Rahul Sambaraju

“Just an Excuse People Are Just Using These Days”: Attending to and Managing Interactional Concerns in Talk on Exclusion of Immigrants

In line with discursive work on the role of constructions of minority groups in social exclusion, we offer an examination of talk on immigrants and its links with employment of British residents, in the U.K. Parliament and interview talk with British residents looking for work, in the context of a financial crisis (2007-2009). Discursive analysis of data shows that parliamentarians treat immigration as problematic for British residents’ employment, whereas interviewees’ responses reject or minimally accept this, while displaying sensitivity to the status of this as a prevalent complaint about immigration. Parliamentarians do so to warrant and challenge or manage challenges to Government’s policies, whereas interviewees do so to manage being seen as discriminatory and work-shy. These findings show that constructions of immigration and its links with employment in the context of the financial crisis, and their use in warrants for exclusion are offered in ways to attend to the situated institutional and interactional relevancies in play for interlocutors.

‘Her choice of course’: Negotiating legitimacy of ‘choice’ in abortion rights deliberations during the ‘Repeal the Eighth’ movement in Ireland:

Discourses of ‘choice’ are routinely involved in sexual and reproductive rights’ advocacy. In this article, we offer a discursive psychological examination of how ‘choice’ is oriented to, in online deliberations on the ongoing movement for abortion rights in Ireland. Comment posters treated ‘choice’ as involving outcomes of and motives for choosing, in negotiating legitimacy of women’s rights to choose. These accompanied alternative versions of women, either as independent or as intimately bound up with pregnancy/motherhood, which were flexibly used in negotiation legitimacy of women’s rights to ‘choice’ in abortion practices. Choice advocacy is then situated in particular discursive practices.