emcawiki - User contributions [en]

Conferences

2026-10-08T08:36:01Z

JakubMlynar:

This page presents ongoing call for proposals and upcoming conferences, workshops etc. in EMCA. If you have one you would like listed, please [mailto:admins@emcawiki.net email the admins]!
------
== Upcoming Conferences / Symposia / Workshop ==
{{#ask:[[Category:Announcements]][[AnnType::Conference||Symposium||Workshop]]
[[AnnTo::>{{CURRENTYEAR}}-{{CURRENTMONTH}}-{{CURRENTDAY}}]]
|?#
|?AnnType
|?AnnFrom
|?AnnTo
|format=ul
|limit=100
|sort=AnnTo
|order=ascending
|headers=hide
|searchlabel=
|sep=,
|template=ConfList
|default=There are no active Conferences listed at the moment
}}
{{#ask:[[Category:Announcements]][[AnnType::Conference||Symposium||Workshop]]
[[AnnTo::>{{CURRENTYEAR}}-{{CURRENTMONTH}}-{{CURRENTDAY}}]]
|?#
|?AnnShortSummary
|format=feed
|limit=30
|sort=AnnTo
|order=descending
|title=EMCAwiki Conference Announcements
|description=Latest Conference announcements from EMCAwiki.net
|searchlabel=Conferences RSS
}}
[[File:Ical.gif|link=http://bit.ly/emcaconfical]] | [[File:Gcal.gif|link=http://www.google.com/calendar/render?cid=http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2Femcaconfical]]

== Active CFPs ==
{{#ask:[[Category:Announcements]]
[[AnnAbstractDue::>{{CURRENTYEAR}}-{{CURRENTMONTH}}-{{CURRENTDAY}}]]||[[AnnSubmissionDeadline::>{{CURRENTYEAR}}-{{CURRENTMONTH}}-{{CURRENTDAY}}]]
|?#
|?AnnType
|?AnnFrom
|?AnnTo
|?AnnAbstractDue
|?AnnSubmissionDeadline
|format=ul
|limit=300
|sort=AnnAbstractDue
|order=ascending
|headers=hide
|searchlabel=
|sep=,
|template=CfpList
|default=There are no active CFPs at the moment
}}
{{#ask:[[Category:Announcements]]
[[AnnAbstractDue::<{{CURRENTYEAR}}-{{CURRENTMONTH}}-{{CURRENTDAY}}]]||[[AnnSubmissionDeadline::>{{CURRENTYEAR}}-{{CURRENTMONTH}}-{{CURRENTDAY}}]]
|?#
|?AnnShortSummary
|format=feed
|limit=300
|sort=AnnTo
|order=descending
|title=EMCAwiki CFP Announcements
|description=Latest CFP announcements from EMCAwiki.net
|searchlabel=CFP RSS feed
}}
[[File:Ical.gif|link=http://bit.ly/emcawikicfpical2]] | [[File:Gcal.gif|link=http://www.google.com/calendar/render?cid=http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2Femcawikicfpical2]]

Conferences

2026-10-08T08:35:51Z

JakubMlynar: to force cache update

This page presents ongoing call for proposals and upcoming conferences, workshops etc. in EM/CA. If you have one you would like listed, please [mailto:admins@emcawiki.net email the admins]!
------
== Upcoming Conferences / Symposia / Workshop ==
{{#ask:[[Category:Announcements]][[AnnType::Conference||Symposium||Workshop]]
[[AnnTo::>{{CURRENTYEAR}}-{{CURRENTMONTH}}-{{CURRENTDAY}}]]
|?#
|?AnnType
|?AnnFrom
|?AnnTo
|format=ul
|limit=100
|sort=AnnTo
|order=ascending
|headers=hide
|searchlabel=
|sep=,
|template=ConfList
|default=There are no active Conferences listed at the moment
}}
{{#ask:[[Category:Announcements]][[AnnType::Conference||Symposium||Workshop]]
[[AnnTo::>{{CURRENTYEAR}}-{{CURRENTMONTH}}-{{CURRENTDAY}}]]
|?#
|?AnnShortSummary
|format=feed
|limit=30
|sort=AnnTo
|order=descending
|title=EMCAwiki Conference Announcements
|description=Latest Conference announcements from EMCAwiki.net
|searchlabel=Conferences RSS
}}
[[File:Ical.gif|link=http://bit.ly/emcaconfical]] | [[File:Gcal.gif|link=http://www.google.com/calendar/render?cid=http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2Femcaconfical]]

== Active CFPs ==
{{#ask:[[Category:Announcements]]
[[AnnAbstractDue::>{{CURRENTYEAR}}-{{CURRENTMONTH}}-{{CURRENTDAY}}]]||[[AnnSubmissionDeadline::>{{CURRENTYEAR}}-{{CURRENTMONTH}}-{{CURRENTDAY}}]]
|?#
|?AnnType
|?AnnFrom
|?AnnTo
|?AnnAbstractDue
|?AnnSubmissionDeadline
|format=ul
|limit=300
|sort=AnnAbstractDue
|order=ascending
|headers=hide
|searchlabel=
|sep=,
|template=CfpList
|default=There are no active CFPs at the moment
}}
{{#ask:[[Category:Announcements]]
[[AnnAbstractDue::<{{CURRENTYEAR}}-{{CURRENTMONTH}}-{{CURRENTDAY}}]]||[[AnnSubmissionDeadline::>{{CURRENTYEAR}}-{{CURRENTMONTH}}-{{CURRENTDAY}}]]
|?#
|?AnnShortSummary
|format=feed
|limit=300
|sort=AnnTo
|order=descending
|title=EMCAwiki CFP Announcements
|description=Latest CFP announcements from EMCAwiki.net
|searchlabel=CFP RSS feed
}}
[[File:Ical.gif|link=http://bit.ly/emcawikicfpical2]] | [[File:Gcal.gif|link=http://www.google.com/calendar/render?cid=http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2Femcawikicfpical2]]

Category:Term

2026-10-07T06:27:44Z

JakubMlynar:

'''''[[Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA and IL|The Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics]]''''' (edited by '''[https://www.ids-mannheim.de/en/prag/personal/gubina/ Alexandra Gubina]''', '''[https://sites.google.com/site/elliotthoey/?pli=1&authuser=3 Elliott M. Hoey]''', and '''[http://www.chasewesleyraymond.com Chase Wesley Raymond]''') is an online resource for students and scholars of CA/IL, publicly available on the EMCA Wiki.

Here is an alphabetical listing of all the terms included so far:

Category:Term

2026-10-07T06:27:33Z

JakubMlynar: to force cache update

'''''[[Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA and IL|The Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics]]''''' (edited by '''[https://www.ids-mannheim.de/en/prag/personal/gubina/ Alexandra Gubina]''', '''[https://sites.google.com/site/elliotthoey/?pli=1&authuser=3 Elliott M. Hoey]''', and '''[http://www.chasewesleyraymond.com Chase Wesley Raymond]''') is an on-line resource for students and scholars of CA/IL, publicly available on the EMCA Wiki.

Here is an alphabetical listing of all the terms included so far:

Main Page

2026-10-07T06:25:56Z

JakubMlynar:

{{Div col|rules=no}}
Welcome to the EM/CA wiki
''Send EM/CA [[news]], [[conferences]], [[jobs]] & [[training]] opportunities to [mailto:announce@emcawiki.net announce@emcawiki.net], bibliography entries to [mailto:admins@emcawiki.net admins@emcawiki.net].
 Please send any editorial queries to [mailto:editors@emcawiki.net editors@emcawiki.net]''
 
Follow ISCAupdates on
[[File:Bluesky Logo.svg.png|30px|link=https://bsky.app/profile/iscaupdates.bsky.social]] [https://bsky.app/profile/iscaupdates.bsky.social Bluesky] or
[[File:Mastodon.png|30px|link=https://fediscience.org/@isca]] [https://fediscience.org/@isca Mastodon] for news.
{{Div col end}}
== Recent announcements ==
{{Div col|rules=yes}}

{{#ask:[[Category:Announcements]]
[[AnnTo::>{{CURRENTYEAR}}-{{CURRENTMONTH}}-{{CURRENTDAY}}]]
|?#
|?AnnType
|?AnnSubmissionDeadline
|format=ul
|limit=10
|sort=AnnFrom, AnnSubmissionDeadline
|order=ascending
|headers=hide
|searchlabel=
|sep=,
|template=AnnList
}}
{{#ask:[[Category:Announcements]]
|mainlabel=-
|?AnnShortSummary
|?AnnWebLink
|format=feed
|limit=300
|sort=Modification date
|order=descending
|title=EMCAwiki Announcements
|description=Latest announcements from EMCAwiki.net
}}
| Check the [[News]] page for more feeds.

 
=== Recent publications ===
Latest five 2025/2026 additions to the [[EMCA bibliography database]]:

{{#ask:[[Category:BibEntry]]
[[BibYear::>2025]]
|?#
|?BibAuthor
|?BibYear
|?BibTitle
|?Modification date
|format=ul
|limit=5
|link=subject
|sort=Modification date
|order=descending
|headers=hide
|searchlabel=
|sep=,
|template=NewsList
}}

{{Div col end}}
----------
<center>Check the '''[[News]]''', '''[[Conferences]]''', '''[[Jobs]]''', '''[[Calendar]]''', and '''[[Training]]''' pages for more</center>
== Resources ==
{{Div col|rules=yes}}
* [[EMCA Researchers]]
* [[Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA and IL]]
* [[EMCA Organizations]]
* [[EMCA Teaching Resources]]
* [[EMCA Learning Resources]]
* [[EMCA Research Resources]]
* [[EMCA Online Discussion]]
* [[EMCA-relevant Media]]

 

 

 
* '''[[EMCA bibliography database]]'''
** [[Basic resources and debates tag | Basic resources and debates]] (start here if you're new)
** [[General EMCA tag | General EMCA]] (everything)
** [[Membership categorization analysis tag | Membership Categorization Analysis]]
** [[Interactional linguistics tag | Interactional Linguistics]]
** [[Discursive psychology tag | Discursive Psychology]]
** [[Related interaction studies tag | Related Interaction Studies]] (Goffman & EMCA fellow travellers)
** [[Medical EMCA tag | Medical EMCA]]
** [[EMCA books database | EMCA books]]
** [[EMCA & Artificial Intelligence | EMCA & Artificial Intelligence]]
**[https://emcawiki.net/Phonetics_of_talk-in-interaction Phonetics of talk-in-interaction]
{{Div col end}}

{{#seo:
|title=EMCA Wiki Home
|titlemode=replace
|keywords=Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis, Goffman, Garfinkel, Sacks, Jefferson, Schegloff, Sociology, Anthropology, Linguistics, Cognitive Science, Applied Linguistics, Research Methodology
|description=EM/CA Wiki offers information on Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis.
}}
__NOEDITSECTION__

Main Page

2026-10-07T06:25:29Z

JakubMlynar:

{{Div col|rules=no}}
Welcome to the EM/CA wiki
''Send EM/CA [[news]], [[conferences]], [[jobs]] & [[training]] opportunities to [mailto:announce@emcawiki.net announce@emcawiki.net], bibliography entries to [mailto:admins@emcawiki.net admins@emcawiki.net].
 Please send any editorial queries to [mailto:editors@emcawiki.net editors@emcawiki.net]''
 
Follow ISCAupdates on
[[File:Bluesky Logo.svg.png|30px|link=https://bsky.app/profile/iscaupdates.bsky.social]] [https://bsky.app/profile/iscaupdates.bsky.social Bluesky] or
[[File:Mastodon.png|30px|link=https://fediscience.org/@isca]] [https://fediscience.org/@isca Mastodon] for news.
{{Div col end}}
== Recent announcements ==
{{Div col|rules=yes}}

{{#ask:[[Category:Announcements]]
[[AnnTo::>{{CURRENTYEAR}}-{{CURRENTMONTH}}-{{CURRENTDAY}}]]
|?#
|?AnnType
|?AnnSubmissionDeadline
|format=ul
|limit=10
|sort=AnnFrom, AnnSubmissionDeadline
|order=ascending
|headers=hide
|searchlabel=
|sep=,
|template=AnnList
}}
{{#ask:[[Category:Announcements]]
|mainlabel=-
|?AnnShortSummary
|?AnnWebLink
|format=feed
|limit=300
|sort=Modification date
|order=descending
|title=EMCAwiki Announcements
|description=Latest announcements from EMCAwiki.net
}}
| Check the [[News]] page for more feeds.

 
== Recent publications ==
Latest five 2025/2026 additions to the [[EMCA bibliography database]]:

{{#ask:[[Category:BibEntry]]
[[BibYear::>2025]]
|?#
|?BibAuthor
|?BibYear
|?BibTitle
|?Modification date
|format=ul
|limit=5
|link=subject
|sort=Modification date
|order=descending
|headers=hide
|searchlabel=
|sep=,
|template=NewsList
}}

{{Div col end}}
----------
<center>Check the '''[[News]]''', '''[[Conferences]]''', '''[[Jobs]]''', '''[[Calendar]]''', and '''[[Training]]''' pages for more</center>
== Resources ==
{{Div col|rules=yes}}
* [[EMCA Researchers]]
* [[Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA and IL]]
* [[EMCA Organizations]]
* [[EMCA Teaching Resources]]
* [[EMCA Learning Resources]]
* [[EMCA Research Resources]]
* [[EMCA Online Discussion]]
* [[EMCA-relevant Media]]

 

 

 
* '''[[EMCA bibliography database]]'''
** [[Basic resources and debates tag | Basic resources and debates]] (start here if you're new)
** [[General EMCA tag | General EMCA]] (everything)
** [[Membership categorization analysis tag | Membership Categorization Analysis]]
** [[Interactional linguistics tag | Interactional Linguistics]]
** [[Discursive psychology tag | Discursive Psychology]]
** [[Related interaction studies tag | Related Interaction Studies]] (Goffman & EMCA fellow travellers)
** [[Medical EMCA tag | Medical EMCA]]
** [[EMCA books database | EMCA books]]
** [[EMCA & Artificial Intelligence | EMCA & Artificial Intelligence]]
**[https://emcawiki.net/Phonetics_of_talk-in-interaction Phonetics of talk-in-interaction]
{{Div col end}}

{{#seo:
|title=EMCA Wiki Home
|titlemode=replace
|keywords=Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis, Goffman, Garfinkel, Sacks, Jefferson, Schegloff, Sociology, Anthropology, Linguistics, Cognitive Science, Applied Linguistics, Research Methodology
|description=EM/CA Wiki offers information on Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis.
}}
__NOEDITSECTION__

Main Page

2026-10-07T06:24:36Z

JakubMlynar:

{{Div col|rules=no}}
Welcome to the EM/CA wiki
''Send EM/CA [[news]], [[conferences]], [[jobs]] & [[training]] opportunities to [mailto:announce@emcawiki.net announce@emcawiki.net], bibliography entries to [mailto:admins@emcawiki.net admins@emcawiki.net].
 Please send any editorial queries to [mailto:editors@emcawiki.net editors@emcawiki.net]''
 
Follow ISCAupdates on
[[File:Bluesky Logo.svg.png|30px|link=https://bsky.app/profile/iscaupdates.bsky.social]] [https://bsky.app/profile/iscaupdates.bsky.social Bluesky] or
[[File:Mastodon.png|30px|link=https://fediscience.org/@isca]] [https://fediscience.org/@isca Mastodon] for news.
{{Div col end}}
=== Recent Announcements ===
{{Div col|rules=yes}}

{{#ask:[[Category:Announcements]]
[[AnnTo::>{{CURRENTYEAR}}-{{CURRENTMONTH}}-{{CURRENTDAY}}]]
|?#
|?AnnType
|?AnnSubmissionDeadline
|format=ul
|limit=10
|sort=AnnFrom, AnnSubmissionDeadline
|order=ascending
|headers=hide
|searchlabel=
|sep=,
|template=AnnList
}}
{{#ask:[[Category:Announcements]]
|mainlabel=-
|?AnnShortSummary
|?AnnWebLink
|format=feed
|limit=300
|sort=Modification date
|order=descending
|title=EMCAwiki Announcements
|description=Latest announcements from EMCAwiki.net
}}
| Check the [[News]] page for more feeds.

