the approach of multimodality in social interaction, from a conversation-analytic perspective. It aims at briefly introducing the state of the art in the field, in relation to the emergence and development of the use of video recordings. Then, the focus of the workshop will be on how multimodal analysis is practiced: analytical issues (how to tackle multimodal resources such as gesture, gaze, body postures, movements, and manipulations of objects within the study of turn-taking, action formation, and sequence organization) will be articulated to the practice of transcribing (how to annotate multimodality, how to take into consideration its complex temporality, how to build collections of complex multimodal Gestalts). The workshop will discuss classical phenomena in conversation analysis as well as new challenges (e.g., those related to mobility, multiactivity, sensoriality, and animality).

7. Issues and Advances in Transcription (Alexa Hepburn & Galina Bolden)

Alexa Hepburn and Galina Bolden (Rutgers University) - Alexa.hepburn@rutgers.edu / gbolden@rci.rutgers.edu

The aim of this workshop is to help develop participants’ transcription skills. We will begin with a review of a pre-circulated transcription exercise. This will involve explicating, with examples, many of the key elements of the Jeffersonian transcription system. Then, in break-out groups, participants will have an opportunity to engage with some more recent developments in transcribing, such as issues involved in rendering non-vocal conduct, transcribing emotional activities such as crying, laughter and pain cries, transcribing talk in languages other than English, and using transcription and data management software.

8. Sensitive and Distressing Topics and Actions in Healthcare Interactions (Ruth Parry & Marco Pino)

Ruth Parry (University of Nottingham) and Marco Pino (Loughborough University) - ruth.parry@nottingham.ac.uk / M.Pino@lboro.ac.uk

This workshop will be useful to people whose work considers difficult and delicate topics and actions. You will learn about identifying and analysing how people engage in and manage sensitive topics and actions. “Sensitive” is seen here as a participant orientation, so the focus is on how people themselves treat some activities/topics as objects requiring special management in interaction.

Small group work will examine collections of doctors’ and patients’ actions to initiate and/or pursue sensitive activities/topics in relation to patients’ life-limiting conditions and the prospect of dying. Actions attempted subtly, i.e. not overtly or on-record will be a key focus. We will discuss analytic tools (e.g., beyond next-turn proof procedures) for characterising these actions.

Note: We will work with medical data wherein patients have, and sometimes discuss, a terminal diagnosis. You should be aware that this can sometimes trigger difficult emotions – please keep this in mind when booking a place.

A final discussion will also consider:

  • looking after yourself and your audiences when dealing with potentially distressing data
  • presenting findings based on extended stretches of talk
  • application of findings (e.g., training)
9. Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis: How to Do Both in Research and Teaching (Doug Maynard)

Douglas W. Maynard (University of Wisconsin, Madison) - maynard@ssc.wisc.edu

I have always taught a course in Conversation Analysis with ample, interwoven helpings or doses of ethnomethodology. This workshop is for those who would also like to teach (or do) CA in a way that is informed by Ethnomethodology. In this workshop, we will explore such topics as:

  • Conversational practices as commonsense. What is commonsense and how practices of talk and embodied actions exhibit it?
  • Atypical interactions and their avenue to commonsense
  • Turn-taking in conversation in relation to embodied queueing in service encounters
  • What actual talk shows in comparison with Goffman’s constructed examples or Garfinkel’s contrived interactions
  • Action formation, “composites,” “constructives,” and Garfinkel’s fascination with Gurwitsch’s notion of functional significance
  • “Detail” in ethnomethodology and in CA: what is it?
  • Analyzing a single as well as a singular, just-this episode

Addressing these topics through brief presentations, together with focused data sessions.

Tuesday (full-day workshops):

10. Repair (Makoto Hayashi and Barbara Fox)

Makoto Hayashi (Nagoya University, Japan) and Barbara Fox (University of Colorado, Boulder) - hayashi@lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp / Barbara.Fox@colorado.edu

The theme of this workshop is conversational repair, which refers to a set of practices employed by participants to deal with problems of speaking, hearing, or understanding that they encounter during the course of talk-in-interaction. This workshop is intended to provide a forum for (1) reviewing the basics of repair operations in conversation; (2) discussing possible directions in future research on repair; and (3) engaging in hands-on data analysis. The workshop consists of brief lectures, small group breakout sessions, collective data sessions, and participants’ data presentations (based either on their own data or data provided by the workshop leaders). While attempts will be made to cover as wide a range of repair-related topics as possible, one focus will be on exploring how different linguistic structures across languages might be consequential for repair practices.

