Kevin A. Whitehead

“Categorizing the Categorizer”: The Management of Racial Common Sense in Interaction

In this paper, I consider one mechanism by which racial categories, racial “common sense,” and thus the social organization of race itself, are reproduced in interaction. I approach these issues by using an ethnomethodological, conversation analytic approach to analyze a range of practices employed by participants of a “race-training” workshop. These practices manage the normative accountability involved in referring to the racial categories of others when describing their actions, and thus in using racial common sense in talk-in-interaction. This accountability arises in part because a speakers use of a racial category to explain someone elses actions may provide a warranted basis for recipients to treat the speakers own racial category as relevant for understanding and assessing the speakers actions. I describe three main ways in which speakers can manage this accountability, namely generalizing race, localizing race, and alluding to race. My analysis shows that, even in attempting to resist racial common sense in accounting for their own actions and those of others, speakers orient to race as a normative framework according to which individuals will produce their own actions and interpret those of others, and thus reproduce it as relevant for understanding social action. This research contributes to advancing knowledge in the fields of ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, racial studies, and categorical inequality.

When are persons ‘white’?: on some practical asymmetries of racial reference in talk-in-interaction

This report contributes to the study of racial discourse by examining some of the practical asymmetries that obtain between different categories of racial membership as they are actually employed in talk-in-interaction. In particular, we identify three interactional environments in which the ordinarily ‘invisible’ racial category ‘white’ is employed overtly, and we describe the mechanisms through which this can occur. These mechanisms include: (1) ‘white’ surfacing ‘just in time’ as an account for action; (2) the occurrence of referential ambiguities with respect to race occasioning repairs that result in overt references to ‘white’; and (3) the operation of a recipient design consideration that we term ‘descriptive adequacy’. These findings demonstrate some ways in which the mundane invisibility of whiteness — or indeed, other locally invisible racial categories — can be both exposed and disturbed as a result of ordinary interactional processes, revealing the importance of the generic machinery of talk-in-interaction for understanding both the reproduction of and resistance to the racial dynamics of everyday life.

Racial categories as resources and constraints in everyday interactions: Implications for racialism and non-racialism in post-apartheid South Africa

Abstract The anti-apartheid struggle was characterized by tensions between the opposing ideologies of non-racialism (exemplified by the Freedom Charter) and racialism (exemplified by Black Consciousness). These tensions have remained prevalent in public policies and discourse, and in the writings of social scientists, in the post-apartheid period. In this paper I examine some ways in which issues of whether, when, and how race matters become visible in everyday interactions in South Africa, and what insights this may offer with respect to these ongoing tensions. Specifically, I employ an ethnomethodological, conversation analytic approach to examine some ways in which racial categories are treated as resources for action or constraints on action. I conclude by arguing that these findings point to the contingent and situational operation of a practical non-racialism (as well as practical racialism), and thus to the achievement of these ideologies in the moment-by-moment unfolding of interactions.

Everyday Antiracism in Action: Preference Organization in Responses to Racism

This article examines features of preference organization in disaffiliative responses to possibly racist actions, drawing on a corpus of more than 120 hours of recorded interactions from South African radio call-in shows. My analysis demonstrates how features of dispreferred turn shapes provide producers of possibly racist actions with opportunities to withdraw or back down from them. In cases where these opportunities are not taken up, subsequent responses may progressively include more features of preferred turn shapes. Responses may also include features of preferred turn shapes from the outset, thereby treating the prior actions as unequivocally racist. Responses that treat prior actions as such, however, also recurrently exhibit features of dispreference, thereby displaying speakers’ orientations to “cross-cutting preferences” in responding to racism, with disaffiliative responses being “dispreferred” actions in some senses, but “preferred” actions in others. I conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for everyday antiracism in interactional settings.

An Ethnomethodological, Conversation Analytic Approach to Investigating Race in South Africa

ABSTRACT This primarily methodologically oriented article describes how an ethnomethodologically informed, conversation analytic approach can be used to investigate the ways in which racial categories become relevant in ordinary interactions in post-apartheid South Africa. Drawing on descriptions of the data and procedures employed in a broader study of the continuing centrality of race for everyday life in South Africa, the article explicates the central features and assumptions of the approach and its utility in studying the operation of social category systems (or ‘membership categorization devices’) such as race in recorded interactions. This methodological discussion is illustrated by presenting some excerpts from the data on which the broader study was based, thereby demonstrating some of the analytic payoffs of employing this type of approach. Specifically, I briefly describe a generalising practice through which speakers can treat race as relevant, or potentially relevant, for what they are doing. This empirical illustration demonstrates the utility of this approach in exploring how racial categories (and other social categories) may surface in interactions in which they have not been pre-specified as a topic of interest. The approach I describe thus offers insights into the deployment, and hence reproduction, of common-sense knowledge associated with social categories and racial categories in particular, in ordinary episodes of interaction.

Producing and Responding to -isms in Interaction

We provide an introduction to some of the conceptual and methodological debates with respect to the focus of this special issue on -isms (a term used to refer to phenomena, e.g., racism, sexism, and heterosexism), focusing on the definition and identification of these phenomena. We offer an overview of the different approaches to research in this regard and conclude by summarizing the contributions to this special issue.

The anatomy of ‘race trouble’ in online interactions

South Africa has a long history of race-related conflicts in a variety of settings, but the use of the concept ‘racism’ to analyse such conflicts is characterized by theoretical and methodological difficulties. In this article, we apply the alternative ‘race trouble’ framework developed by Durrheim, Mtose, and Brown (2011) to the examination of racialized conflicts in online newspaper forums. We analyse the conflicts using an approach informed by conversation analytic and discursive psychological techniques, focusing in particular on the emergence and use of race and racism as interactional resources. Our findings reveal some mechanisms through which the continuing salience of race in South Africa comes to be reproduced in everyday interactions, thereby suggesting reasons why race continues to garner social and cultural importance. Disagreements over the nature of racism were also recurrent in the exchanges that we examined, demonstrating the contested and shifting meanings of this concept in everyday interactions.

Producing, ratifying, and resisting support in an online support forum.

Previous research examining online support forums has tended to focus either on evaluating their effectiveness while paying limited or no attention to the details of the interactions therein, or on features of their social organization, without regard to their effectiveness in fulfilling their stated purposes. In this article, we consider both the interactional features of a forum and participants’ treatment thereof as being effective (or otherwise), thus adopting a view of effectiveness grounded in participants’ proximate orientations and actions. Our analysis demonstrates some ways in which participants produce ratified displays of empathy in response to troubles expressed by another, as well as considering some designedly supportive actions that are treated by their recipients as unsupportive or antagonistic. Our findings indicate some structural features of such forums that facilitate the production of support, while suggesting that claims of knowledge tend to be treated as a basis of resistance to ostensibly supportive actions.

Omni-relevant and contingent membership categories in research interview and focus group openings:

Research based on interviews and focus groups has been characterized by a shift toward treating them as objects of inquiry in their own right, rather than simply as data collection instruments for the purposes of providing insights into other phenomena of interest. In this article, we contribute to research in this area by examining phenomena at the intersection of openings of interactions and membership categorization, specifically in the context of interviews and focus group interactions. We do so by examining a set of recorded interview and focus group interactions, considering how categories belonging to different types of membership categorization devices (omni-relevant, contingently omni-relevant, and contingent) are treated as relevant and procedurally consequential, observably shaping participants’ conduct in the openings of the interactions. Our findings demonstrate some ways in which these different types of membership categories surface in the moment-by-moment unfolding of these parts of the interactions.

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.