 
=== Recent publications ===
Latest five 2025/2026 additions to the [[EMCA bibliography database]]:

{{#ask:[[Category:BibEntry]]
[[BibYear::>2025]]
|?#
|?BibAuthor
|?BibYear
|?BibTitle
|?Modification date
|format=ul
|limit=5
|link=subject
|sort=Modification date
|order=descending
|headers=hide
|searchlabel=
|sep=,
|template=NewsList
}}

{{Div col end}}
----------
<center>Check the '''[[News]]''', '''[[Conferences]]''', '''[[Jobs]]''', '''[[Calendar]]''', and '''[[Training]]''' pages for more</center>
== Resources ==
{{Div col|rules=yes}}
* [[EMCA Researchers]]
* [[Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA and IL]]
* [[EMCA Organizations]]
* [[EMCA Teaching Resources]]
* [[EMCA Learning Resources]]
* [[EMCA Research Resources]]
* [[EMCA Online Discussion]]
* [[EMCA-relevant Media]]

 

 

 
* '''[[EMCA bibliography database]]'''
** [[Basic resources and debates tag | Basic resources and debates]] (start here if you're new)
** [[General EMCA tag | General EMCA]] (everything)
** [[Membership categorization analysis tag | Membership Categorization Analysis]]
** [[Interactional linguistics tag | Interactional Linguistics]]
** [[Discursive psychology tag | Discursive Psychology]]
** [[Related interaction studies tag | Related Interaction Studies]] (Goffman & EMCA fellow travellers)
** [[Medical EMCA tag | Medical EMCA]]
** [[EMCA books database | EMCA books]]
** [[EMCA & Artificial Intelligence | EMCA & Artificial Intelligence]]
**[https://emcawiki.net/Phonetics_of_talk-in-interaction Phonetics of talk-in-interaction]
{{Div col end}}

{{#seo:
|title=EMCA Wiki Home
|titlemode=replace
|keywords=Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis, Goffman, Garfinkel, Sacks, Jefferson, Schegloff, Sociology, Anthropology, Linguistics, Cognitive Science, Applied Linguistics, Research Methodology
|description=EM/CA Wiki offers information on Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis.
}}
__NOEDITSECTION__

Chinn2026

2026-09-25T06:56:22Z

JakubMlynar: Created page with "{{BibEntry |BibType=ARTICLE |Author(s)=Deborah Chinn; Andrea Bruun; Deborah Worrall; Susan Buell; Jessica La |Title=Communicative Dilemmas for Practitioners in Service Encount..."

{{BibEntry
|BibType=ARTICLE
|Author(s)=Deborah Chinn; Andrea Bruun; Deborah Worrall; Susan Buell; Jessica La
|Title=Communicative Dilemmas for Practitioners in Service Encounters With People With Intellectual Disabilities: Insights From a Systematic Review of Conversation Analytic Research
|Tag(s)=EMCA; Service Encounters; Palliative Care; Conversation Analysis
|Key=Chinn2026
|Year=2026
|Language=English
|Journal=Journal of Applied Research in Intellectual Disabilities
|Volume=39
|Number=3
|Pages=e70239
|URL=https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jar.70239
|DOI=10.1111/jar.70239
|Abstract=Background
How do practitioners in service settings respond to communication support needs of people with intellectual disabilities? Conversation Analysis (CA) uses recordings of everyday encounters to understand the challenges practitioners face.

Method
Following specialist guidance on systematically reviewing CA research, we reviewed 65 CA research articles examining staff communication in healthcare, education, social care and the police.

Results
We identified five themes in the synthesis. Two were categories of interactional practices (Questions and Answers; Decision-Making), one examined non-verbal communication (Embodied and Non-Verbal Communication) and two considered contributions of other material and human agents (Communication Aids and Supports; Involvement of Companions). In each theme, we saw examples of competency-enhancing and competency-inhibiting practices.

Conclusions
Practitioners face interactional dilemmas: (1) Orienting to the Person's Self-determination versus Getting the Job Done; (2) Adapting Communication versus Downplaying Difference. Future research should build on this review to develop and evaluate communication training for staff.
}}

Bruun2026b

2026-09-25T06:51:41Z

JakubMlynar: Created page with "{{BibEntry |BibType=ARTICLE |Author(s)=Andrea Bruun; Irene Tuffrey-Wijne; |Title=Exploring communication between people with intellectual disabilities and hospice staff: A con..."

{{BibEntry
|BibType=ARTICLE
|Author(s)=Andrea Bruun; Irene Tuffrey-Wijne;
|Title=Exploring communication between people with intellectual disabilities and hospice staff: A conversation analysis pilot study
|Tag(s)=EMCA; In press; intellectual disability; palliative care; hospices; communication; qualitative research; pilot projects; conversation analysis
|Key=Bruun2026b
|Year=2026
|Language=English
|Journal=Palliative Medicine
|URL=https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/02692163261482008
|DOI=10.1177/02692163261482008
|Abstract=Background:
Communication challenges are key barriers for people with intellectual disabilities in accessing palliative care. However, no studies to date have closely analysed the communication between people with intellectual disabilities and palliative care staff.
Aim:
To assess feasibility and acceptability of conducting a Conversation Analysis study with people with intellectual disabilities and hospice staff.
Design:
A small-scale Conversation Analysis pilot study was conducted. Hospice consultations between people with intellectual disabilities and staff were recorded, transcribed, and analysed.
Setting/Participants:
Three consultations with three people with intellectual disabilities, one paid carer, three hospice nurses, and one welfare officer were video-recorded in a UK hospice between April and May 2025.
Results:
Study procedures were deemed feasible and acceptable, enabling data collection. Most hospice patients with intellectual disabilities lacked capacity to consent and/or received in-home hospice care. This hindered recruitment due to data collection being restricted to hospice premises, and the Research Ethics Committee disallowing people who lack capacity to participate. Pain assessment was identified as a phenomenon of interest. Analysis showed an assessment involving multiple questions aimed at assessing frequency, severity, and management of the person’s pain. The analysis displayed communicative challenges around brief patient answers with limited elaboration and how these were navigated by staff.
Conclusion:
The Conversation Analysis pilot study was deemed feasible and acceptable. Analyses of pain assessments provided in-depth detail of the communication challenges and strategies employed to navigate them. This type of study and evidence can inform future communication and assessment guidelines.
}}

Hyder2026

2026-09-25T06:31:24Z

JakubMlynar: Created page with "{{BibEntry |BibType=ARTICLE |Author(s)=Sanaa Hyder; Sarah Peters; Dawn Edge; Susan Speer; |Title=How is ‘culture’ made relevant in consultations between General Practition..."

{{BibEntry
|BibType=ARTICLE
|Author(s)=Sanaa Hyder; Sarah Peters; Dawn Edge; Susan Speer;
|Title=How is ‘culture’ made relevant in consultations between General Practitioners and ethnic minority patients?: a conversation analysis
|Tag(s)=EMCA; Conversation analysis; Doctor-patient interaction; Culture; Affiliation; Clinical communication; Primary care; Cultural competence; In press
|Key=Hyder2026
|Year=2026
|Language=English
|Journal=BMC Primary Care
|URL=https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12875-026-03527-8
|DOI=10.1186/s12875-026-03527-8
|Abstract=Background
General Practitioners (GPs)—usually the first points of healthcare in the UK—are required to provide ‘whole person care,’ by considering patients’ cultural backgrounds. Previous research suggests that doctors’ interactional behaviour can contribute to ethnic health disparities in clinical consultations, and culturally competent care may be a solution to address these disparities. Although research has shown how people make ‘culture’ or aspects of it (e.g., language, country of ethnic origin, and religion) interactionally visible, we know very little about how culture is signalled or managed in primary care interactions. In this study, we examine what counts as an orientation to culture, how it is made relevant, and its interactional functions in GP consultations with ethnic minority patients. This is considered with the view to better understand what culturally informed communication looks like in real-life clinical settings.

Methods
Data were from two datasets: (i) video/audio recordings of 38 consultations involving ethnic minority patients, their companions, GPs and GP Trainees across 4 UK general practices, and (ii) 16 GP-patient consultations from the publicly broadcasted documentary GPs: Behind Closed Doors, where patients’ ethnic minority backgrounds are made relevant in interaction. Forty instances of cultural orientations were identified, and transcripts were analysed using conversation analysis.

Results
Participants make culture relevant by signalling their group/identity membership related to a cultural category/practice (such as country of ethnic origin or eating specific types of food). Membership signalling is achieved using the following interactional practices: (i) explicitly or implicitly referencing a cultural category, and using insertions to secure recognition of the reference, (ii) offering assessments related to the cultural category, and (iii) code-switching. By deploying these practices, speakers show how they establish shared understanding with regards to cultural knowledge, such as in displays of affiliation.

Conclusion
We demonstrated how doctors’ and patients’ cultural orientations signal their identity/group memberships, which in turn display their affiliative stance in interaction. Implications include considering the use of cultural membership signalling practices in clinical practice as part of demonstrating culturally informed communication, and developing continuing relationships with ethnically diverse patients.
}}

Livingston2026

2026-09-09T10:36:38Z

JakubMlynar: Created page with "{{BibEntry |BibType=ARTICLE |Author(s)=Eric Livingston; |Title=Two Ethnomethodologies: A Comment on Lynch’s Vision of Ethnomethodology in “Promise and Silence” |Tag(s)=E..."

{{BibEntry
|BibType=ARTICLE
|Author(s)=Eric Livingston;
|Title=Two Ethnomethodologies: A Comment on Lynch’s Vision of Ethnomethodology in “Promise and Silence”
|Tag(s)=EMCA; In press; Outsider ethnomethodology; The Rendering Theorem; Legwork; The discovering sciences; Incipient gestalts; The ethnomethodological project; Ethnomethodology
|Key=Livingston2026
|Year=2026
|Language=English
|Journal=Human Studies
|URL=https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10746-026-09851-3
|DOI=10.1007/s10746-026-09851-3
|Abstract=In my first reply to Lynch’s “Promise and Silence,” I stressed the major themes of my earlier paper “Ethnomethodology’s Broken Promise”—the failings of ethnomethodological field studies and ways that such shortcomings are ignored, glossed over, or hidden. I considered clarifying this material as being of first importance. On the other hand, Lynch’s paper is written from within a disciplinary approach to the ethnomethodological project. The present comment presents 1970s UCLA ethnomethodology as a foil to understand better the background and misleading character of Lynch’s critique.
}}

Multimodal Gestalt

2026-09-09T08:12:06Z

JakubMlynar:

{{Infobox cite
| Authors = '''Lorenza Mondada''' (University of Basel, Switzerland) (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7543-9769)
| To cite = Mondada, Lorenza. (2024). Multimodal Gestalt. In Alexandra Gubina, Elliott M. Hoey & Chase Wesley Raymond (Eds.), ''Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics''. International Society for Conversation Analysis (ISCA). DOI: [https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/Q7HP8 10.17605/OSF.IO/Q7HP8]
}}
The notion of “'''multimodal Gestalt'''” refers to a recurrent accountable arrangement of various multimodal resources that are mobilized by the participants and constitute a methodic practice or action. These resources are perceived and treated as such by the participants, who can orient both analytically to their single details and holistically to the whole that they constitute (De Stefani, 2022; Mondada, 2014a: 139-140, 2014b: 98, 2016: 344). An example of multimodal Gestalt is a request accomplished by the requester pointing to the requested object while also gazing at it, leaning, and stepping towards it: the pointing gesture is performed within this wider constellation of embodied movements, which are perceived as making sense together in that context (by contrast to other movements, not associated with the Gestalt).

In a multimodal Gestalt, resources are seen and heard as mobilized together although they are generally initiated at different moments in time, have different durations, and specific trajectories. For example, though one can step towards an object and then point at it, while staring at it continuously, these mobile, gestural, and visual practices are part of the same Gestalt. Thus, a multimodal Gestalt constitutes a dynamic complex temporal format that emerges, transforms, and is closed in time, characterized by multi-layered resources (Mondada, 2018). Moreover, the Gestalt is sequentially positioned and organized, as the action it accomplishes unfolds and is responded to. Finally, the way resources constituting a Gestalt are assembled crucially depends on the material ecology in which they emerge.

Methodologically, the notion of multimodal Gestalt enables the analyst to treat assemblages of multiple resources (instead of singling out one embodied resource treated in relation to another, typically talk), and to consider the sequential environment in which the Gestalt emerges and in which it situatedly acquires its relevance and intelligibility. Gestalts might be considered in their indexicality, or might be seen as stabilized and grammaticalized (Stukenbrock, 2021).

More generally, the notion of Gestalt has been previously used in EMCA in at least two ways, referring to ''linguistic Gestalts'' and to ''Gestalt contextures''—which the notion of multimodal Gestalt might include. On the one hand, in interactional linguistics, Auer (1996, 2009) and Selting (2005) use the term to refer to the dynamic emergent formats characterizing the unfolding of turns-in-progress, combining prosodic, syntactic, and pragmatic features. In particular, Auer (1996) prefers to speak of “Gestalt” rather than of “structure”, highlighting its temporal character and its projecting potentials, including the real-time perception of its emergent form (p. 59). This is further elaborated in Auer’s notion of '''[[Online syntax|online syntax]]'''. Syntax emerges in time, through the way a possible trajectory of a syntactic Gestalt is projected (opened), generates expectations, and is finally completed (closed) (Auer, 2009: 4).

On the other hand, in ethnomethodology, the concept of Gestalt has inspired Garfinkel, referring to Gurwitsch’s “gestalt contexture” (1957, see Eisenmann & Lynch, 2021; Lynch & Eisenmann, 2022; Meyer, 2022). Revisiting the notion of Gestalt in a phenomenological way, Gurwitch speaks of “gestalt contexture” to refer to the coherence of the interrelated components of the whole. Their coherence is established within the perceptual field of the observer. Garfinkel moves from the perceived phenomenal qualities to a focus on the practices producing these qualities. His praxeological focus is not on the figure/ground relation observable between visual objects, but on the action that achieves the visibility of these objects and their relations, moment-by-moment and here-and-now within social interaction (Garfinkel, 2021; Lynch & Eisenmann, 2022; Meyer, 2022). Queuing constitutes a prototypical example (Garfinkel & Livingston, 2003): the organization of the queue is not reducible to a line, as visible on photographs; rather, it is a spatial and temporal achievement of bodies progressively assembling in a certain way, resulting from the actions of finding the end-of-the-queue, witnessably joining the queue, holding and continuing the structure of the queue, etc.

The uses of Gestalt for the analysis of multimodality somehow refer to this double tradition. Heath (1986: 97), mentioning Gurwitsch and Garfinkel’s documentary method of interpretation, uses the notion of Gestalt to refer to the multimodal organization of action, pinpointing the '''[[Reflexivity|reflexive]]''' relation between action and movements, between perceived action and underlying presupposed patterns. Mondada (2014a, 2014b) speaks of multimodal Gestalt in relation to the accountability of action achieved by multiple linguistic and embodied resources, referring to its multi-layered order, its embeddedness in the sequential organization, the flexibility of its temporal arrangement, and the orientation of the participants making relevant these multiple details as belonging to the same assemblage, against the background of other actions.

In order to give two contrastive examples of multimodal Gestalts, let’s compare the following two extracts: in a garage showroom, a car seller (Jan) successively explains to two customers (Luc and Guy) some functionalities of the car they just bought. We join the first instance in which Jan explains to Luc where the button deactivating the air-bag security is:

[[File:Mondada-gestalt-1.jpg|550px]]

While uttering the deictic expression “ici”/‘here’, Jan points at the feature he is describing, a button disactivating the air-bag. His own gaze is on the button, as well as, since the beginning of the turn, his recipient’s gaze (Figure 1). Luc not only gazes but also bends over, looking carefully, as Jan utters the noun phrase describing the feature (line 1, Figure 2). At turn completion, Jan gazes at Luc (Figure 3), who immediately positively responds (line 2), displaying his understanding and closing the sequence.