11. Epistemics (John Heritage & Chase Raymond)

John Heritage (University of California, Los Angeles) and Chase Raymond (University of Colorado, Boulder) - heritage@soc.ucla.edu / Chase.Raymond@colorado.edu

Conversation-analytic research into epistemics focuses on the knowledge claims that interactants assert, contest, and defend in and through turns-at-talk and sequences of interaction. The aim of this workshop is to provide a hands-on introduction to this area of study within CA. We begin by offering an overview of some relevant concepts and terminology. With this foundation in place, using question-answer and assessment sequences as cases-in-point, we will consider particular features of turn design that have been shown to be implicated in the negotiation of epistemic (and experiential) rights and obligations in interaction. We will also explore how epistemic issues are negotiated cross-linguistically (in languages with distinct resources at their disposal), as well as discuss and respond to some recent critiques of CA’s treatment of epistemic matters. Throughout the workshop, participants will have ample opportunity to practice using the concepts under discussion through group data exercises involving both ordinary and institutional talk.

12. Medical Interaction: Evaluating Decision-making in Practice (Merran Toerien)

Merran Toerien (University of York, UK) - merran.toerien@york.ac.uk

This workshop will focus on three practices that doctors use to initiate decision-making in consultation with patients: recommendations, option-listing and patient view elicitors. We will use these as a way in to exploring a range of analytic and applied issues in the doing of CA in medical settings. With some room for flexibility, depending on who signs up, these will include:

  1. How do we identify practices and tease out patterns within them?
  2. How do we compare practices with each other?
  3. How do we move from the detailed specifics of our analysis to the ‘so what’ factor that may interest clinicians/policymakers?

The workshop will draw on my collection of over 200 neurology consultations, providing data clips and transcripts for participants to learn from engaging with a range of analytic exercises. My work has centered on how clinicians give patients choice, and whether choice can really be said to be better than a recommendation. These have proven far harder to answer than I expected! I will be drawing on my own conversation analytic ‘battles’ throughout the workshop and welcome participants to do the same.

13. CA and Pragmatics (Liz Holt and Michael Haugh)

Elizabeth Holt (University of Huddersfield) and Michael Haugh (University of Queensland) - e.j.holt@hud.ac.uk /michael.haugh@uq.ed.au

The focus of this workshop involves exploring the relationship between conversation analysis and pragmatics through detailed analysis of data. We will consider how pragmatic concerns may be informed by the sequential approach offered by conversation analysis. Given the breadth of this topic, we will take a focused approach by concentrating on one or two interactional phenomena such as reported speech and requests. Issues of footing, face and politeness may then be considered in respect of their relevance to the sequential analysis of instances.

14. Quantification (Kobin Kendrick)

Kobin H. Kendrick (University of York, UK) - kobin.kendrick@york.ac.uk

This workshop introduces participants to a set of practical methods used for the quantification of interactional phenomena in CA research. It will include an introductory lecture on the theoretical issues that arise when conversation analysts use quantitative methods, as well as a sober discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the approach, based on concrete examples from published research. The primary focus of the workshop, however, will be on specific technical procedures that researchers can use to conduct quantitative CA, drawing on methods developed in my own research. This includes developing coding schemes inductively so as to respect the natural integrity of interactional phenomena; segmenting audio recordings in Praat for precise measurements of timing; coding video recordings in ELAN, with a focus on the frame-by-frame analysis of embodied action; and exporting codes from ELAN into a format suitable for statistical analysis (e.g., in R or SPSS). Participants will be guided through a series of hands-on tutorials, each with step-by-step instructions. Two important caveats: first, the methods that will be taught are all manual (i.e., no automation or scripting will be involved); and second, the workshop will not provide instruction on statistics, though references to useful resources will be distributed. Participants must bring laptops to the workshop and have all necessary software installed in advance.

15. Conversation Analytic Role-Play Method (CARM) (Liz Stokoe)

Elizabeth Stokoe (Loughborough University) - E.H.Stokoe@lboro.ac.uk

This workshop is intended for CA researchers who want to learn about CARM and its use in training service providers/professionals to have effective conversations with the people they interact with. It will cover the development of CARM and problems with traditional forms of role-play training. We will also discuss how to gain accreditation for CARM for Continuing Professional Development, as well as how to use CARM as an accredited CARM Affiliate. The workshop will provide examples of its use in a variety of workplace settings, including mediation, cold-calling, hostage negotiation, and medical interaction, and will also involve discussion of CARM’s use in new settings. We will also spend some time thinking about not just CARM for spoken interaction but also for an organization’s written communication with potential and current clients, as well as scaling up CA research and working with organizations in different ways. We will think about issues such as CARM branding, public engagement and income generation. The workshop will be a mix of mini-lectures, practical activities and exercises, including hands-on work with recorded conversation. All materials will be provided. Part 1 will mostly focus on ‘what CARM is’ with examples of the method in use. Part 2 will focus on the technical side of building CARM workshops using relevant multimedia technology.

