Geoffrey Raymond

The epistemics of social relations: Owning grandchildren

Scholars have long understood that linkages between the identities of actors and the design of their actions in interaction constitute one of the central mechanisms by which social patterns are produced. Although a range of empirical approaches has successfully grounded claims regarding the significance of various forms or types of identity (gender, sex, race, ethnicity, class, familial status, etc.) in almost every form of social organization, these analyses have mostly focused on aggregated populations, aggregated interactions, or historical periods that have been (in different ways) abstracted from the particulars of singular episodes of interaction. By contrast, establishing the mechanisms by which a specific identity is made relevant and consequential in any particular episode of interaction has remained much more elusive. This article develops a range of general analytic resources for explicating how participants in an interaction can make relevant and consequential specific identities in particular courses of action. It then illustrates the use of these analytic resources by examining a phone call between two friends, one of whom relevantly embodies “grandparent” as an identity. The conclusion offers observations prompted by this analysis regarding basic contingencies that characterize self-other relationships, and the role of generic grammatical resources in establishing specific identities and intimate relationships.

Conversational Repair and Human Understanding

Humans are imperfect, and problems of speaking, hearing and understanding are pervasive in ordinary interaction. This book examines the way we “repair” and correct such problems as they arise in conversation and other forms of human interaction. The first book-length study of this topic, it brings together a team of scholars from the fields of anthropology, communication, linguistics and sociology to explore how speakers address problems in their own talk and that of others, and how the practices of repair are interwoven with non-verbal aspects of communication such as gaze and gesture, across a variety of languages. Specific chapters highlight intersections between repair and epistemics, repair and turn construction, and repair and action formation. Aimed at researchers and students in sociolinguistics, speech communication, conversation analysis and the broader human and social sciences to which they contribute – anthropology, linguistics, psychology and sociology – this book provides a state-of-the-art review of conversational repair, while charting new directions for future study.

Rights and Responsibilities in Calls for Help: The Case of the Mountain Glade Fire

In this article, we examine a corpus of calls occasioned by a single event, the 1990 Mountain Glade Fire in a coastal community on the Pacific Coast, to consider (a) how the distribution of rights and responsibilities are displayed in the talk of callers to the emergency phone line (9-1-1) and call takers (CTs) who receive them and (b) how these are linked to the directionality and action trajectory of such calls. In the case of the Mountain Glade corpus, the organization of emergency calls and the presuppositions and distribution of rights and responsibilities that it institutionalizes was incrementally but systematically altered over the course of multiple calls. In describing the problems encountered by callers and CTs in managing these calls, we note that even in departing from the institutionalized activities emergency telecommunications were designed to facilitate, callers and CTs were not free to disregard its constraints. These observations suggest that the ways in which the organized practice through which an institution is routinely produced and embodied in interaction can be a source of institutional resistance to change. In conclusion, we consider how other events with community wide impact—whether actual or merely potential—may have similar consequences for emergency services such as 9-1-1.

Which epistemics? Whose conversation analysis?:

In a Special Issue of Discourse Studies (2016) titled ‘The Epistemics of Epistemics’, contributing authors criticize Heritage’s research on participants’ orientations to, and management of, the distribution of (rights to) knowledge in conversation. These authors claim (a) that the analytic framework Heritage (and I) developed for analyzing epistemic phenomena privileges the analysts’ over the participants’ point of view, and (b) rejects standard methods of conversation analysis (CA); (c) that (a) and (b) are adopted in developing and defending the use of abstract analytic schemata that offer little purchase on either the specific actions speakers accomplish or the understanding others display of them; and (d) that, by virtue of these deficiencies, claims about the systematic relevance of epistemic phenomena for talk-in-interaction breach long-standing norms regarding the relationship between data analysis and generalizing claims. Using a collection of excerpts bearing on the import of epistemics for action formation and action sequencing, I demonstrate that these claims are patently false and suggest that they reflect the authors’ effort to recast CA as a kind of fundamentalist enterprise. I then consider excerpts from a second collection (of occasions involving the pursuit of one party’s ‘suspicions’ about another’s alleged misdeeds) to illustrate how the form of social organization described by Heritage can be used to explicate other phenomena that depend on systematic alterations to its basic features. In conclusion, I suggest that CA’s success in enhancing our grasp of the organization of talk-in-interaction derives from its unique commitment to both generalization and context specificity, collections and single cases, findings plus a continual openness to the ‘something more’ that each particular case can provide.

Conversational Repair and Human Understanding: Conversational repair and human understanding: an introduction

Any serious effort to contend with the real time production and understanding of human actions in everyday interaction can scarcely avoid noting that they are characterized by the routine occurrence of troubles, “hitches,” misunderstandings, “errors,” and other infelicities. Indeed, these phenomena – and participants’ efforts to contend with them – are so ubiquitous that very few approaches within the human and social sciences have avoided commenting on, or contending with them, in some way. In many approaches within the social sciences, researchers looked past these phenomena altogether, treating them as epiphenomenal to the proper object of study (however that is defined) or as matters to be reduced, remedied, or otherwise overcome. More recently approaches from various disciplines have recognized their import in different ways, thereby raising the more nettlesome issue of just what is to be done with them or what can be done with them. Here, approaches vary considerably: some have simply incorporated these phenomena into the larger domain of human conduct being investigated (whether it is the psyche in psychology, ritual and culture in anthropology, or social structure in sociology), conflating a range of matters that are more profitably treated as distinct from one another. In many such cases, however, scholars interested in learning about the mind, self, language, society, and culture have treated these phenomena as special – as even more informative than other types of conduct. For these approaches the ubiquity of such troubles (and their management) makes them especially attractive since their occurrence in the stream of conduct impacts on virtually every aspect of it. The perception that such troubles are special derives from a belief that they entail (or reveal) an authenticity obscured by more “practiced” behavior, or that they offer a window into the mind, or the depths of personhood, identity, and social relations, otherwise obscured by socialization, experience, or politeness. In these respects we might say that such approaches “exploit” such troubles insofar as they are not interested in them as such, but for how the apparently “unpracticed” character of such hitches, or the apparently revealing character of errors and the like, has