In the next extract, Jan explains to Guy the button activating the closure of the doors.

[[File:Mondada-gestalt-2.jpg|650px]]

Like in the previous instance, Jan begins his turn with “ici”/‘here’. However, contrary to the previous case, at that point his recipient, Guy, is still looking at something else (Figure 4). Guy begins to move his head at the beginning of Jan’s turn, while Jan adds a spatial description (“à l’avant”/‘on the front’ line 2), orienting to the fact that Guy is still turned to the back. Only then Jan produces a noun phrase describing the feature, while continuously extending his hand, which reaches the object described on its final word (Figures 5-6). At this point too, Jan gazes at Guy, who is now looking at the referred to feature. After a silence, Jan, visibly orienting to Guy’s absence of response, increments his turn with an infinitive phrase (line 4), still having his pointing fingers on the button and looking at Guy (Figure 7)—thereby offering a new opportunity to respond. Guy finally acknowledges the explanation with a small nod and the sequence is closed.

Despite the fact that in both cases a similar verbal format is used (with the proximal deictic and a noun phrase), and the speaker points at the object referred to, the two occurrences show important differences, accounting for two distinct multimodal Gestalts (see Mondada, 2012 for a systematization). The first Gestalt, in which the deictic expression co-occurs with a pointing gesture, is adopted for introducing an object that is in the line of sight of the recipient and therefore does not necessitate a reorientation of their attention. This Gestalt works as a device ''introducing a new referent'' singled out within the material environment.
Alternatively, when the speaker introduces a referent located elsewhere than where the recipient is currently looking at, a similar verbal construction is used, but within a different distribution of gesture and gaze. In this second Gestalt, the pointing gesture occurs later, mostly at the end of the description, concurring with the noun phrase verbalizing the object, adjusting to the reorientation of the recipient’s gaze. In this second Gestalt “ici”/’here’ works as an ''attention-getting device'', announcing that something has to be searched for and seen, projecting imminent pointing. Moreover, whereas in the first Gestalt the verbal construction is quite minimal (deictic + noun phrase), this second Gestalt also includes other verbal resources that expand the turn, like further specifications, or extensions of the turn, all orienting and adjusting to the late gaze movement of the recipient.

These two configurations show the importance of the temporal and interactional arrangement of a multimodal composite Gestalt and the need to describe such Gestalts in order to capture in detail their praxeological and interactional meaning (for other examples see Mondada, 2023). For the cases illustrated here, the practice of indexically referring to a new object can neither be reduced to the verbal deictic expression nor its co-occurrence with a pointing gesture, but has to take into consideration in an integrated way a) the multiple multimodal details assembled in the Gestalt and composing it, b) their temporal arrangements, c) their sequential unfolding, d) the way in which these details as well as the Gestalt as a whole are interactively treated by all the participants.

'''Additional Related Entries:'''

* '''[[Turn-taking]]'''
* '''[[Multimodality]]'''
* '''[[Multisensoriality]]'''
* '''[[Participation]]'''

'''Cited References:'''

Auer, P. (1996). On the prosody and syntax of turn-taking. In E. Couper-Kuhlen & M. Selting (eds.), ''Prosody and conversation'' (pp. 57-100). Cambridge University Press.

Auer, P. (2006). Increments and more. Anmerkungen zur augenblicklichen Diskussion über die Erweiterbarkeit von Turnkonstruktionseinheiten. In A. Deppermann, R. Fiehler, & T. Spranz-Fogasy (eds.), ''Grammatik und Interaktion'' (pp. 279-294). Verlag für Gesprächsforschung.

De Stefani, E. (2022). On gestalts and their analytical corollaries: A commentary to the special issue. ''Social Interaction. Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality'', 5(1).

Eisenmann, C., & Lynch, M. (2021). Introduction to Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological “misreading” of Aron Gurwitsch on the phenomenal field. ''Human Studies'', 44(1), 1-17.

Garfinkel, H. (2021). Ethnomethodological misreading of Aron Gurwitsch on the phenomenal field. ''Human Studies'', 44(1), 19-42.

Garfinkel, H., & Livingston, E. (2003). Phenomenal field properties of order in formatted queues and their neglected standing in the current situation of inquiry. ''Visual Studies'', 18(1), 21-28.

Gurwitsch, A. (1957). ''Théorie du champ de la conscience''. Desclés de Brouwer [The field of consciousness. 1964. Duquesne University Press.].

Heath, C. (1986). ''Body movement and speech in medical interaction''. Cambridge University Press.

Lynch, M., & Eisenmann, C. (2022). Transposing Gestalt phenomena from visual fields to practical and interactional work: Garfinkel’s and Sacks’ social praxeology. ''Philosophia Scientiae'', 26(3), 95-122.

Meyer, C. (2022). The phenomenological foundations of ethnomethodology’s conceptions of sequentiality and indexicality. Harold Garfinkel’s references to Aron Gurwitsch’s “field of consciousness”. ''Gesprächsforschung Online'', 23, 111-144.

Mondada, L. (2012). Deixis: An integrated interactional multimodal analysis. In P. Bergmann & J. Brenning (eds.), ''Prosody and embodiment in interactional grammar'' (pp. 173-206). De Gruyter.

Mondada, L. (2014a). The local constitution of multimodal resources for social interaction. ''Journal of Pragmatics'', 65, 137-156.

Mondada, L. (2014b). Pointing, talk and the bodies: Reference and joint attention as embodied interactional achievements. In M. Seyfeddinipur & M. Gullberg (eds.), ''From gesture in conversation to visible utterance in action'' (pp. 95-124). John Benjamins.

Mondada, L. (2016). Challenges of multimodality: Language and the body in social interaction. ''Journal of Sociolinguistics'', 20(2), 336-366.

Mondada, L. (2018). Multiple temporalities of language and body in interaction: challenges for transcribing multimodality. ''Research on Language and Social Interaction'', 51(1), 85-106.

Mondada, L. (2023). Requesting in shop encounters. multimodal gestalts and their interactional and institutional accountability. In D. Barth-Weingarten & M. Selting (eds.), ''New perspectives of interactional linguistic research''. John Benjamins.

Selting, M. (2005). Syntax and prosody as methods for the construction and identification of turn-constructional units in conversation. In A. Hakulinen & M. Selting (eds.), ''Syntax and lexis in conversation: Studies on the use of linguistic resources in talk-in-interaction'' (pp. 17-44). John Benjamins.

Stukenbrock, A. (2021). Multimodal gestalts and their change over time: Is routinization also grammaticalization? ''Frontiers in Communication'', 6, 662240.

'''Additional References:'''

Koffka, K. (1922). Perception: An introduction to the Gestalt-Theorie. ''The Psychological Bulletin'', 19(10), 531–585.

Wertheimer, M. (1985 [1924]). Über Gestalttheorie. ''Gestalt Theory'', 7(2), 99–120.

=== EMCA Wiki Bibliography items tagged with 'Gestalt' ===
{{#widget:Iframe
|url=https://emcawiki.net/bibtex/browser.php?keywords=Gestalt&bib=emca.bib
|border=0
}}

Multimodal Gestalt

2026-09-09T03:44:13Z

JakubMlynar: added link to Reflexivity

{{Infobox cite
| Authors = '''Lorenza Mondada''' (University of Basel, Switzerland) (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7543-9769)
| To cite = Mondada, Lorenza. (2024). Multimodal Gestalt. In Alexandra Gubina, Elliott M. Hoey & Chase Wesley Raymond (Eds.), ''Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics''. International Society for Conversation Analysis (ISCA). DOI: [https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/Q7HP8 10.17605/OSF.IO/Q7HP8]
}}
The notion of “'''multimodal Gestalt'''” refers to a recurrent accountable arrangement of various multimodal resources that are mobilized by the participants and constitute a methodic practice or action. These resources are perceived and treated as such by the participants, who can orient both analytically to their single details and holistically to the whole that they constitute (De Stefani, 2022; Mondada, 2014a: 139-140, 2014b: 98, 2016: 344). An example of multimodal Gestalt is a request accomplished by the requester pointing to the requested object while also gazing at it, leaning, and stepping towards it: the pointing gesture is performed within this wider constellation of embodied movements, which are perceived as making sense together in that context (by contrast to other movements, not associated with the Gestalt).

In a multimodal Gestalt, resources are seen and heard as mobilized together although they are generally initiated at different moments in time, have different durations, and specific trajectories. For example, though one can step towards an object and then point at it, while staring at it continuously, these mobile, gestural, and visual practices are part of the same Gestalt. Thus, a multimodal Gestalt constitutes a dynamic complex temporal format that emerges, transforms, and is closed in time, characterized by multi-layered resources (Mondada, 2018). Moreover, the Gestalt is sequentially positioned and organized, as the action it accomplishes unfolds and is responded to. Finally, the way resources constituting a Gestalt are assembled crucially depends on the material ecology in which they emerge.

Methodologically, the notion of multimodal Gestalt enables the analyst to treat assemblages of multiple resources (instead of singling out one embodied resource treated in relation to another, typically talk), and to consider the sequential environment in which the Gestalt emerges and in which it situatedly acquires its relevance and intelligibility. Gestalts might be considered in their indexicality, or might be seen as stabilized and grammaticalized (Stukenbrock, 2021).

More generally, the notion of Gestalt has been previously used in EMCA in at least two ways, referring to ''linguistic Gestalts'' and to ''Gestalt contextures''—which the notion of multimodal Gestalt might include. On the one hand, in interactional linguistics, Auer (1996, 2009) and Selting (2005) use the term to refer to the dynamic emergent formats characterizing the unfolding of turns-in-progress, combining prosodic, syntactic, and pragmatic features. In particular, Auer (1996) prefers to speak of “Gestalt” rather than of “structure”, highlighting its temporal character and its projecting potentials, including the real-time perception of its emergent form (p. 59). This is further elaborated in Auer’s notion of '''[[Online syntax|online syntax]]'''. Syntax emerges in time, through the way a possible trajectory of a syntactic Gestalt is projected (opened), generates expectations, and is finally completed (closed) (Auer, 2009: 4).

On the other hand, in ethnomethodology, the concept of Gestalt has inspired Garfinkel, referring to Gurwitsch’s “gestalt contexture” (1957, see Eisenmann & Lynch, 2021; Lynch & Eisenmann, 2022; Meyer, 2022). Revisiting the notion of Gestalt in a phenomenological way, Gurwitch speaks of “gestalt contexture” to refer to the coherence of the interrelated components of the whole. Their coherence is established within the perceptual field of the observer. Garfinkel moves from the perceived phenomenal qualities to a focus on the practices producing these qualities. His praxeological focus is not on the figure/ground relation observable between visual objects, but on the action that achieves the visibility of these objects and their relations, moment-by-moment and here-and-now within social interaction (Garfinkel, 2021; Lynch & Eisenmann, 2022; Meyer, 2022). Queuing constitutes a prototypical example (Garfinkel & Livingston, 2003): the organization of the queue is not reducible to a line, as visible on photographs; rather, it is a spatial and temporal achievement of bodies progressively assembling in a certain way, resulting from the actions of finding the end-of-the-queue, witnessably joining the queue, holding and continuing the structure of the queue, etc.

The uses of Gestalt for the analysis of multimodality somehow refer to this double tradition. Heath (1986: 97), mentioning Gurwitsch and Garfinkel’s documentary method of interpretation, uses the notion of Gestalt to refer to the multimodal organization of action, pinpointing the [[Reflexivity|reflexive]] relation between action and movements, between perceived action and underlying presupposed patterns. Mondada (2014a, 2014b) speaks of multimodal Gestalt in relation to the accountability of action achieved by multiple linguistic and embodied resources, referring to its multi-layered order, its embeddedness in the sequential organization, the flexibility of its temporal arrangement, and the orientation of the participants making relevant these multiple details as belonging to the same assemblage, against the background of other actions.

In order to give two contrastive examples of multimodal Gestalts, let’s compare the following two extracts: in a garage showroom, a car seller (Jan) successively explains to two customers (Luc and Guy) some functionalities of the car they just bought. We join the first instance in which Jan explains to Luc where the button deactivating the air-bag security is:

[[File:Mondada-gestalt-1.jpg|550px]]

While uttering the deictic expression “ici”/‘here’, Jan points at the feature he is describing, a button disactivating the air-bag. His own gaze is on the button, as well as, since the beginning of the turn, his recipient’s gaze (Figure 1). Luc not only gazes but also bends over, looking carefully, as Jan utters the noun phrase describing the feature (line 1, Figure 2). At turn completion, Jan gazes at Luc (Figure 3), who immediately positively responds (line 2), displaying his understanding and closing the sequence.

In the next extract, Jan explains to Guy the button activating the closure of the doors.

[[File:Mondada-gestalt-2.jpg|650px]]

Like in the previous instance, Jan begins his turn with “ici”/‘here’. However, contrary to the previous case, at that point his recipient, Guy, is still looking at something else (Figure 4). Guy begins to move his head at the beginning of Jan’s turn, while Jan adds a spatial description (“à l’avant”/‘on the front’ line 2), orienting to the fact that Guy is still turned to the back. Only then Jan produces a noun phrase describing the feature, while continuously extending his hand, which reaches the object described on its final word (Figures 5-6). At this point too, Jan gazes at Guy, who is now looking at the referred to feature. After a silence, Jan, visibly orienting to Guy’s absence of response, increments his turn with an infinitive phrase (line 4), still having his pointing fingers on the button and looking at Guy (Figure 7)—thereby offering a new opportunity to respond. Guy finally acknowledges the explanation with a small nod and the sequence is closed.

Despite the fact that in both cases a similar verbal format is used (with the proximal deictic and a noun phrase), and the speaker points at the object referred to, the two occurrences show important differences, accounting for two distinct multimodal Gestalts (see Mondada, 2012 for a systematization). The first Gestalt, in which the deictic expression co-occurs with a pointing gesture, is adopted for introducing an object that is in the line of sight of the recipient and therefore does not necessitate a reorientation of their attention. This Gestalt works as a device ''introducing a new referent'' singled out within the material environment.
Alternatively, when the speaker introduces a referent located elsewhere than where the recipient is currently looking at, a similar verbal construction is used, but within a different distribution of gesture and gaze. In this second Gestalt, the pointing gesture occurs later, mostly at the end of the description, concurring with the noun phrase verbalizing the object, adjusting to the reorientation of the recipient’s gaze. In this second Gestalt “ici”/’here’ works as an ''attention-getting device'', announcing that something has to be searched for and seen, projecting imminent pointing. Moreover, whereas in the first Gestalt the verbal construction is quite minimal (deictic + noun phrase), this second Gestalt also includes other verbal resources that expand the turn, like further specifications, or extensions of the turn, all orienting and adjusting to the late gaze movement of the recipient.

These two configurations show the importance of the temporal and interactional arrangement of a multimodal composite Gestalt and the need to describe such Gestalts in order to capture in detail their praxeological and interactional meaning (for other examples see Mondada, 2023). For the cases illustrated here, the practice of indexically referring to a new object can neither be reduced to the verbal deictic expression nor its co-occurrence with a pointing gesture, but has to take into consideration in an integrated way a) the multiple multimodal details assembled in the Gestalt and composing it, b) their temporal arrangements, c) their sequential unfolding, d) the way in which these details as well as the Gestalt as a whole are interactively treated by all the participants.

'''Additional Related Entries:'''

* '''[[Turn-taking]]'''
* '''[[Multimodality]]'''
* '''[[Multisensoriality]]'''
* '''[[Participation]]'''

'''Cited References:'''

Auer, P. (1996). On the prosody and syntax of turn-taking. In E. Couper-Kuhlen & M. Selting (eds.), ''Prosody and conversation'' (pp. 57-100). Cambridge University Press.