16. Storytelling (Jenny Mandelbaum)

Jenny Mandelbaum (Rutgers University) - jmandle@comminfo.rutgers.edu

Stories told in conversation are designed by tellers to implement some kind of action, and understood by recipients to be “doing” something. This workshop focuses on how interactants design storytellings and responses to them to implement actions. We explore (1) how tellers may use each next step in the unfolding of a storytelling (the pre-beginning; the launch of the storytelling; various points in its course; its possible completion, and post-completion) to develop a course of action, and (2) how story recipients co-participate in the development of this action, or resist or derail it. Following a brief exercise in which participants work on detecting basic practices of talk and the body for implementing actions in a video- field-recorded storytelling, we examine a collection of storytellings to discover practices storytellers use to implement a range of (focal and “off record”) actions at various points in the storytelling, and practices recipients use to co-construct or obstruct actions. The workshop is suitable for conversation analysts at all levels of preparation.

17. Phonetics and Prosody (Richard Ogden)

Richard Ogden (University of York, UK) - richard.ogden@york.ac.uk

The aim of this workshop is to equip participants with some basic terms and skills in auditory phonetics, with an emphasis on observation rather than transcription.

This workshop will have two main parts to it. The first one will focus on listening, paying attention to details and thinking about how they relate to other things that are going on in the talk. We’ll think more about the kinds of problems we have to solve, and how we can go about solving them. The second part will focus more on aspects of intonation, providing participants with a simple framework for talking about how intonation works. The data will mostly be English.

There will be some short talks, some listening exercises, and discussions. Our main tools will be our ears; but there will be some advice also on using tools for acoustic analysis. Participants will also be invited to contribute data beforehand.

18. Atypical Interactions (Charles Antaki & Ray Wilkinson)

Charles Antaki (Loughborough University) and Ray Wilkinson (University of Sheffield) - C.Antaki@lboro.ac.uk / ray.wilkinson@sheffield.ac.uk

“Atypical interaction” is a term which covers interaction in which at least one participant has some trouble with language, speech or hearing (as in acquired communication disorders such as aphasia, or developmental disorders such as Down's syndrome or autism). This workshop will use data from recorded interactions to show how Conversation Analysis can be used to identify the things that clients find difficult, as well as analyzing how these interactions can often work successfully despite one participant’s often limited communicative resources. Ray Wilkinson will lead an exploration of conversations involving people with aphasia, and Charles Antaki will concentrate on developmental disorders such as Down’s Syndrome and autism. There will be a good deal of hands-on work, with an opportunity for participants to bring their own data for group discussion if they wish. A workshop aim will be to highlight similarities and differences across various types of atypical interaction.

Wednesday (half-day workshops):

19. Transcription of Multimodal Interactions (Elwys De Stefani)

Elwys De Stefani (University of Leuven, Belgium) - elwys.destefani@kuleuven.be

Transcripts have been described as “a good enough record of what happened, to some extent. Other things, to be sure, happened” (Sacks 1992, I: 622). In this workshop we focus on such “other things”, i.e. on the transcription of embodied actions observable in video recordings (gaze, gesture, body movement, object manipulation, etc.). Two questions will guide us through the workshop: 1) How do we select the phenomena we transcribe? 2) How should we represent multimodal conduct in transcripts? We will answer these questions by doing hands-on transcription exercises with a variety of available tools (e.g., ELAN vs. vertical transcription) and transcription conventions, and by comparing multimodal transcripts as published in the literature. Participants in the workshop will become aware that transcripts are, necessarily, partial renditions of a recorded event and that transcribing is a selective practice with which we make available analytically relevant phenomena. Some good practices for transcribing video footage from a conversation-analytic perspective will be shared.

20. Preference (Danielle Pillet-Shore)

Danielle Pillet-Shore (University of New Hampshire) - Danielle.Pillet-Shore@unh.edu

A compelling domain of conversation-analytic inquiry capable of producing powerful insights into the orderliness of everyday human social interaction, preference organization research elucidates how people systematically design their actions to either support or undermine social solidarity. The aim of this workshop is to advance attendees’ dexterity at detecting preferences in interaction. Using recorded, naturally occurring data from ordinary and institutional interactions between English-speakers, we will discuss preference as it relates to both sequence-responding and sequence-initiating actions. This workshop will offer a mix of short presentations and individual or group hands-on exercises that engage key preference principles distilled from over 45 years of conversation-analytic work, including the preferences for recipient design, contiguity and agreement, progressivity, offers, recognition, self-correction, self-criticism (over other-criticism), and other-praise (over self-praise). We will also consider debates and possible directions for future research in this area. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own laptops, and are welcome to bring their own data for joint analysis during the workshop.

