University of Wisconsin-Madison Cardiff, UK
Workshop
CA and Other Conceptions of Context: Borders and Bridges
This workshop will highlight aspects of contributors’ on-going work bearing upon different conceptions of context. We will raise fundamental questions of how methods, analytic principles and findings of CA can, or cannot, be brought to bear on other understandings of context. And we will explore whether and how connections can be made between CA and other approaches.
Drawing from our current research, to be circulated in advance of the Symposium, our aim is to engage in respectful dialogue and to stimulate discussion of these issues among those in attendance at the workshop.
A persistent challenge for sociolinguists involves connecting fine-grained and broader approaches to context and social organization. Conversation analysis is centrally concerned with how participants display orientations to local context on a turn by turn basis. Yet there continues to be a perceived problematic around how to approach the wider social contexts that have traditionally been the focus of sociolinguistics: including the ‘Big 4’ variables of gender, age, ethnicity and class (Duranti and Goodwin 1992, Schegloff 1997, Wetherell 1998, Arminen 2000, Blommaert 2005). This is also manifested in the particulars of any scholar’s position with regard to a focus of inquiry and to the individuals under scrutiny (Iedema 2003). Our workshop will support an open examination of current research issues related to the study of social contexts as oriented to (and affected by) realtime, interactional practices, and as related to broader conceptions of context. One challenge involves grounds for establishing analytic categories: how is it feasible to arrive at social interactional categorizations of membership and of practices that are both warranted in terms of local interaction, and connected to social problems more broadly understood?
Workshop Foci
We will consider issues in the following areas:
• Applications: can CA be made relevant to broader issues of culture and community, in particular exploring the links between talk and communities of practice?
• Compatibility: what are the boundaries between the approaches of conversation analysis as an account of talk in interaction, and the analysis of discourse as a social practice?
• Scope of relevance: CA focuses on the relevance of members’ categories in talk; is there anything to be done with the relevance of analysts’ categories or participants self-reported senses of social categories?
• Diachronic analyses: is there any contribution to be made to language change, and
patterns in the organization and management of interactions from a socio-historical
perspective?
• Speaker roles and institutional identities: how do we deal with issues of control and the negotiation of access to discursive/ interactional space?
• Ethnography, ethnomethodology and CA: What are the relationships between these
approaches in our current research?
Workshop Participants and General Positions
Workshop participants represent diverse fields. Some are working within CA and are
already interested in exploring the relationship between context in CA and in other theories and methods. Others are working within the field of discourse analysis and are interested in an exchange of questions, challenges and potential developments in this area. Many are convinced that we should ground our analyses in the observable orientations of participants (Schegloff 1991 and elsewhere). We take seriously the possibility that using a priori social categories and descriptions of social problems can lead to “losing analytic grip on the phenomena that participants themselves regard as prominent” (Maynard, 2002:72-3). Yet many of us who use CA and other methods also take seriously the fact that our analyses “arise from and serve a specific set of situated interests and concerns”, and that the “distinction made between ‘technical analysis’ and ‘interpretive description’ is not absolute” (Iedema 2003: 83). We are all committed to scholarly exchange at the borders of approaches to understanding discourse and social interaction.
Organisation
We intend the workshop structure to enable maximum time for general exchange of ideas, with formal presentations concentrated on highlighting panelists’ current research in relation to the workshop theme. The organizers will offer an introductory orientation to the aims of the workshop. Panelists will then discuss their current research and how it bears on “context” as understood in CA and in other compelling theories and methods. Panelists will have shared their work-in-progress with one another prior to the workshop, and our brief (10-minute) presentations will include references to issues raised in other panelists’ research. Thus, the structure of presentations will be a form of dialogue. We will each provide data in the form of video, audio and/or transcripts, and these data can serve as resources for the open discussion to follow presentations.
After the brief presentations, and ideally placed at the beginning of the second 90-minute block of time scheduled for the workshop, the discussant will reflect on issues raised in the panelists’ presentations. We will reserve at least 30 minutes for participation by all those attending the workshop. Depending upon attendance, we may split into smaller groups for this exchange, with the principal discussant, workshop organizers, and invited panelists moderating.