Auer, P. (2006). Increments and more. Anmerkungen zur augenblicklichen Diskussion über die Erweiterbarkeit von Turnkonstruktionseinheiten. In A. Deppermann, R. Fiehler, & T. Spranz-Fogasy (eds.), ''Grammatik und Interaktion'' (pp. 279-294). Verlag für Gesprächsforschung.

De Stefani, E. (2022). On gestalts and their analytical corollaries: A commentary to the special issue. ''Social Interaction. Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality'', 5(1).

Eisenmann, C., & Lynch, M. (2021). Introduction to Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological “misreading” of Aron Gurwitsch on the phenomenal field. ''Human Studies'', 44(1), 1-17.

Garfinkel, H. (2021). Ethnomethodological misreading of Aron Gurwitsch on the phenomenal field. ''Human Studies'', 44(1), 19-42.

Garfinkel, H., & Livingston, E. (2003). Phenomenal field properties of order in formatted queues and their neglected standing in the current situation of inquiry. ''Visual Studies'', 18(1), 21-28.

Gurwitsch, A. (1957). ''Théorie du champ de la conscience''. Desclés de Brouwer [The field of consciousness. 1964. Duquesne University Press.].

Heath, C. (1986). ''Body movement and speech in medical interaction''. Cambridge University Press.

Lynch, M., & Eisenmann, C. (2022). Transposing Gestalt phenomena from visual fields to practical and interactional work: Garfinkel’s and Sacks’ social praxeology. ''Philosophia Scientiae'', 26(3), 95-122.

Meyer, C. (2022). The phenomenological foundations of ethnomethodology’s conceptions of sequentiality and indexicality. Harold Garfinkel’s references to Aron Gurwitsch’s “field of consciousness”. ''Gesprächsforschung Online'', 23, 111-144.

Mondada, L. (2012). Deixis: An integrated interactional multimodal analysis. In P. Bergmann & J. Brenning (eds.), ''Prosody and embodiment in interactional grammar'' (pp. 173-206). De Gruyter.

Mondada, L. (2014a). The local constitution of multimodal resources for social interaction. ''Journal of Pragmatics'', 65, 137-156.

Mondada, L. (2014b). Pointing, talk and the bodies: Reference and joint attention as embodied interactional achievements. In M. Seyfeddinipur & M. Gullberg (eds.), ''From gesture in conversation to visible utterance in action'' (pp. 95-124). John Benjamins.

Mondada, L. (2016). Challenges of multimodality: Language and the body in social interaction. ''Journal of Sociolinguistics'', 20(2), 336-366.

Mondada, L. (2018). Multiple temporalities of language and body in interaction: challenges for transcribing multimodality. ''Research on Language and Social Interaction'', 51(1), 85-106.

Mondada, L. (2023). Requesting in shop encounters. multimodal gestalts and their interactional and institutional accountability. In D. Barth-Weingarten & M. Selting (eds.), ''New perspectives of interactional linguistic research''. John Benjamins.

Selting, M. (2005). Syntax and prosody as methods for the construction and identification of turn-constructional units in conversation. In A. Hakulinen & M. Selting (eds.), ''Syntax and lexis in conversation: Studies on the use of linguistic resources in talk-in-interaction'' (pp. 17-44). John Benjamins.

Stukenbrock, A. (2021). Multimodal gestalts and their change over time: Is routinization also grammaticalization? ''Frontiers in Communication'', 6, 662240.

'''Additional References:'''

Koffka, K. (1922). Perception: An introduction to the Gestalt-Theorie. ''The Psychological Bulletin'', 19(10), 531–585.

Wertheimer, M. (1985 [1924]). Über Gestalttheorie. ''Gestalt Theory'', 7(2), 99–120.

=== EMCA Wiki Bibliography items tagged with 'Gestalt' ===
{{#widget:Iframe
|url=https://emcawiki.net/bibtex/browser.php?keywords=Gestalt&bib=emca.bib
|border=0
}}

Reflexivity

2026-09-08T20:15:03Z

JakubMlynar:

{{Infobox cite
| Authors = '''Jakub Mlynář''' (HES-SO Valais-Wallis University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland, Switzerland) (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5206-3212)
| To cite = Mlynář, Jakub. (2026). Reflexivity. In Alexandra Gubina, Elliott M. Hoey & Chase Wesley Raymond (Eds.), ''Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics''. International Society for Conversation Analysis (ISCA). DOI: [ ]
}}

The notion of '''reflexivity''' as a constitutive property of naturally organized ordinary activities (see, e.g., Lynch, 2002; Czyżewski, 1994) provides a fundamental background for studies in CA and IL. In ethnomethodology, the essential reflexivity of actions (including ‘talk-in-interaction’) is closely related to their '''[[indexicality]]'''. Actions acquire sense in and through their practical embeddedness in specific ongoing situations or settings. While the situation provides sense for practical actions, it is not the case that their sense is fully determined by the '''[[Context|context]]'''. Practical actions simultaneously establish and give sense to the ongoing situation. Any action depends for its sense – indexically and reflexively – on the situation in which it happens, but it also immediately becomes part of this situation, to whose sense it contributes. It is in this way that the relationship between a setting (such as a recruitment interview or a board game) and a practice (a question, a move) is said to be reflexive (see Llewellyn, 2010; Liberman, 2013, ch. 3). As Wieder put it, “each utterance [gives] sense to the context and [obtains] sense from its place in that context” (1974: 163). Each formulation or account is part of the same setting that it ‘describes’, and any utterance is also a ‘circumstance’ or a ‘practical feature’ of the setting of activities in which it is produced (Garfinkel, 1967; Garfinkel & Sacks, 1970). Reflexivity is a way to characterize this double directionality as simultaneous and parallel, capturing “the acausal and non-mentalistic determination of meaningful action-in-context” (Lynch & Peyrot, 1992: 115).

The centrality of the reflexive character of practical actions can be seen as a bond between ethnomethodology and CA (Maynard & Gill, 2024). As pointed out by Schegloff (1992: xxxvi) and discussed by McHoul (2025), Sacks’ characterization of culture as “an apparatus for generating ''recognizable'' actions” is grounded in the reflexivity of social action: “… if the same procedures are used for generating as for detecting, that is perhaps as simple a solution to the problem of recognizability as is formulatable” (Sacks, 1992[I]: 226; original emphasis). The resonance becomes clear when this quote is compared with Garfinkel’s introduction of ethnomethodology’s “central recommendation … that the activities whereby members produce and manage settings of organized everyday affairs are identical with members’ procedures for making those settings ‘account-able’” (Garfinkel, 1967: 1).

A relatively simple example of the reflexive relationship between an object or an event (such as a piece of '''[[Advice|advice]]''') and its setting (such as a ‘consultation’) is the illustration of ‘gestalt contextures’ given by the phenomenologist Aron Gurwitsch (2010[1964]) and developed by Garfinkel (see Garfinkel, 2021; Lynch & Eisenmann, 2022; Meyer, 2022).

[[File:Mlynar reflexivity fig1.png]]

'''Figure 1: Two dots'''

Presenting a depiction similar to Figure 1, Gurwitsch observes that once we see the two points as “constituents of a unitary group”, which is “most likely to occur spontaneously when the points are in close proximity to one another”, we do “not see one point ''plus'' the other located a short distance away. Rather one point appears as the ''right member'', the other as the ''left member'' of the pair.” (Gurwitsch, 2010[1964]: 103; original emphasis) The ‘left-hand member’ gives sense to the ‘right-hand member’, and vice versa, and this perceived mutual relationship also reflexively gives sense to their recognizable unity as a pair. In a similar sense, to return to the previous example, giving advice co-constitutes a consultation as a specific activity, and advice as an action obtains its sense from being done within a consultation.

Elaborating Gurwitsch, Meyer (2022) demonstrates how this essential reflexivity of social action can be used to illuminate CA’s phenomena such as '''[[Adjacency pair|adjacency pairs]]''' (Schegloff, 1968; Sacks, 1992 – e.g., question–answer or greeting sequences): “Only when both pair members adopt a ‘functional significance’ in relation to one another the pair is actually established as pair – and only then a felicitous gestalt contexture for good continuation is realized.” (Meyer, 2022: 131) On the same subject, Lynch and Eisenmann (2022) add: “An adjacency pair made up, for example, of a greeting and return-greeting, an insult and a riposte, or a question and answer exhibits properties as a pair and not simply as one item followed by another. Although such paired utterances are composed of words, phrases, and sentences, they are produced and made evident through interactionally oriented practical work. A first pair part is not simply a sentence or token uttered by a speaker, it is a first member of a pair.” (p. 114)

Following Garfinkel’s transposition of gestalt phenomena from the perceptual domain to practical and interactional work (Lynch & Eisenmann, 2022), reflexivity captures that “situations, actions, and rules determine one another’s sense as constituent parts of a gestalt contexture” (Wieder, 1974: 170). Instead of advancing a ‘bucket theory’ (Heritage & Clayman, 2010) of '''[[Context|context]]''' as a space or time surrounding observable actions, the term highlights that the foundations of CA and IL are based on the ethnomethodological notion of gestalt ''contextures'' as reflexively organized ‘phenomenal fields’ of practical action.

'''Additional Related Entries:'''

* '''[[context]]'''
* '''[[first pair part]]'''
* '''[[indexicality]]'''
* '''[[multimodal Gestalt]]'''
* '''[[second pair part]]'''

'''Cited References:'''

Czyżewski, M. (1994). Reflexivity of actors versus reflexivity of accounts. ''Theory, Culture & Society'', 11(4), 161–168.

Garfinkel, H. (1967). ''Studies in Ethnomethodology''. Prentice-Hall.

Garfinkel, H. (2021). Ethnomethodological misreading of Aron Gurwitsch on the phenomenal field. ''Human Studies'', 44(1), 19–42.

Garfinkel, H., & Sacks, H. (1970). On formal structures of practical action. In J. C. McKinney & E. A. Tiryakian (Eds.), ''Theoretical Sociology: Perspectives and Developments'' (pp. 338–366). Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Gurwitsch, A. (2010 [1964]). ''The Field of Consciousness: Theme, Thematic Field, and Margin (The Collected Works of Aron Gurwitsch [1901–1973], Vol. III)''. Springer.

Heritage, J., & Clayman, S. E. (2010). ''Talk in Action: Interactions, Identities and Institutions''. Wiley-Blackwell.

Liberman, K. (2013). ''More Studies in Ethnomethodology''. SUNY Press.

Llewellyn, N. (2010). On the reflexivity between setting and practice: The ‘recruitment interview’. In Nick Llewellyn, Jon Hindmarsh (Eds.), ''Organisation, Interaction and Practice: Studies of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis'' (pp. 74–95). Cambridge University Press.

Lynch, M. (2000). Against reflexivity as an academic virtue and source of privileged knowledge. ''Theory, Culture and Society'', 17(3), 27–53.

Lynch, M., & Eisenmann, C. (2022). Transposing gestalt phenomena from visual fields to practical and interactional work: Garfinkel’s and Sacks’ social praxeology. ''Philosophia Scientiæ'', 26(3), 95–122.

Lynch, M., & Peyrot, M. (1992). Introduction: A reader’s guide to ethnomethodology. ''Qualitative Sociology'', 15(2), 113–122.

Maynard, D. W., & Gill, V. T. (2024). Ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and the study of interaction in everyday life. In J. D. Robinson, R. Clift, K. H. Kendrick, & C. W. Raymond (Eds.), ''The Cambridge Handbook of Methods in Conversation Analysis'' (pp. 512–540). Cambridge University Press.

McHoul, A. (2025). Understanding (and) culture: Working out Sacks’s aphorism. ''Przegląd Socjologiczny'', 74(3), 29–36.

Meyer, C. (2022). The phenomenological foundations of ethnomethodology’s conceptions of sequentiality and indexicality: Harold Garfinkel’s references to Aron Gurwitsch’s ‘Field of Consciousness’. ''Gesprächsforschung - Online-Zeitschrift zur verbalen Interaktion'', 23, 111– 144.

Sacks, H. (1992). ''Lectures on Conversation''. Basil Blackwell.

Schegloff, E. A. (1968). Sequencing in conversational openings. ''American Anthropologist'', 70(6), 1075–1095.

Schegloff, E. A. (1992). Introduction. In H. Sacks: ''Lectures on Conversation, Vol. I'' (pp. ix–lii). Basil Blackwell.

Wieder, L. (1974). Telling the code. In R. Turner (Ed.), ''Ethnomethodology: Selected Readings'' (pp. 144–172). Penguin.

=== EMCA Wiki Bibliography items tagged with 'reflexivity' ===
{{#widget:Iframe
|url=https://emcawiki.net/bibtex/browser.php?keywords=reflexiv&bib=emca.bib
|border=0
}}

Reflexivity

2026-09-08T20:07:32Z

JakubMlynar:

{{Infobox cite
| Authors = '''Jakub Mlynář''' (HES-SO Valais-Wallis University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland, Switzerland) (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5206-3212)
| To cite = Mlynář, Jakub. (2026). Reflexivity. In Alexandra Gubina, Elliott M. Hoey & Chase Wesley Raymond (Eds.), ''Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics''. International Society for Conversation Analysis (ISCA). DOI: [ ]
}}

The notion of '''reflexivity''' as a constitutive property of naturally organized ordinary activities (see, e.g., Lynch, 2002; Czyżewski, 1994) provides a fundamental background for studies in CA and IL. In ethnomethodology, the essential reflexivity of actions (including ‘talk-in-interaction’) is closely related to their '''[[indexicality]]'''. Actions acquire sense in and through their practical embeddedness in specific ongoing situations or settings. While the situation provides sense for practical actions, it is not the case that their sense is fully determined by the '''[[Context|context]]'''. Practical actions simultaneously establish and give sense to the ongoing situation. Any action depends for its sense – indexically and reflexively – on the situation in which it happens, but it also immediately becomes part of this situation, to whose sense it contributes. It is in this way that the relationship between a setting (such as a recruitment interview or a board game) and a practice (a question, a move) is said to be reflexive (see Llewellyn, 2010; Liberman, 2013, ch. 3). As Wieder put it, “each utterance [gives] sense to the context and [obtains] sense from its place in that context” (1974: 163). Each formulation or account is part of the same setting that it ‘describes’, and any utterance is also a ‘circumstance’ or a ‘practical feature’ of the setting of activities in which it is produced (Garfinkel, 1967; Garfinkel & Sacks, 1970). Reflexivity is a way to characterize this double directionality as simultaneous and parallel, capturing “the acausal and non-mentalistic determination of meaningful action-in-context” (Lynch & Peyrot, 1992: 115).

The centrality of the reflexive character of practical actions can be seen as a bond between ethnomethodology and CA (Maynard & Gill, 2024). As pointed out by Schegloff (1992: xxxvi) and discussed by McHoul (2025), Sacks’ characterization of culture as “an apparatus for generating ''recognizable'' actions” is grounded in the reflexivity of social action: “… if the same procedures are used for generating as for detecting, that is perhaps as simple a solution to the problem of recognizability as is formulatable” (Sacks, 1992[I]: 226; original emphasis). The resonance becomes clear when this quote is compared with Garfinkel’s introduction of ethnomethodology’s “central recommendation … that the activities whereby members produce and manage settings of organized everyday affairs are identical with members’ procedures for making those settings ‘account-able’” (Garfinkel, 1967: 1).

A relatively simple example of the reflexive relationship between an object or an event (such as a piece of '''[[Advice|advice]]''') and its setting (such as a ‘consultation’) is the illustration of ‘gestalt contextures’ given by the phenomenologist Aron Gurwitsch (2010[1964]) and developed by Garfinkel (see Garfinkel, 2021; Lynch & Eisenmann, 2022; Meyer, 2022).

