Frederick Attenborough

‘I don’t f***ing care!’ Marginalia and the (textual) negotiation of an academic identity by university students:

This article charts the ways in which students negotiate an academic identity whilst pursuing academic tasks that are publicly observable precisely as ‘academic tasks’ to their peers. Previous research into aspects of student interaction that take place within university tutorial sessions has suggested that different kinds of student identity come into conflict as students interact, face-to-face. Most notably, the imperative of ‘doing education’ — as a keen proto-academic seeking a good final degree classification — is often overridden by the imperative of ‘doing being a student’ — as an average and/or indifferent student who does not stand out. In this article, however, it is not the university tutorial but a slightly different and hitherto unexplored site of interaction that is foregrounded: the university library textbook. As with tutorials, the margins of library textbooks are spaces within which individually accomplished research becomes publicly observable — in the former as group work, and in the latter as student marginalia. Drawing on discourse analytic concepts such as ‘footing’ and ‘stake’ this article seeks to understand what student marginalia can tell us about the ways in which the tension between ‘doing education’ and ‘doing being a student’ is managed and negotiated in sites other than the university tutorial.

Student Life; Student Identity; Student Experience: Ethnomethodological Methods for Pedagogical Matters

Within psychology and, more broadly, the social sciences, the teaching of qualitative methods has become a common and required component of research methods training. Textbooks and journals that support such training are increasingly dominated by various forms of individual and (focus) group interviews as methods of data collection, whilst constructionist forms of discursive psychology, particularly those influenced by conversation analysis (CA) and ethnomethodology (EM), seem to be declining. This article aims to tilt the balance in qualitative methods teaching back towards these methods, showing that and how they are uniquely able to respecify and challenge some of traditional psychologys key assumptions about ‘experience’ and ‘identity’. To do so, EM/CA methods are shown in use. Drawing upon five separate data corpora, findings from previous and ongoing research into, broadly, student identity and the ‘student experience’ of university education are presented. Rather than attempting to recover ‘identity’ and ‘experience’ from interviewee talk, the article shows how it is possible to capture it as it emerges in and as the practice of ‘doing-being-a-student-amongst-other-students’. Reflecting on these findings, the conclusion suggests that EM/CA methods should (be encouraged to) figure far more prominently in the teaching of qualitative methods in psychology.

Complicating the sexualization thesis: The media, gender and ‘sci-candy’

General suggestions about the ‘sexualization of culture’ pay too little attention to the ways in which gender shapes the media’s representation of men and women as sexy men and women. As a result, claims to the effect that ‘we are all objectified now’ (i.e. that idealized–sexualized representational strategies are no longer limited to women’s bodies) have proliferated in recent years. In this article, however, it is argued that such claims result from too generic and undifferentiated an understanding of ‘sexualization’. Rather than thinking in terms of ‘the’ process of sexualization, this article seeks to foreground ‘a’ diverse array of practices that tend to coalesce under the heading ‘sexualization’. To do so, it performs a critical discourse analysis on a corpus of national UK newspaper articles in which both a male and a female celebrity scientist are profiled. A discussion of the referential strategies, transitivity choices and strategies of fragmentation and focalization on display in those articles leads not to the claim that ‘we are all objectified now’, but, rather, to the suggestion that the plural pronoun ‘we’ conceals and maintains a definite gender asymmetry.

Prospective and Retrospective Categorisation Category Proffers and Inferences in Social Interaction and Rolling News Media