21. Best Practices in Presenting Non-English Data (Giovanni Rossi)

Giovanni Rossi (University of Helsinki) - giovanni.rossi@helsinki.fi

This half-day workshop deals with practices for presenting conversational data in languages other than English. The main goals are to identify and discuss existing conventions and standards of presentation, and at the same time, to consider informal strategies for facilitating an audience’s understanding of the data. The workshop has two foci: i) the preparation of transcripts, including glossing, translating, representing prosody, and layout; and 2) the preparation of audiovisual clips, including technical aspects of making and subtitling the clips, and modes of playback. After a presentation and discussion of these topics, we will break out into groups working separately on the transcript and audiovisual clip of a conversational extract. The results will then be presented to the whole group for further discussion. Participants are encouraged to bring their own data and laptops to work with.

22. Investigating Particles (Galina Bolden)

Galina Bolden (Rutgers University) - gbolden@rci.rutgers.edu

This workshop explores issues involved in conducting conversation-analytic research on “particles” (or “discourses markers”) - a class of linguistic devices that includes words and phrases such as anyway, well, you know, I mean, oh, so, like, etc. While particles are easily identifiable and collectable, a systematic analysis of their use in interactional data is notoriously difficult. What constitutes a workable collection of cases for conducting conversation-analytic research into particles? What kinds of evidence can be mounted for a defensible analysis? To address these questions, workshop participants will work on a collection of cases of an English particle, develop a grounded analysis of its interactional functions, and explore challenges involved in such research. There will also be an opportunity to discuss unique issues in analyzing particles in other languages.

23. Video/Audio Data Management (digitizing, anonymising, etc.) (Clare Jackson)

Clare Jackson (University of York, UK) - clare.jackson@york.ac.uk

In this half-day workshop, we will cover ethical and technological issues in working with audio and video digital materials (as well as digitizing existing analogue data). Ethically, recording people as they go about their activities, whether that’s as mundane as making a phone-call or as sensitive as giving/receiving bad news in a medical consultation, places a burden of responsibility on researchers to manage the data securely. We will address how best to manage these responsibilities before, during and after data collection. The real advantage of recorded data is that (with consent) it can be shared with others to illustrate analytic claims in ways that are more compelling than transcription alone. However, as researchers, we are also obliged to manage the inherent risk that our participants’ anonymity will be undermined. We will therefore discuss how to clip and anonymize data.

24. Teaching CA (Andrew Merrison)

Andrew Merrison (York St. John University) - a.merrison@yorksj.ac.uk

This workshop on Teaching Conversation Analysis is designed to facilitate an opportunity for sharing the wealth of expertise that will undoubtedly be present in the room. We welcome students and teachers of Conversation Analysis, both seasoned and new, to actively participate in this extended ‘show and tell’. Because it cannot be known who will want to ‘show and tell’ what, the nature of this workshop is purposive but necessarily unplanned. That said, the sorts of experiences that teachers and students of CA may well wish to discuss include (but are not limited to) the following:

  • CONTEXT for TEACHING: Course Type; Course design; Disciplinary Background
  • CURRICULUM: Turn-Taking; Sequence Organization; Repair; Word Selection; Ethics; Transcription; Tech-Support
  • DELIVERY: Module/Class Structure (hours/weeks); Delivery Style (lectures/seminars/workshops); Assessment Methods (transcription/data-collection/essays/analyses/projects/presentations/tests/quizzes/exams)
  • ACTIVITIES: Seminar Readings; Individual/Group Analyses; Homework Exercises; Data Collection; Data Transcription; Demonstrations (use of visual aids / YouTube videos etc.); Line-by-Line Analyses
  • CLASS RESOURCES: Textbooks; Data Packs; Reading Packs
  • SUPPORT STRUCTURES: Team Teaching; Supported Open Learning / TA-led Sessions; Data Sessions; Reading Groups
25. ‘Clinic’ on Research Proposals (Alison Pilnick, coordinator)

Coordinated by Alison Pilnick (University of Nottingham), in conjunction with a panel of experts - Alison.Pilnick@nottingham.ac.uk

Most of us now work in environments where research funding has become more scarce, and where competition for those funds that are available is greater. This workshop will consider some of the issues facing researchers who are seeking funding for projects driven by or incorporating CA. It will draw on the experience of a panel of researchers who have been successful in achieving funding for projects from a variety of funders, in different national contexts, and from small to large scale. The workshop will begin with a short presentation highlighting some common themes, but will be mostly focused around a question-and-answer session with the panel, to allow participants to raise their own topics and concerns.