[[File:Mlynar reflexivity fig1.png]]

'''Figure 1: Two dots'''

Presenting a depiction similar to Figure 1, Gurwitsch observes that once we see the two points as “constituents of a unitary group”, which is “most likely to occur spontaneously when the points are in close proximity to one another”, we do “not see one point ''plus'' the other located a short distance away. Rather one point appears as the ''right member'', the other as the ''left member'' of the pair.” (Gurwitsch, 2010[1964]: 103; original emphasis) The ‘left-hand member’ gives sense to the ‘right-hand member’, and vice versa, and this perceived mutual relationship also reflexively gives sense to their recognizable unity as a pair. In a similar sense, to return to the previous example, giving advice co-constitutes a consultation as a specific activity, and advice as an action obtains its sense from being done within a consultation.

Elaborating Gurwitsch, Meyer (2022) demonstrates how this essential reflexivity of social action can be used to illuminate CA’s phenomena such as '''[[Adjacency pair|adjacency pairs]]''' (Schegloff, 1968; Sacks, 1992 – e.g., question–answer or greeting sequences): “Only when both pair members adopt a ‘functional significance’ in relation to one another the pair is actually established as pair – and only then a felicitous gestalt contexture for good continuation is realized.” (Meyer, 2022: 131) On the same subject, Lynch and Eisenmann (2022) add: “An adjacency pair made up, for example, of a greeting and return-greeting, an insult and a riposte, or a question and answer exhibits properties as a pair and not simply as one item followed by another. Although such paired utterances are composed of words, phrases, and sentences, they are produced and made evident through interactionally oriented practical work. A first pair part is not simply a sentence or token uttered by a speaker, it is a first member of a pair.” (p. 114)

Following Garfinkel’s transposition of gestalt phenomena from the perceptual domain to practical and interactional work (Lynch & Eisenmann, 2022), reflexivity captures that “situations, actions, and rules determine one another’s sense as constituent parts of a gestalt contexture” (Wieder, 1974: 170). Instead of advancing a ‘bucket theory’ (Heritage & Clayman, 2010) of '''[[Context|context]]''' as a space or time surrounding observable actions, the term highlights that the foundations of CA and IL are based on the ethnomethodological notion of gestalt ''contextures'' as reflexively organized ‘phenomenal fields’ of practical action.

'''Additional Related Entries:'''

* '''[[context]]'''
* '''[[first pair part]]'''
* '''[[indexicality]]'''
* '''[[multimodal Gestalt]]'''
* '''[[second pair part]]'''

'''Cited References:'''

Czyżewski, M. (1994). Reflexivity of actors versus reflexivity of accounts. ''Theory, Culture & Society'', 11(4), 161–168.

Garfinkel, H. (1967). ''Studies in Ethnomethodology''. Prentice-Hall.

Garfinkel, H. (2021). Ethnomethodological misreading of Aron Gurwitsch on the phenomenal field. ''Human Studies'', 44(1), 19–42.

Garfinkel, H., & Sacks, H. (1970). On formal structures of practical action. In J. C. McKinney & E. A. Tiryakian (Eds.), ''Theoretical Sociology: Perspectives and Developments'' (pp. 338–366). Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Gurwitsch, A. (2010 [1964]). ''The Field of Consciousness: Theme, Thematic Field, and Margin (The Collected Works of Aron Gurwitsch [1901–1973], Vol. III)''. Springer.

Heritage, J., & Clayman, S. E. (2010). ''Talk in Action: Interactions, Identities and Institutions''. Wiley-Blackwell.

Liberman, K. (2013). ''More Studies in Ethnomethodology''. SUNY Press.

Llewellyn, N. (2010). On the reflexivity between setting and practice: The ‘recruitment interview’. In Nick Llewellyn, Jon Hindmarsh (Eds.), ''Organisation, Interaction and Practice: Studies of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis'' (pp. 74–95). Cambridge University Press.

Lynch, M. (2000). Against reflexivity as an academic virtue and source of privileged knowledge. ''Theory, Culture and Society'', 17(3), 27–53.

Lynch, M., & Eisenmann, C. (2022). Transposing gestalt phenomena from visual fields to practical and interactional work: Garfinkel’s and Sacks’ social praxeology. ''Philosophia Scientiæ'', 26(3), 95–122.

Lynch, M., & Peyrot, M. (1992). Introduction: A reader’s guide to ethnomethodology. ''Qualitative Sociology'', 15(2), 113–122.

Maynard, D. W., & Gill, V. T. (2024). Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis, and the Study of Interaction in Everyday Life. In J. D. Robinson, R. Clift, K. H. Kendrick, & C. W. Raymond (Eds.), ''The Cambridge Handbook of Methods in Conversation Analysis'' (pp. 512–540). Cambridge University Press.

McHoul, A. (2025). Understanding (and) culture: Working out Sacks’s aphorism. ''Przegląd Socjologiczny'', 74(3), 29–36.

Meyer, C. (2022). The phenomenological foundations of ethnomethodology’s conceptions of sequentiality and indexicality: Harold Garfinkel’s references to Aron Gurwitsch’s ‘Field of Consciousness’. ''Gesprächsforschung - Online-Zeitschrift zur verbalen Interaktion'', 23, 111– 144.

Sacks, H. (1992). ''Lectures on Conversation''. Basil Blackwell.

Schegloff, E. A. (1968). Sequencing in conversational openings. ''American Anthropologist'', 70(6), 1075–1095.

Schegloff, E. A. (1992). Introduction. In H. Sacks: ''Lectures on Conversation, Vol. I'' (pp. ix–lii). Basil Blackwell.

Wieder, L. (1974). Telling the code. In R. Turner (Ed.), ''Ethnomethodology: Selected Readings'' (pp. 144–172). Penguin.

=== EMCA Wiki Bibliography items tagged with 'reflexivity' ===
{{#widget:Iframe
|url=https://emcawiki.net/bibtex/browser.php?keywords=reflexiv&bib=emca.bib
|border=0
}}

Reflexivity

2026-09-08T20:05:52Z

JakubMlynar:

{{Infobox cite
| Authors = '''Jakub Mlynář''' (HES-SO Valais-Wallis University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland, Switzerland) (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5206-3212)
| To cite = Mlynář, Jakub. (2026). Reflexivity. In Alexandra Gubina, Elliott M. Hoey & Chase Wesley Raymond (Eds.), ''Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics''. International Society for Conversation Analysis (ISCA). DOI: [ ]
}}

The notion of '''reflexivity''' as a constitutive property of naturally organized ordinary activities (see, e.g., Lynch, 2002; Czyżewski, 1994) provides a fundamental background for studies in IL and CA. In ethnomethodology, the essential reflexivity of actions (including ‘talk-in-interaction’) is closely related to their '''[[indexicality]]'''. Actions acquire sense in and through their practical embeddedness in specific ongoing situations or settings. While the situation provides sense for practical actions, it is not the case that their sense is fully determined by the '''[[Context|context]]'''. Practical actions simultaneously establish and give sense to the ongoing situation. Any action depends for its sense – indexically and reflexively – on the situation in which it happens, but it also immediately becomes part of this situation, to whose sense it contributes. It is in this way that the relationship between a setting (such as a recruitment interview or a board game) and a practice (a question, a move) is said to be reflexive (see Llewellyn, 2010; Liberman, 2013, ch. 3). As Wieder put it, “each utterance [gives] sense to the context and [obtains] sense from its place in that context” (1974: 163). Each formulation or account is part of the same setting that it ‘describes’, and any utterance is also a ‘circumstance’ or a ‘practical feature’ of the setting of activities in which it is produced (Garfinkel, 1967; Garfinkel & Sacks, 1970). Reflexivity is a way to characterize this double directionality as simultaneous and parallel, capturing “the acausal and non-mentalistic determination of meaningful action-in-context” (Lynch & Peyrot, 1992: 115).

The centrality of the reflexive character of practical actions can be seen as a bond between ethnomethodology and CA (Maynard & Gill, 2024). As pointed out by Schegloff (1992: xxxvi) and discussed by McHoul (2025), Sacks’ characterization of culture as “an apparatus for generating ''recognizable'' actions” is grounded in the reflexivity of social action: “… if the same procedures are used for generating as for detecting, that is perhaps as simple a solution to the problem of recognizability as is formulatable” (Sacks, 1992[I]: 226; original emphasis). The resonance becomes clear when this quote is compared with Garfinkel’s introduction of ethnomethodology’s “central recommendation … that the activities whereby members produce and manage settings of organized everyday affairs are identical with members’ procedures for making those settings ‘account-able’” (Garfinkel, 1967: 1).

A relatively simple example of the reflexive relationship between an object or an event (such as a piece of '''[[Advice|advice]]''') and its setting (such as a ‘consultation’) is the illustration of ‘gestalt contextures’ given by the phenomenologist Aron Gurwitsch (2010[1964]) and developed by Garfinkel (see Garfinkel, 2021; Lynch & Eisenmann, 2022; Meyer, 2022).

[[File:Mlynar reflexivity fig1.png]]

'''Figure 1: Two dots'''

Presenting a depiction similar to Figure 1, Gurwitsch observes that once we see the two points as “constituents of a unitary group”, which is “most likely to occur spontaneously when the points are in close proximity to one another”, we do “not see one point ''plus'' the other located a short distance away. Rather one point appears as the ''right member'', the other as the ''left member'' of the pair.” (Gurwitsch, 2010[1964]: 103; original emphasis) The ‘left-hand member’ gives sense to the ‘right-hand member’, and vice versa, and this perceived mutual relationship also reflexively gives sense to their recognizable unity as a pair. In a similar sense, to return to the previous example, giving advice co-constitutes a consultation as a specific activity, and advice as an action obtains its sense from being done within a consultation.

Elaborating Gurwitsch, Meyer (2022) demonstrates how this essential reflexivity of social action can be used to illuminate CA’s phenomena such as '''[[Adjacency pair|adjacency pairs]]''' (Schegloff, 1968; Sacks, 1992 – e.g., question–answer or greeting sequences): “Only when both pair members adopt a ‘functional significance’ in relation to one another the pair is actually established as pair – and only then a felicitous gestalt contexture for good continuation is realized.” (Meyer, 2022: 131) On the same subject, Lynch and Eisenmann (2022) add: “An adjacency pair made up, for example, of a greeting and return-greeting, an insult and a riposte, or a question and answer exhibits properties as a pair and not simply as one item followed by another. Although such paired utterances are composed of words, phrases, and sentences, they are produced and made evident through interactionally oriented practical work. A first pair part is not simply a sentence or token uttered by a speaker, it is a first member of a pair.” (p. 114)

Following Garfinkel’s transposition of gestalt phenomena from the perceptual domain to practical and interactional work (Lynch & Eisenmann, 2022), reflexivity captures that “situations, actions, and rules determine one another’s sense as constituent parts of a gestalt contexture” (Wieder, 1974: 170). Instead of advancing a ‘bucket theory’ (Heritage & Clayman, 2010) of '''[[Context|context]]''' as a space or time surrounding observable actions, the term highlights that the foundations of CA and IL are based on the ethnomethodological notion of gestalt ''contextures'' as reflexively organized ‘phenomenal fields’ of practical action.

'''Additional Related Entries:'''

* '''[[context]]'''
* '''[[first pair part]]'''
* '''[[indexicality]]'''
* '''[[multimodal Gestalt]]'''
* '''[[second pair part]]'''

'''Cited References:'''

Czyżewski, M. (1994). Reflexivity of actors versus reflexivity of accounts. ''Theory, Culture & Society'', 11(4), 161–168.

Garfinkel, H. (1967). ''Studies in Ethnomethodology''. Prentice-Hall.

Garfinkel, H. (2021). Ethnomethodological misreading of Aron Gurwitsch on the phenomenal field. ''Human Studies'', 44(1), 19–42.

Garfinkel, H., & Sacks, H. (1970). On formal structures of practical action. In J. C. McKinney & E. A. Tiryakian (Eds.), ''Theoretical Sociology: Perspectives and Developments'' (pp. 338–366). Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Gurwitsch, A. (2010 [1964]). ''The Field of Consciousness: Theme, Thematic Field, and Margin (The Collected Works of Aron Gurwitsch [1901–1973], Vol. III)''. Springer.

Heritage, J., & Clayman, S. E. (2010). ''Talk in Action: Interactions, Identities and Institutions''. Wiley-Blackwell.

Liberman, K. (2013). ''More Studies in Ethnomethodology''. SUNY Press.

Llewellyn, N. (2010). On the reflexivity between setting and practice: The ‘recruitment interview’. In Nick Llewellyn, Jon Hindmarsh (Eds.), ''Organisation, Interaction and Practice: Studies of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis'' (pp. 74–95). Cambridge University Press.

Lynch, M. (2000). Against reflexivity as an academic virtue and source of privileged knowledge. ''Theory, Culture and Society'', 17(3), 27–53.

Lynch, M., & Eisenmann, C. (2022). Transposing gestalt phenomena from visual fields to practical and interactional work: Garfinkel’s and Sacks’ social praxeology. ''Philosophia Scientiæ'', 26(3), 95–122.

Lynch, M., & Peyrot, M. (1992). Introduction: A reader’s guide to ethnomethodology. ''Qualitative Sociology'', 15(2), 113–122.

Maynard, D. W., & Gill, V. T. (2024). Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis, and the Study of Interaction in Everyday Life. In J. D. Robinson, R. Clift, K. H. Kendrick, & C. W. Raymond (Eds.), ''The Cambridge Handbook of Methods in Conversation Analysis'' (pp. 512–540). Cambridge University Press.

McHoul, A. (2025). Understanding (and) culture: Working out Sacks’s aphorism. ''Przegląd Socjologiczny'', 74(3), 29–36.

Meyer, C. (2022). The phenomenological foundations of ethnomethodology’s conceptions of sequentiality and indexicality: Harold Garfinkel’s references to Aron Gurwitsch’s ‘Field of Consciousness’. ''Gesprächsforschung - Online-Zeitschrift zur verbalen Interaktion'', 23, 111– 144.

Sacks, H. (1992). ''Lectures on Conversation''. Basil Blackwell.

Schegloff, E. A. (1968). Sequencing in conversational openings. ''American Anthropologist'', 70(6), 1075–1095.

Schegloff, E. A. (1992). Introduction. In H. Sacks: ''Lectures on Conversation, Vol. I'' (pp. ix–lii). Basil Blackwell.

Wieder, L. (1974). Telling the code. In R. Turner (Ed.), ''Ethnomethodology: Selected Readings'' (pp. 144–172). Penguin.

=== EMCA Wiki Bibliography items tagged with 'reflexivity' ===
{{#widget:Iframe
|url=https://emcawiki.net/bibtex/browser.php?keywords=reflexiv&bib=emca.bib
|border=0
}}

Reflexivity

2026-09-08T20:05:08Z

JakubMlynar: minor corrections, added related entries

{{Infobox cite
| Authors = '''Jakub Mlynář''' (HES-SO Valais-Wallis University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland, Switzerland) (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5206-3212)
| To cite = Mlynář, Jakub. (2026). Reflexivity. In Alexandra Gubina, Elliott M. Hoey & Chase Wesley Raymond (Eds.), ''Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics''. International Society for Conversation Analysis (ISCA). DOI: [ ]
}}

The notion of '''reflexivity''' as a constitutive property of naturally organized ordinary activities (see, e.g., Lynch, 2002; Czyżewski, 1994) provides a fundamental background for studies in IL and CA. In ethnomethodology, the essential reflexivity of actions (including ‘talk-in-interaction’) is closely related to their '''[[indexicality]]'''. Actions acquire sense in and through their practical embeddedness in specific ongoing situations or settings. While the situation provides sense for practical actions, it is not the case that their sense is fully determined by the '''[[Context|context]]'''. Practical actions simultaneously establish and give sense to the ongoing situation. Any action depends for its sense – indexically and reflexively – on the situation in which it happens, but it also immediately becomes part of this situation, to whose sense it contributes. It is in this way that the relationship between a setting (such as a recruitment interview or a board game) and a practice (a question, a move) is said to be reflexive (see Llewellyn, 2010; Liberman, 2013, ch. 3). As Wieder put it, “each utterance [gives] sense to the context and [obtains] sense from its place in that context” (1974: 163). Each formulation or account is part of the same setting that it ‘describes’, and any utterance is also a ‘circumstance’ or a ‘practical feature’ of the setting of activities in which it is produced (Garfinkel, 1967; Garfinkel & Sacks, 1970). Reflexivity is a way to characterize this double directionality as simultaneous and parallel, capturing “the acausal and non-mentalistic determination of meaningful action-in-context” (Lynch & Peyrot, 1992: 115).