In this chapter, we have attempted to do three things. First, we have illustrated an approach to Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA) that focuses on sequential and categorial analysis and shows the way categories, and the resourcefulness of their inference-rich quality, can be used prospectively and retrospectively to proffer and solidify on-going accounts, states of affairs, event descriptions, and ‘fact’. In addition to the analysis of different kinds of spoken and written interaction, we have also shown how the movement between description and categorisation functions to construct, constrain and produce accounts of ‘what is happening’ and ‘what happened’ in news reporting. Second, we have tried to show Sacks’s machinery of membership categorisation in practice. While one reads many descriptions of the terms of MCA, including the notions of ‘inference-rich’ and so on, these terms can seem complex and can also be used to justify the kinds of ‘wild and promiscuous’ analysis that Schegloff has criticised MCA for conducting. In contrast, we have shown how the inference-rich nature of categories is built into people’s categorial practices. As noted earlier, it is not just that categories are, in theory and before empirical observation, ‘inference rich’, but that we can see that, and how, people treat categories as carrying inferential resources, in the design of their turns in which categorial formulations appear (Stokoe, 2012b). In other words, the inference-rich nature of categories is observable from the endogenous orientations of participants and is a resource for constructing accounts that can be reconstructed, contested, provisional, deniable – on their way to becoming solid, factual and beyond construction. Third, we have shown how one can build MCA studies of the identification of practices from different sorts of large datasets. As Stokoe (2012b) has argued elsewhere, for MCA to survive as a method, in any way distinct from the more dominant conversation analysis, or as adding something to the analysis of social interaction, studies of practices that can be transferred across settings are required. Not only does such an approach provide an empirical base for other researchers, in the same way that CA has done, but it provides for the possibility of applying research findings to create impact for users and practitioners (Stokoe, 2013). Stokoe (2012b) has described a number of principles and steps for beginning and proceeding with a categorisation study, whether they start with an interest in a particular category in mind (e.g., ‘nutter’) or categorial phrase (e.g., ‘it’s human to get angry’; ‘speaking as a parent’), or with a more inductive ‘noticing’ of a set of spoken or written interactional materials. The key is to collect data across different sorts of settings; including both interactional and textual materials. Data collection may be purposive (e.g. gathering together instances of particular categories in use because of an a priori interest in that category) or unmotivated (e.g. noticing a category’s use and pursuing it within and across multiple discourse sites). Once collected and organised, analysis should look for evidence that, and how, recipients orient to categories, devices or inferences for the [Page 70]interactional consequences of a category’s use; for co-occurring component features of categorial formulations; and for the way participants within and between turns build and resist categorisations. In this way, a ‘categorial systematics’ approach to MCA works with collections of instances of possible categorial phenomena gathered from different discourse contexts, with the aim of uncovering the systematic centrality of categories and categorial practices to action.

The monad and the nomad: medical microbiology and the politics and possibilities of the mobile microbe

This paper is about the ontological politics and possibilities of the mobile microbe. It seeks to foreground a link that exists between current understandings of the mobile microbe and the conditions of possibility structuring the production of such a microbe in the medical microbiological sciences. When the microbial world is brought into the field of medical perception, it is a monadic microbe, isolated and alone, that appears. But why is this? Because out there, in the microbial world, things travel alone? Working through a case study of the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak, this paper suggests not. That SARS was caused by one viral agent, a coronavirus (CoV), is now microbiological fact. But the argument here is that this fact is an effect; that various medical microbiological practices and interventions, whilst establishing the visibility of this monadic human coronavirus, were serving, at the same time, to suppress any possibility of a very different, and differently mobile, human coronavirus becoming similarly visible. And that is where the politics comes in. For if politics, the realm of the political, can be taken to arise in situations where various possibilities exist but not all possibilities can be chosen, then it follows that there is a politics bound up with the practical production of the mobile microbe in the medical microbiological sciences.

Discourse analysis and sexualisation: a study of scientists in the media

The relatively novel phenomenon of ‘sexualisation’ has, over recent years, received attention as a matter of concern within scholarly and popular texts. And yet those studies have paid little attention to the ways in which ‘gender’ inflects the medias representations of ‘sexy’ men and women. As a result, claims that sexualised representational strategies now affect men just as much as they did, and still do, affect women have proliferated. The objective of this article, however, is to demonstrate that and how a particular form of discourse analysis allows for a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which gender cuts across, and inflects, processes of sexualisation. This argument is developed through a case study of representations of two differently gendered scientists across a corpus of national UK newspaper articles. A discussion of the naming, focalisation and transitivity choices on display therein leads not to the conclusion that sexualisation is a singular phenomenon, but rather, to the suggestion that it is indexical, with sense and reference afforded by occasioned use, and occasioned use inflected by definite gender asymmetries.

To rid oneself of the uninvited guest: Robert Koch, Sergei Winogradsky and competing styles of practice in medical microbiology.

Abstract Does an infectious disease have one, singular pathogenic cause, or many interacting causes? In the discipline of medical microbiology, there is no definitive theoretical answer to this question: there, the conditions of aetiological possibility exist in a curious tension. Ever since the late 19th century, the “germ theory of disease”–“one disease, one cause”– has co‐existed with a much less well known theory of “multifactorality”–“one disease, many interacting causes”. And yet, in practice, it is always a singular and never a multifactorial aetiology that emerges once the pathogenic world is brought into the field of medical perception. This paper seeks to understand why. Performing a detailed, genealogical reading of the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak, it foregrounds a set of links that connect the practical diagnostic tools at work within contemporary, 21st century laboratories to the philosophical assumptions at work within late‐19th century understandings of the “germ theory of disease”.