Closing matters: Alignment and misalignment in sequence and call closings in institutional interaction:

Using data from American emergency call centers, this article focuses on the coordination, and mutual relevance, of participants’ effort to manage two forms of unit completion – sequence closing (as a method for ‘project’ completion) and concluding the occasion in which the project was pursued. In doing so, we specify the import of sequence organization as one method for conducting, organizing, and resolving interactional projects participants may be said to pursue, and describe (1) a range of possible relations between project completion and occasion closure and (2) the locations from which problems come to be introduced as parties move to resolve projects and close calls. As we show, sequence and occasion closings produced in the service of projects are fateful: they inexorably demand that the participants arrive at some alignment – or make visible their failure to do so – regarding the projects pursued in it, the status of those projects, and thus who, as a consequence, the parties are (or could have been) for another, that is, their ‘identities’. For strangers and familiars both, the management of projects and the manner in which closing is achieved matters.

Situational Factors and Mechanisms in Pathways to Violence INTRODUCTION

Background: A large body of research has produced vast quantities of empirical data on risk factors for violence in a range of countries and community contexts. Despite the unquestionable successes of this research in cataloguing these risk factors, relatively little is known about the situational factors and mechanisms that translate risks for violence into enactments of violence itself. Without stronger explanations of these situational pathways to violence, understandings of violence remain “fuzzy.” This special issue aims to address this important limitation through a focus on the situational dimensions of violence. Key points: Although directly observing violence is often ethically and methodologically challenging, the studies in this special issue demonstrate the value of better understanding the situational contexts that shape the well-documented affective, interactional, and behavioral variables and processes that constitute violent enactments. Examining these processes and factors as they unfold in situ can advance and deepen theoretical and empirical research on general risks for violence. Implications: Situations in which violence is enacted, and the mechanisms through which it is realized, can and should be systematically studied as part of any attempt to enhance the resolution of existing knowledge with respect to violence. Empirical and theoretical research that attempts to get “closer” to violence offers important and innovative insights and opportunities for understanding violence itself, alongside its causes, correlates, and consequences. Investing in the design of robust studies of the situational dimensions of violence is important for advancing the field of violence scholarship and potentially informing policy and intervention practices.

Enabling Human Conduct: Studies of talk-in-interaction in honor of Emanuel A. Schegloff

This book presents a collection of academic papers in honor of Emanuel ‘Manny’ Schegloff, one of the three founders of the field of conversation analysis (CA). On one level, the curation of papers serves nicely to both embody and extend this esteemed scholar’s work by building on and debating the main tenets of his extensive research and contributions to relevant fields. On another level, the volume gives the reader a glimpse of Schegloff the man through an interview and personal anecdotes offered by some of the authors. The book is organized as follows: The first chapter relays some background on Schegloff and the field of CA, and previews the content; then, a two-part interview with Schegloff provides a firsthand account of his work endeavors, interests, and professional experience; next, a set of multilingual empirical studies examines concepts originating in Schegloff’s own research such as sequence-initiation, repair, person reference, practices found in telephone openings and closings, and embodied conduct; finally, two reflective papers by authors from surrounding disciplines assess Schegloff’s contributions to the understanding of human interaction, after which a response to one of the reflections by Schegloff himself gives the honoree the last word.

Conversational Repair and Human Understanding: Contents

Humans are imperfect, and problems of speaking, hearing and understanding are pervasive in ordinary interaction. This book examines the way we “repair” and correct such problems as they arise in conversation and other forms of human interaction. The first book-length study of this topic, it brings together a team of scholars from the fields of anthropology, communication, linguistics and sociology to explore how speakers address problems in their own talk and that of others, and how the practices of repair are interwoven with non-verbal aspects of communication such as gaze and gesture, across a variety of languages. Specific chapters highlight intersections between repair and epistemics, repair and turn construction, and repair and action formation. Aimed at researchers and students in sociolinguistics, speech communication, conversation analysis and the broader human and social sciences to which they contribute – anthropology, linguistics, psychology and sociology – this book provides a state-of-the-art review of conversational repair, while charting new directions for future study.

Conversational Repair and Human Understanding: Frontmatter

Humans are imperfect, and problems of speaking, hearing and understanding are pervasive in ordinary interaction. This book examines the way we “repair” and correct such problems as they arise in conversation and other forms of human interaction. The first book-length study of this topic, it brings together a team of scholars from the fields of anthropology, communication, linguistics and sociology to explore how speakers address problems in their own talk and that of others, and how the practices of repair are interwoven with non-verbal aspects of communication such as gaze and gesture, across a variety of languages. Specific chapters highlight intersections between repair and epistemics, repair and turn construction, and repair and action formation. Aimed at researchers and students in sociolinguistics, speech communication, conversation analysis and the broader human and social sciences to which they contribute – anthropology, linguistics, psychology and sociology – this book provides a state-of-the-art review of conversational repair, while charting new directions for future study.