The centrality of the reflexive character of practical actions can be seen as a bond between ethnomethodology and CA (Maynard & Gill, 2024). As pointed out by Schegloff (1992: xxxvi) and discussed by McHoul (2025), Sacks’ characterization of culture as “an apparatus for generating ''recognizable'' actions” is grounded in the reflexivity of social action: “… if the same procedures are used for generating as for detecting, that is perhaps as simple a solution to the problem of recognizability as is formulatable” (Sacks, 1992[I]: 226; original emphasis). The resonance becomes clear when this quote is compared with Garfinkel’s introduction of ethnomethodology’s “central recommendation … that the activities whereby members produce and manage settings of organized everyday affairs are identical with members’ procedures for making those settings ‘account-able’” (Garfinkel, 1967: 1).

A relatively simple example of the reflexive relationship between an object or an event (such as a piece of '''[[Advice|advice]]''') and its setting (such as a ‘consultation’) is the illustration of ‘gestalt contextures’ given by the phenomenologist Aron Gurwitsch (2010[1964]) and developed by Garfinkel (see Garfinkel, 2021; Lynch & Eisenmann, 2022; Meyer, 2022).

[[File:Mlynar reflexivity fig1.png]]

'''Figure 1: Two dots'''

Presenting a depiction similar to Figure 1, Gurwitsch observes that once we see the two points as “constituents of a unitary group”, which is “most likely to occur spontaneously when the points are in close proximity to one another”, we do “not see one point ''plus'' the other located a short distance away. Rather one point appears as the ''right member'', the other as the ''left member'' of the pair.” (Gurwitsch, 2010[1964]: 103; original emphasis) The ‘left-hand member’ gives sense to the ‘right-hand member’, and vice versa, and this perceived mutual relationship also reflexively gives sense to their recognizable unity as a pair. In a similar sense, to return to the previous example, giving advice co-constitutes a consultation as a specific activity, and advice as an action obtains its sense from being done within a consultation.

Elaborating Gurwitsch, Meyer (2022) demonstrates how this essential reflexivity of social action can be used to illuminate CA’s phenomena such as '''[[Adjacency pair|adjacency pairs]]''' (Schegloff, 1968; Sacks, 1992 – e.g., question–answer or greeting sequences): “Only when both pair members adopt a ‘functional significance’ in relation to one another the pair is actually established as pair – and only then a felicitous gestalt contexture for good continuation is realized.” (Meyer, 2022: 131) On the same subject, Lynch and Eisenmann (2022) add: “An adjacency pair made up, for example, of a greeting and return-greeting, an insult and a riposte, or a question and answer exhibits properties as a pair and not simply as one item followed by another. Although such paired utterances are composed of words, phrases, and sentences, they are produced and made evident through interactionally oriented practical work. A first pair part is not simply a sentence or token uttered by a speaker, it is a first member of a pair.” (p. 114)

Following Garfinkel’s transposition of gestalt phenomena from the perceptual domain to practical and interactional work (Lynch & Eisenmann, 2022), reflexivity captures that “situations, actions, and rules determine one another’s sense as constituent parts of a gestalt contexture” (Wieder, 1974: 170). Instead of advancing a ‘bucket theory’ (Heritage & Clayman, 2010) of '''[[Context|context]]''' as a space or time surrounding observable actions, the term highlights that the foundations of CA and IL are based on the ethnomethodological notion of gestalt ''contextures'' as reflexively organized ‘phenomenal fields’ of practical action.

'''Additional Related Entries:'''

* '''[[context]]'''
* '''[[first pair part]]'''
* '''[[indexicality]]'''
* '''[[multimodal gestalt]]'''
* '''[[second pair part]]'''

'''Cited References:'''

Czyżewski, M. (1994). Reflexivity of actors versus reflexivity of accounts. ''Theory, Culture & Society'', 11(4), 161–168.

Garfinkel, H. (1967). ''Studies in Ethnomethodology''. Prentice-Hall.

Garfinkel, H. (2021). Ethnomethodological misreading of Aron Gurwitsch on the phenomenal field. ''Human Studies'', 44(1), 19–42.

Garfinkel, H., & Sacks, H. (1970). On formal structures of practical action. In J. C. McKinney & E. A. Tiryakian (Eds.), ''Theoretical Sociology: Perspectives and Developments'' (pp. 338–366). Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Gurwitsch, A. (2010 [1964]). ''The Field of Consciousness: Theme, Thematic Field, and Margin (The Collected Works of Aron Gurwitsch [1901–1973], Vol. III)''. Springer.

Heritage, J., & Clayman, S. E. (2010). ''Talk in Action: Interactions, Identities and Institutions''. Wiley-Blackwell.

Liberman, K. (2013). ''More Studies in Ethnomethodology''. SUNY Press.

Llewellyn, N. (2010). On the reflexivity between setting and practice: The ‘recruitment interview’. In Nick Llewellyn, Jon Hindmarsh (Eds.), ''Organisation, Interaction and Practice: Studies of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis'' (pp. 74–95). Cambridge University Press.

Lynch, M. (2000). Against reflexivity as an academic virtue and source of privileged knowledge. ''Theory, Culture and Society'', 17(3), 27–53.

Lynch, M., & Eisenmann, C. (2022). Transposing gestalt phenomena from visual fields to practical and interactional work: Garfinkel’s and Sacks’ social praxeology. ''Philosophia Scientiæ'', 26(3), 95–122.

Lynch, M., & Peyrot, M. (1992). Introduction: A reader’s guide to ethnomethodology. ''Qualitative Sociology'', 15(2), 113–122.

Maynard, D. W., & Gill, V. T. (2024). Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis, and the Study of Interaction in Everyday Life. In J. D. Robinson, R. Clift, K. H. Kendrick, & C. W. Raymond (Eds.), ''The Cambridge Handbook of Methods in Conversation Analysis'' (pp. 512–540). Cambridge University Press.

McHoul, A. (2025). Understanding (and) culture: Working out Sacks’s aphorism. ''Przegląd Socjologiczny'', 74(3), 29–36.

Meyer, C. (2022). The phenomenological foundations of ethnomethodology’s conceptions of sequentiality and indexicality: Harold Garfinkel’s references to Aron Gurwitsch’s ‘Field of Consciousness’. ''Gesprächsforschung - Online-Zeitschrift zur verbalen Interaktion'', 23, 111– 144.

Sacks, H. (1992). ''Lectures on Conversation''. Basil Blackwell.

Schegloff, E. A. (1968). Sequencing in conversational openings. ''American Anthropologist'', 70(6), 1075–1095.

Schegloff, E. A. (1992). Introduction. In H. Sacks: ''Lectures on Conversation, Vol. I'' (pp. ix–lii). Basil Blackwell.

Wieder, L. (1974). Telling the code. In R. Turner (Ed.), ''Ethnomethodology: Selected Readings'' (pp. 144–172). Penguin.

=== EMCA Wiki Bibliography items tagged with 'reflexivity' ===
{{#widget:Iframe
|url=https://emcawiki.net/bibtex/browser.php?keywords=reflexiv&bib=emca.bib
|border=0
}}

Indexing

2026-09-08T19:50:25Z

JakubMlynar:

{{Infobox cite
| Authors = '''Jakub Mlynář''' (HES-SO Valais-Wallis University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland, Switzerland) (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5206-3212)
| To cite = Mlynář, Jakub. (2026). Indexing. In Alexandra Gubina, Elliott M. Hoey & Chase Wesley Raymond (Eds.), ''Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics''. International Society for Conversation Analysis (ISCA). DOI: [ ]
}}

The verb '''indexing''' is used to encompass relationships between observable phenomena and their directly unobservable correlates. The term is used in analyses of particular features of data under examination, and signposts that a feature – e.g., an uttered phrase or a type of produced gesture – makes relevant an analytical orientation to a background structure. Thus, in line with a broader sociolinguistic perspective, “meaning [is] indexed by linguistic structures” (Ochs 1992: 228). Taking this orientation, contemporary studies in IL and CA attended to, for example, how turn-final ''or'' indexes uncertainty (Drake 2015) and ''do''-constructions index contrast (Raymond 2017) in English, how ''ich dachte'' indexes discrepant assumptions (Depperman & Reineke 2020) and responsive ''(das) stimmt'' indexes a change in epistemic access (Betz 2015) in German, and how the Danish token ''n↑å↓'' indexes a perceptual shift after periods of intense scrutiny (Heinemann 2016).

One of the earliest uses of the term in CA-adjacent discourse can be found in Erving Goffman’s ''Forms of Talk'' (1981), who discusses '''[[Response cry|response cries]]''' – in a text first published in 1978 – as possibly belonging to a category of “signs meant to be taken to index directly the state of the transmitter” (Goffman 1981: 116) – namely states such as “feelings” (ibid., p. 20) and other “psychic states” (ibid., p. 111). Note that according to Goffman the indexing of inner states is both intentionally produced by the speaker (“meant”) and interpreted by the hearer (“taken”) but is still relatively “direct” in the case of response cries. This might not be so with other practices that have been studied in CA and IL. Heritage (1984) referred to and appropriated Goffman’s (1981) use of the term in his early discussion of ''oh'' as a '''[[Change-of-state token|change-of-state token]]''' – as Koivisto (2023) briefly puts it in the associated Encyclopedia entry, “''oh'' indexes a change in state”. Similarly, in a later study by Heritage and Raymond (2005), specific formats of talk-in-interaction – produced and made sense of in the particulars of the sequential environment – are proposed to be indexing '''[[Epistemic Authority|epistemic authority]]''' (see also Wu 2018).

To illustrate the purpose of the term, consider the following transcript from a paper by Kaneyasu and Iwasaki (2017) on indexing “entrustment” based on a social relationship or a shared cultural knowledge. The authors argue that the Japanese formulaic construction ''N da yo N'' “foregrounds and takes advantage [of entrustment] in order to reaffirm a close mutual relationship” (p. 417). The excerpt reproduced below is from a movie ''Zatoichi''.

(1) Face (film 'Zatoichi', 2003)

(Shin (a male) and Osei (a male disguised as a female) are facing each other in a small bath tub.)

[[File:Mlynar indexing fig1.png]]

In this movie scene, Shinkichi admires Kiyotaroo’s disguise as Osei, attributing the beauty to the use of makeup. Osei partially disagrees, stressing that true beauty comes from natural facial features (line 7). The authors propose that the common knowledge being indexed here by the ''N da yo N'' construction is that “the natural features of one’s face are considered crucial to how beautiful the person would look with makeup” (p. 412). The linguistic construction thus obtains its meaning in and through its reference to an underlying structure – in this instance, to the relevant common knowledge and entrustment that is being expressed or indexed using the formulaic phrase.

The term indexing as employed in CA and IL also became a subject of discussion in the context of '''[[Epistemics|epistemics]]''' (e.g., Macbeth et al., 2016; Heritage, 2018, 2024; Button et al. 2022). One distinction often noted in this debate is the difference between indexing and '''[[Indexicality|indexicality]]'''. While the notion of indexicality specifically avoids attributing ‘meaning’ to ‘signed objects’ (such as turns at talk), the notion of indexing has been linked to Peirce’s (see Burks 1949) original concept of ‘indexes’ as a category of signs (alongside ‘icons’ and ‘symbols’).

'''Additional Related Entries:'''

* '''[[change-of-state token]]'''
* '''[[epistemics]]'''
* '''[[epistemic authority]]'''
* '''[[epistemic stance]]'''
* '''[[indexicality]]'''

'''Cited References:'''

Betz, E. M. (2015). Indexing epistemic access through different confirmation formats: Uses of responsive ''(das) stimmt'' in German interaction. ''Journal of Pragmatics'', 87, 251–266.

Burks, A. W. (1949). Icon, Index, and Symbol. ''Philosophy and Phenomenological Research'', 9(4), 673–689.

Button, G., Lynch, M., & Sharrock, W. (2022). ''Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis and Constructive Analysis: On Formal Structures of Practical Action''. Routledge.

Deppermann, A., & Reineke, S. (2020). Practices of indexing discrepant assumptions with German ich dachte (‘I thought’) in talk-in-interaction. ''Functions of Language'', 27(2), 113–142.

Drake, V. (2015). Indexing uncertainty: The case of turn-final ''or''. ''Research on Language and Social Interaction'', 48(3), 301–318.

Goffman, E. (1981). ''Forms of Talk''. Basil Blackwell.

Heinemann, T. (2016). From ‘looking’ to ‘seeing’: Indexing delayed intelligibility of an object with the Danish change-of-state token ''n↑å↓:''. ''Journal of Pragmatics'', 104, 108–132.

Heritage, J. (1984). A change-of-state token and aspects of its sequential placement. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), ''Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis'' (pp. 299–345). Cambridge University Press.

Heritage, J. (2018). The ubiquity of epistemics: A rebuttal to the ‘epistemics of epistemics’ group. ''Discourse Studies'', 20(1), 14–56.

Heritage, J. (2024). The epistemics of epistemics: Validating claims about epistemic stance in conversation analysis. In J. D. Robinson, R. Clift, K. H. Kendrick, & C. W. Raymond (Eds.), ''The Cambridge Handbook of Methods in Conversation Analysis'' (pp. 419–451). Cambridge University Press.

Heritage, J., & Raymond, G. (2005). The terms of agreement: Indexing epistemic authority and subordination in assessment sequences. ''Social Psychology Quarterly'', 68(1), 15–38.

Koivisto, A. (2023). Change-of-state token. In A. Gubina, E. M. Hoey & C. W. Raymond (Eds.), ''Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics''. International Society for Conversation Analysis (ISCA).

Macbeth, D., Wong, J., & Lynch, M. (2016). The story of ‘Oh’, Part 1: Indexing structure, animating transcript. ''Discourse Studies'', 18(5), 550–573

Ochs, E. (1992). Indexing gender. In A. Duranti & C. Goodwin (Eds.), ''Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon'' (pp. 335–358). Cambridge University Press.

Raymond, C. W. (2017). Indexing a contrast: The ''do''-construction in English conversation. ''Journal of Pragmatics'', 118, 22–37.

Wu, R.-J. R. (2018). Indexing epistemic authority/primacy in Mandarin conversation: ''aiyou''-prefacing as an interactional resource. ''Journal of Pragmatics'', 131, 30–53.

=== EMCA Wiki Bibliography items tagged with 'indexing' ===
{{#widget:Iframe
|url=https://emcawiki.net/bibtex/browser.php?keywords=index&bib=emca.bib
|border=0
}}

Indexing

2026-09-08T19:47:11Z

JakubMlynar:

{{Infobox cite
| Authors = '''Jakub Mlynář''' (HES-SO Valais-Wallis University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland, Switzerland) (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5206-3212)
| To cite = Mlynář, Jakub. (2026). Indexing. In Alexandra Gubina, Elliott M. Hoey & Chase Wesley Raymond (Eds.), ''Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics''. International Society for Conversation Analysis (ISCA). DOI: [ ]
}}

The verb '''indexing''' is used to encompass relationships between observable phenomena and their directly unobservable correlates. The term is used in analyses of particular features of data under examination, and signposts that a feature – e.g., an uttered phrase or a type of produced gesture – makes relevant an analytical orientation to a background structure. Thus, in line with a broader sociolinguistic perspective, “meaning [is] indexed by linguistic structures” (Ochs 1992: 228). Taking this orientation, contemporary studies in IL and CA attended to, for example, how turn-final ''or'' indexes uncertainty (Drake 2015) and ''do''-constructions index contrast (Raymond 2017) in English, how ''ich dachte'' indexes discrepant assumptions (Depperman & Reineke 2020) and responsive ''(das) stimmt'' indexes a change in epistemic access (Betz 2015) in German, and how the Danish token ''n↑å↓'' indexes a perceptual shift after periods of intense scrutiny (Heinemann 2016).

One of the earliest uses of the term in CA-adjacent discourse can be found in Erving Goffman’s ''Forms of Talk'' (1981), who discusses '''[[Response cry|response cries]]''' – in a text first published in 1978 – as possibly belonging to a category of “signs meant to be taken to index directly the state of the transmitter” (Goffman 1981: 116) – namely states such as “feelings” (ibid., p. 20) and other “psychic states” (ibid., p. 111). Note that according to Goffman the indexing of inner states is both intentionally produced by the speaker (“meant”) and interpreted by the hearer (“taken”) but is still relatively “direct” in the case of response cries. This might not be so with other practices that have been studied in CA and IL. Heritage (1984) referred to and appropriated Goffman’s (1981) use of the term in his early discussion of ''oh'' as a '''[[Change-of-state token|change-of-state token]]''' – as Koivisto (2023) briefly puts it in the associated Encyclopedia entry, “''oh'' indexes a change in state”. Similarly, in a later study by Heritage and Raymond (2005), specific formats of talk-in-interaction – produced and made sense of in the particulars of the sequential environment – are proposed to be indexing '''[[Epistemic Authority|epistemic authority]]''' (see also Wu 2018).

To illustrate the purpose of the term, consider the following transcript from a paper by Kaneyasu and Iwasaki (2017) on indexing “entrustment” based on a social relationship or a shared cultural knowledge. The authors argue that the Japanese formulaic construction ''N da yo N'' “foregrounds and takes advantage [of entrustment] in order to reaffirm a close mutual relationship” (p. 417). The excerpt reproduced below is from a movie ''Zatoichi''.

(1) Face (film 'Zatoichi', 2003)

(Shin (a male) and Osei (a male disguised as a female) are facing each other in a small bath tub.)

[[File:Mlynar indexing fig1.png]]

In this movie scene, Shinkichi admires Kiyotaroo’s disguise as Osei, attributing the beauty to the use of makeup. Osei partially disagrees, stressing that true beauty comes from natural facial features (line 7). The authors propose that the common knowledge being indexed here by the ''N da yo N'' construction is that “the natural features of one’s face are considered crucial to how beautiful the person would look with makeup” (p. 412). The linguistic construction thus obtains its meaning in and through its reference to an underlying structure – in this instance, to the relevant common knowledge and entrustment that is being expressed or indexed using the formulaic phrase.

The term indexing as employed in CA and IL also became a subject of discussion in the context of '''[[Epistemics|epistemics]]''' (e.g., Macbeth et al., 2016; Heritage, 2018, 2024; Button et al. 2022). One distinction often noted in this debate is the difference between indexing and '''[[Indexicality|indexicality]]'''. While the notion of indexicality specifically avoids attributing “meaning” to “signed objects” (such as turns at talk), the notion of indexing has been linked to Peirce’s (see Burks 1949) original concept of “indexes” as a category of signs (alongside “icons” and “symbols”).

'''Additional Related Entries:'''

* '''[[change-of-state token]]'''
* '''[[epistemics]]'''
* '''[[epistemic authority]]'''
* '''[[epistemic stance]]'''
* '''[[indexicality]]'''

'''Cited References:'''

Betz, E. M. (2015). Indexing epistemic access through different confirmation formats: Uses of responsive ''(das) stimmt'' in German interaction. ''Journal of Pragmatics'', 87, 251–266.

Burks, A. W. (1949). Icon, Index, and Symbol. ''Philosophy and Phenomenological Research'', 9(4), 673–689.

Button, G., Lynch, M., & Sharrock, W. (2022). ''Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis and Constructive Analysis: On Formal Structures of Practical Action''. Routledge.

Deppermann, A., & Reineke, S. (2020). Practices of indexing discrepant assumptions with German ich dachte (‘I thought’) in talk-in-interaction. ''Functions of Language'', 27(2), 113–142.

Drake, V. (2015). Indexing uncertainty: The case of turn-final ''or''. ''Research on Language and Social Interaction'', 48(3), 301–318.

Goffman, E. (1981). ''Forms of Talk''. Basil Blackwell.

Heinemann, T. (2016). From ‘looking’ to ‘seeing’: Indexing delayed intelligibility of an object with the Danish change-of-state token ''n↑å↓:''. ''Journal of Pragmatics'', 104, 108–132.

Heritage, J. (1984). A change-of-state token and aspects of its sequential placement. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), ''Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis'' (pp. 299–345). Cambridge University Press.

Heritage, J. (2018). The ubiquity of epistemics: A rebuttal to the ‘epistemics of epistemics’ group. ''Discourse Studies'', 20(1), 14–56.

Heritage, J. (2024). The epistemics of epistemics: Validating claims about epistemic stance in conversation analysis. In J. D. Robinson, R. Clift, K. H. Kendrick, & C. W. Raymond (Eds.), ''The Cambridge Handbook of Methods in Conversation Analysis'' (pp. 419–451). Cambridge University Press.

Heritage, J., & Raymond, G. (2005). The terms of agreement: Indexing epistemic authority and subordination in assessment sequences. ''Social Psychology Quarterly'', 68(1), 15–38.

Koivisto, A. (2023). Change-of-state token. In A. Gubina, E. M. Hoey & C. W. Raymond (Eds.), ''Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics''. International Society for Conversation Analysis (ISCA).

Macbeth, D., Wong, J., & Lynch, M. (2016). The story of ‘Oh’, Part 1: Indexing structure, animating transcript. ''Discourse Studies'', 18(5), 550–573

Ochs, E. (1992). Indexing gender. In A. Duranti & C. Goodwin (Eds.), ''Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon'' (pp. 335–358). Cambridge University Press.

Raymond, C. W. (2017). Indexing a contrast: The ''do''-construction in English conversation. ''Journal of Pragmatics'', 118, 22–37.

Wu, R.-J. R. (2018). Indexing epistemic authority/primacy in Mandarin conversation: ''aiyou''-prefacing as an interactional resource. ''Journal of Pragmatics'', 131, 30–53.

=== EMCA Wiki Bibliography items tagged with 'indexing' ===
{{#widget:Iframe
|url=https://emcawiki.net/bibtex/browser.php?keywords=index&bib=emca.bib
|border=0
}}

Reciprocity

2026-09-03T15:04:18Z

JakubMlynar:

{{Infobox cite
| Authors = '''Jakub Mlynář''' (HES-SO Valais-Wallis University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland, Switzerland) (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5206-3212) & '''Yeji Rieser''' (University of Basel, Switzerland) (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6582-150X)
| To cite = Mlynář, Jakub, & Rieser, Yeji. (2026). Reciprocity. In Alexandra Gubina, Elliott M. Hoey & Chase Wesley Raymond (Eds.), ''Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics''. International Society for Conversation Analysis (ISCA). DOI: [ ]
}}

The term '''reciprocity''' is used in a wide variety of ways – addressing a prerequisite for social interaction; referring to the sequential production of relevant next actions; as well as describing phenomena implicating processes of mutual exchange (literally or metaphorically). Reciprocity is taken to be a fundamental precondition of sociality and an assumption for its analytical grasp, but also a produced phenomenon of order.

Schutz’s (1962) notion of “reciprocity of perspectives” was part of his attempt to explain how phenomenology can move from an individual consciousness to the social world. In his view, two basic idealizations of common-sense thinking overcome the asymmetrical access to knowledge about the world and the differences in our personal backgrounds: (1) the interchangeability of the standpoints, and (2) the congruency of the system of relevances. In other words, one takes for granted that if one were to exchange positions with another person, they would perceive things in the same way, and the other takes this for granted too. Furthermore, one also takes for granted that the manner in which one perceives things does not depend on any unique personal characteristics that are not relevant for the practical purposes at hand, and the other person takes this for granted too. From the perspective of ethnomethodology and CA, reciprocity is not just a given assumption or an abstract principle which makes social interaction possible. Instead, it is '''[[Reflexivity|reflexively]]''' achieved in the very ways in which members make sense of and make recognizable their actions to one another such that they can engage in concerted '''[[Activity|activities]]''', each and every time, in their local and practical circumstances (Mair, 2025). The Schutzian conception was, in different ways, an inspiration for early ethnomethodology (Cicourel, 1974; Garfinkel, 1963) and occasionally appears in more recent studies. For example, following Garfinkel (1963), Rawls and David (2006) use the notion of “(mutual) reciprocity” mostly as a synonym or proxy for “trust”. Vom Lehn (2019), in a video-based CA study, refers to Schutz in his analysis of performing optometric tests where the visual perspective of the currently assessed client is measurably interchangeable with that of a standardized client.

Nevertheless, in more recent works, the phenomenological notion of “reciprocity of perspectives” seems to be more often elaborated under the rubric of “intersubjectivity” (e.g., Deppermann, 2015) and as providing a historical background for the conception of sequentiality: Goodwin and Heritage (1990) describe '''[[Adjacency pair|adjacency pair]]''' organization as a “framework of reciprocal conduct” where “[e]ach participant must analyze the developing course of others’ actions in order to produce appropriate reciprocal action” (p. 288). In this sense, reciprocity is accountable in the details of the timely and adequate production of a '''[[Second-pair part|second-pair part]]''' in response to a '''[[First-pair part|first-pair part]]''' – for example, a greeting (e.g., “Hello”) is routinely responded to with a reciprocal greeting. The greeting is not always composed of a single '''[[Turn-constructional unit (TCU)|turn-constructional unit (TCU)]] ''' but can also consist of a “how are you” which opens a sequence in itself to be responded to with a second-pair part and also reciprocated through the initiation of a second sequence. When it comes to these greeting sequences, what Schegloff (2007) calls “reciprocal or exchange sequences” (pp. 195–207), he observes that the reciprocal nature of the second sequence is accountable in the design of the turn, e.g., “how about you” instead of a verbatim repeat of “how are you.” Therefore, the accountability of a second sequence as a reciprocal does not depend on its temporally successive position per se but is a produced order by the participants. Moreover, Schegloff (2007) notes that while such sequences are routinely done reciprocally, their relevance is worked out in local circumstances where sometimes, e.g., depending on categorial memberships and/or specific institutional settings, it is more relevant to not reciprocate such sequences. This is what Albert and Raymond (2019) illustrate in their analysis of the US president Trump’s greeting sequences with multiple recipients in succession.

(1) [[http://bit.ly/gh-ex2 Video available here]] (Albert & Raymond, 2019: 72)

[[File:Mlynar_reciprocity_fig1.png]]

In this stage-managed situation, the authors point out that the recipients do not orient to reciprocating the greeting sequence nor does Trump himself anticipate one. The non-reciprocity of the greeting sequence is reciprocally coordinated in the way by which the recipient’s response is minimally produced, and Trump, already during this response, moves on to greeting the next person in line. Beyond human communication, “interactional reciprocity” has also been studied in human–dog interactions, suggesting that dogs orient to the lack of reciprocity from their owners in terms of a missing next action and employ a set of practices to pursue it (Simonen & Lohi, 2021).

Turning to the most literal sense of the term, the following example is taken from a study that belongs to a rather small number of texts that treat “reciprocity” as a phenomenon in its own right, i.e., as a transactional process of giving and taking. Llewellyn (2011) analyses the phenomenon of “picking up the bill” as a case of a gift exchange where the benefactor and the beneficiary orient to the norm of reciprocity. The data comes from video-recordings of a payment desk at a gallery where customers approach to pay for tickets. In Extract II below, two customers (C1, C2) approach the desk to buy tickets. The focus is on how C1 accounts for her acceptance of C2 picking up the bill by offering a reciprocation in response (cf. Clayman & Heritage, 2014, on reciprocations by beneficiaries as a type of appreciative response).

(2) (Llewellyn, 2011: 729)

[[File:Mlynar_reciprocity_fig2.png]]

At the desk, while it is C1 who verbalizes the request to the staff, it is C2 who is quicker to prepare the 20 dollar note to pay (lines 1–8). The possibility that this could be C2 “picking up the bill” is not immediately accepted by C1 who, during the omitted lines (lines 9–15), engages in an interaction with the staff and proceeds to pay her own sum. It is at this point that C2, in line 18, further advances the note on the desk to a space where the staff can readily take it. Thus, C2 accountably produces the action of “picking up the bill” which C1 ultimately accepts with an expression of gratitude such as by gazing at her and touching her hand. At this sequential position, C1 suggests that they get coffee (line 22) as a way of accounting for her acceptance by means of invoking the norm of reciprocity – i.e., since C2 has given her the gift of picking up the bill, she will return it in the form of buying coffee. Although the excerpt focuses on the phenomenon of reciprocity as a norm invoked in gift exchange sequences, it also illustrates the two earlier notions of reciprocity at work. The very intelligibility of any action – greetings, offers, requests, “drawing attention to the note”, etc. – relies on the reciprocity of perspectives being taken for granted by the participants, and is achieved in the appropriate sequential positioning of embodied conduct.

'''Additional Related Entries:'''

* '''[[Adjacency pair|adjacency pair]]'''
* '''[[epistemics]]'''
* '''[[epistemic authority]]'''
* '''[[epistemic stance]]'''
* '''[[indexing]]'''
* '''[[intersubjectivity]]'''

'''Cited References:'''

Albert, S. & Raymond, C. W. (2019). Conversation analysis at the ‘middle region’ of public life: Greetings and the interactional construction of Donald Trump's political persona. ''Language & Communication'', 69, 67–83.

Cicourel, A. V. (1974). ''Cognitive Sociology: Language and Meaning in Social Interaction''. Penguin.

Clayman, S. E. & Heritage, J. (2014). Benefactors and beneficiaries: Benefactive status and stance in the management of offers and requests. In P. Drew & E. Couper-Kuhlen (Eds.), ''Requesting in Social Interaction'' (pp. 55–86). John Benjamins.

Deppermann, A. (2015). When recipient design fails: Egocentric turn-design of instructions in driving school lessons leading to breakdowns of intersubjectivity. ''Gesprächsforschung: Online-Zeitschrift zur verbalen Interaktion'', 16, 63–101.

Garfinkel, H. (1963). A conception of, and experiments with, “trust” as a condition of stable concerted actions. In O. J. Harvey (Ed.), ''Motivation and Social Interaction: Cognitive Determinants'' (pp. 187–238). Ronald Press.

Goodwin, C. & Heritage, J. (1990). Conversation analysis. ''Annual Review of Anthropology'', 19, 283–307.

Llewellyn, N. (2011). The gift in interaction: a study of “picking-up the bill”. ''British Journal of Sociology'', 62(4), 718–738.

Mair, M. (2025). Editorial: Ethnomethodological readings of philosophy, social theory, and the social sciences. In A. P. Carlin, A. Dennis, K. N. Jenkings, O. Lindwall & M. Mair (Eds.), ''The Routledge International Handbook of Ethnomethodology'' (pp. 91–103). Routledge.

Rawls, A. W. & David, G. C. (2005). Accountably other: Trust, reciprocity, and exclusion in a context of situated practice. ''Human Studies'', 28(4), 469–497.

Schegloff, E. A. (2007). ''Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis''. Cambridge University Press.

Simonen, M., & Lohi, H. (2021). Interactional reciprocity in human–dog interaction. In J. Lindström, R. Laury, A. Peräkylä & M.-L. Sorjonen (Eds.), ''Intersubjectivity in Action: Studies in Language and Social Interaction'' (pp. 397–428). John Benjamins.

vom Lehn, D. (2019). From Garfinkel’s ‘experiments in miniature’ to the ethnomethodological analysis of interaction. ''Human Studies'', 42(2), 305–326.

=== EMCA Wiki Bibliography items tagged with 'reciprocity' ===
{{#widget:Iframe
|url=https://emcawiki.net/bibtex/browser.php?keywords=reciproc&bib=emca.bib
|border=0
}}

Reciprocity

2026-09-03T15:03:10Z

JakubMlynar:

{{Infobox cite
| Authors = '''Jakub Mlynář''' (HES-SO Valais-Wallis University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland, Switzerland) (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5206-3212) & '''Yeji Rieser''' (University of Basel, Switzerland) (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6582-150X)
| To cite = Mlynář, Jakub, & Rieser, Yeji. (2026). Reciprocity. In Alexandra Gubina, Elliott M. Hoey & Chase Wesley Raymond (Eds.), ''Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics''. International Society for Conversation Analysis (ISCA). DOI: [ ]
}}

The term '''reciprocity''' is used in a wide variety of ways – addressing a prerequisite for social interaction; referring to the sequential production of relevant next actions; as well as describing phenomena implicating processes of mutual exchange (literally or metaphorically). Reciprocity is taken to be a fundamental precondition of sociality and an assumption for its analytical grasp, but also a produced phenomenon of order.

Schutz’s (1962) notion of “reciprocity of perspectives” was part of his attempt to explain how phenomenology can move from an individual consciousness to the social world. In his view, two basic idealizations of common-sense thinking overcome the asymmetrical access to knowledge about the world and the differences in our personal backgrounds: (1) the interchangeability of the standpoints, and (2) the congruency of the system of relevances. In other words, one takes for granted that if one were to exchange positions with another person, they would perceive things in the same way, and the other takes this for granted too. Furthermore, one also takes for granted that the manner in which one perceives things does not depend on any unique personal characteristics that are not relevant for the practical purposes at hand, and the other person takes this for granted too. From the perspective of ethnomethodology and CA, reciprocity is not just a given assumption or an abstract principle which makes social interaction possible. Instead, it is '''[[Reflexivity|reflexively]]''' achieved in the very ways in which members make sense of and make recognizable their actions to one another such that they can engage in concerted '''[[Activity|activities]]''', each and every time, in their local and practical circumstances (Mair, 2025). The Schutzian conception was, in different ways, an inspiration for early ethnomethodology (Cicourel, 1974; Garfinkel, 1963) and occasionally appears in more recent studies. For example, following Garfinkel (1963), Rawls and David (2006) use the notion of “(mutual) reciprocity” mostly as a synonym or proxy for “trust”. Vom Lehn (2019), in a video-based CA study, refers to Schutz in his analysis of performing optometric tests where the visual perspective of the currently assessed client is measurably interchangeable with that of a standardized client.

Nevertheless, in more recent works, the phenomenological notion of “reciprocity of perspectives” seems to be more often elaborated under the rubric of “intersubjectivity” (e.g., Deppermann, 2015) and as providing a historical background for the conception of sequentiality: Goodwin and Heritage (1990) describe '''[[Adjacency pair|adjacency pair]]''' organization as a “framework of reciprocal conduct” where “[e]ach participant must analyze the developing course of others’ actions in order to produce appropriate reciprocal action” (p. 288). In this sense, reciprocity is accountable in the details of the timely and adequate production of a '''[[Second-pair part|second-pair part]]''' in response to a '''[[First-pair part|first-pair part]]''' – for example, a greeting (e.g., “Hello”) is routinely responded to with a reciprocal greeting. The greeting is not always composed of a single '''[[Turn-constructional unit (TCU)|turn-constructional unit (TCU)]] ''' but can also consist of a “how are you” which opens a sequence in itself to be responded to with a second-pair part and also reciprocated through the initiation of a second sequence. When it comes to these greeting sequences, what Schegloff (2007) calls “reciprocal or exchange sequences” (pp. 195–207), he observes that the reciprocal nature of the second sequence is accountable in the design of the turn, e.g., “how about you” instead of a verbatim repeat of “how are you.” Therefore, the accountability of a second sequence as a reciprocal does not depend on its temporally successive position per se but is a produced order by the participants. Moreover, Schegloff (2007) notes that while such sequences are routinely done reciprocally, their relevance is worked out in local circumstances where sometimes, e.g., depending on categorial memberships and/or specific institutional settings, it is more relevant to not reciprocate such sequences. This is what Albert and Raymond (2019) illustrate in their analysis of the US president Trump’s greeting sequences with multiple recipients in succession.

(1) [[http://bit.ly/gh-ex2 Video available here]] (Albert & Raymond, 2019: 72)

[[File:Mlynar_reciprocity_fig1.png]]

In this stage-managed situation, the authors point out that the recipients do not orient to reciprocating the greeting sequence nor does Trump himself anticipate one. The non-reciprocity of the greeting sequence is reciprocally coordinated in the way by which the recipient’s response is minimally produced, and Trump, already during this response, moves on to greeting the next person in line. Beyond human communication, “interactional reciprocity” has also been studied in human–dog interactions, suggesting that dogs orient to the lack of reciprocity from their owners in terms of a missing next action and employ a set of practices to pursue it (Simonen & Lohi, 2021).

Turning to the most literal sense of the term, the following example is taken from a study that belongs to a rather small number of texts that treat “reciprocity” as a phenomenon in its own right, i.e., as a transactional process of giving and taking. Llewellyn (2011) analyses the phenomenon of “picking up the bill” as a case of a gift exchange where the benefactor and the beneficiary orient to the norm of reciprocity. The data comes from video-recordings of a payment desk at a gallery where customers approach to pay for tickets. In Extract II below, two customers (C1, C2) approach the desk to buy tickets. The focus is on how C1 accounts for her acceptance of C2 picking up the bill by offering a reciprocation in response (cf. Clayman & Heritage, 2014, on reciprocations by beneficiaries as a type of appreciative response).

(2) (Llewellyn, 2011: 729)

[[File:Mlynar_reciprocity_fig2.png]]

At the desk, while it is C1 who verbalizes the request to the staff, it is C2 who is quicker to prepare the 20 dollar note to pay (lines 1–8). The possibility that this could be C2 “picking up the bill” is not immediately accepted by C1 who, during the omitted lines (lines 9–15), engages in an interaction with the staff and proceeds to pay her own sum. It is at this point that C2, in line 18, further advances the note on the desk to a space where the staff can readily take it. Thus, C2 accountably produces the action of “picking up the bill” which C1 ultimately accepts with an expression of gratitude such as by gazing at her and touching her hand. At this sequential position, C1 suggests that they get coffee (line 22) as a way of accounting for her acceptance by means of invoking the norm of reciprocity – i.e., since C2 has given her the gift of picking up the bill, she will return it in the form of buying coffee. Although the excerpt focuses on the phenomenon of reciprocity as a norm invoked in gift exchange sequences, it also illustrates the two earlier notions of reciprocity at work. The very intelligibility of any action – greetings, offers, requests, “drawing attention to the note”, etc. – relies on the reciprocity of perspectives being taken for granted by the participants, and is achieved in the appropriate sequential positioning of embodied conduct.

'''Additional Related Entries:'''

* '''[[Adjacency pair|adjacency pair]]'''
* '''[[epistemics]]'''
* '''[[epistemic authority]]'''
* '''[[epistemic stance]]'''
* '''[[indexing]]'''
* '''[[intersubjectivity]]'''

'''Cited References:'''

Albert, S. & Raymond, C. W. (2019). Conversation analysis at the ‘middle region’ of public life: Greetings and the interactional construction of Donald Trump's political persona. ''Language & Communication'', 69, 67–83.

Cicourel, A. V. (1974). ''Cognitive Sociology: Language and Meaning in Social Interaction''. Penguin.

Clayman, S. E. & Heritage, J. (2014). Benefactors and beneficiaries: Benefactive status and stance in the management of offers and requests. In P. Drew & E. Couper-Kuhlen (Eds.), ''Requesting in Social Interaction'' (pp. 55–86). John Benjamins.

Deppermann, A. (2015). When recipient design fails: Egocentric turn-design of instructions in driving school lessons leading to breakdowns of intersubjectivity. ''Gesprächsforschung: Online-Zeitschrift zur verbalen Interaktion'', 16, 63–101.

Garfinkel, H. (1963). A conception of, and experiments with, “trust” as a condition of stable concerted actions. In O. J. Harvey (Ed.), ''Motivation and Social Interaction: Cognitive Determinants'' (pp. 187–238). Ronald Press.

Goodwin, C. & Heritage, J. (1990). Conversation analysis. ''Annual Review of Anthropology'', 19, 283–307.

Llewellyn, N. (2011). The gift in interaction: a study of “picking-up the bill”. ''British Journal of Sociology'', 62(4), 718–738.

Mair, M. (2025). Editorial: Ethnomethodological readings of philosophy, social theory, and the social sciences. In A. P. Carlin, A. Dennis, K. N. Jenkings, O. Lindwall & M. Mair (Eds.), ''The Routledge International Handbook of Ethnomethodology'' (pp. 91–103). Routledge.

Rawls, A. W. & David, G. C. (2005). Accountably other: Trust, reciprocity, and exclusion in a context of situated practice. ''Human Studies'', 28(4), 469–497.

Schegloff, E. A. (2007). ''Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis' (vol. 1)'. Cambridge University Press.

Simonen, M., & Lohi, H. (2021). Interactional reciprocity in human–dog interaction. In J. Lindström, R. Laury, A. Peräkylä & M.-L. Sorjonen (Eds.), ''Intersubjectivity in Action: Studies in Language and Social Interaction'' (pp. 397–428). John Benjamins.

vom Lehn, D. (2019). From Garfinkel’s ‘experiments in miniature’ to the ethnomethodological analysis of interaction. ''Human Studies'', 42(2), 305–326.

=== EMCA Wiki Bibliography items tagged with 'reciprocity' ===
{{#widget:Iframe
|url=https://emcawiki.net/bibtex/browser.php?keywords=reciproci&bib=emca.bib
|border=0
}}

Reciprocity

2026-09-03T15:01:11Z

JakubMlynar: correction "its" -> "their"

{{Infobox cite
| Authors = '''Jakub Mlynář''' (HES-SO Valais-Wallis University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland, Switzerland) (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5206-3212) & '''Yeji Rieser''' (University of Basel, Switzerland) (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6582-150X)
| To cite = Mlynář, Jakub, & Rieser, Yeji. (2026). Reciprocity. In Alexandra Gubina, Elliott M. Hoey & Chase Wesley Raymond (Eds.), ''Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics''. International Society for Conversation Analysis (ISCA). DOI: [ ]
}}

The term '''reciprocity''' is used in a wide variety of ways – addressing a prerequisite for social interaction; referring to the sequential production of relevant next actions; as well as describing phenomena implicating processes of mutual exchange (literally or metaphorically). Reciprocity is taken to be a fundamental precondition of sociality and an assumption for its analytical grasp, but also a produced phenomenon of order.

Schutz’s (1962) notion of “reciprocity of perspectives” was part of his attempt to explain how phenomenology can move from an individual consciousness to the social world. In his view, two basic idealizations of common-sense thinking overcome the asymmetrical access to knowledge about the world and the differences in our personal backgrounds: (1) the interchangeability of the standpoints, and (2) the congruency of the system of relevances. In other words, one takes for granted that if one were to exchange positions with another person, they would perceive things in the same way, and the other takes this for granted too. Furthermore, one also takes for granted that the manner in which one perceives things does not depend on any unique personal characteristics that are not relevant for the practical purposes at hand, and the other person takes this for granted too. From the perspective of ethnomethodology and CA, reciprocity is not just a given assumption or an abstract principle which makes social interaction possible. Instead, it is '''[[Reflexivity|reflexively]]''' achieved in the very ways in which members make sense of and make recognizable their actions to one another such that they can engage in concerted '''[[Activity|activities]]''', each and every time, in their local and practical circumstances (Mair, 2025). The Schutzian conception was, in different ways, an inspiration for early ethnomethodology (Cicourel, 1974; Garfinkel, 1963) and occasionally appears in more recent studies. For example, following Garfinkel (1963), Rawls and David (2006) use the notion of “(mutual) reciprocity” mostly as a synonym or proxy for “trust”. Vom Lehn (2019), in a video-based CA study, refers to Schutz in his analysis of performing optometric tests where the visual perspective of the currently assessed client is measurably interchangeable with that of a standardized client.

Nevertheless, in more recent works, the phenomenological notion of “reciprocity of perspectives” seems to be more often elaborated under the rubric of “intersubjectivity” (e.g., Deppermann, 2015) and as providing a historical background for the conception of sequentiality: Goodwin and Heritage (1990) describe '''[[Adjacency pair|adjacency pair]]''' organization as a “framework of reciprocal conduct” where “[e]ach participant must analyze the developing course of others’ actions in order to produce appropriate reciprocal action” (p. 288). In this sense, reciprocity is accountable in the details of the timely and adequate production of a '''[[Second-pair part|second-pair part]]''' in response to a '''[[First-pair part|first-pair part]]''' – for example, a greeting (e.g., “Hello”) is routinely responded to with a reciprocal greeting. The greeting is not always composed of a single '''[[Turn-constructional unit (TCU)|turn-constructional unit (TCU)]] ''' but can also consist of a “how are you” which opens a sequence in itself to be responded to with a second-pair part and also reciprocated through the initiation of a second sequence. When it comes to these greeting sequences, what Schegloff (2007) calls “reciprocal or exchange sequences” (pp. 195–207), he observes that the reciprocal nature of the second sequence is accountable in the design of the turn, e.g., “how about you” instead of a verbatim repeat of “how are you.” Therefore, the accountability of a second sequence as a reciprocal does not depend on its temporally successive position per se but is a produced order by the participants. Moreover, Schegloff (2007) notes that while such sequences are routinely done reciprocally, their relevance is worked out in local circumstances where sometimes, e.g., depending on categorial memberships and/or specific institutional settings, it is more relevant to not reciprocate such sequences. This is what Albert and Raymond (2019) illustrate in their analysis of the US president Trump’s greeting sequences with multiple recipients in succession.

(1) [[http://bit.ly/gh-ex2 Video available here]] (Albert & Raymond, 2019: 72)

[[File:Mlynar_reciprocity_fig1.png]]

In this stage-managed situation, the authors point out that the recipients do not orient to reciprocating the greeting sequence nor does Trump himself anticipate one. The non-reciprocity of the greeting sequence is reciprocally coordinated in the way by which the recipient’s response is minimally produced, and Trump, already during this response, moves on to greeting the next person in line. Beyond human communication, “interactional reciprocity” has also been studied in human–dog interactions, suggesting that dogs orient to the lack of reciprocity from their owners in terms of a missing next action and employ a set of practices to pursue it (Simonen & Lohi, 2021).

Turning to the most literal sense of the term, the following example is taken from a study that belongs to a rather small number of texts that treat “reciprocity” as a phenomenon in its own right, i.e., as a transactional process of giving and taking. Llewellyn (2011) analyses the phenomenon of “picking up the bill” as a case of a gift exchange where the benefactor and the beneficiary orient to the norm of reciprocity. The data comes from video-recordings of a payment desk at a gallery where customers approach to pay for tickets. In Extract II below, two customers (C1, C2) approach the desk to buy tickets. The focus is on how C1 accounts for her acceptance of C2 picking up the bill by offering a reciprocation in response (cf. Clayman & Heritage, 2014, on reciprocations by beneficiaries as a type of appreciative response).

(2) (Llewellyn, 2011: 729)

[[File:Mlynar_reciprocity_fig2.png]]

At the desk, while it is C1 who verbalizes the request to the staff, it is C2 who is quicker to prepare the 20 dollar note to pay (lines 1–8). The possibility that this could be C2 “picking up the bill” is not immediately accepted by C1 who, during the omitted lines (lines 9–15), engages in an interaction with the staff and proceeds to pay her own sum. It is at this point that C2, in line 18, further advances the note on the desk to a space where the staff can readily take it. Thus, C2 accountably produces the action of “picking up the bill” which C1 ultimately accepts with an expression of gratitude such as by gazing at her and touching her hand. At this sequential position, C1 suggests that they get coffee (line 22) as a way of accounting for her acceptance by means of invoking the norm of reciprocity – i.e., since C2 has given her the gift of picking up the bill, she will return it in the form of buying coffee. Although the excerpt focuses on the phenomenon of reciprocity as a norm invoked in gift exchange sequences, it also illustrates the two earlier notions of reciprocity at work. The very intelligibility of any action – greetings, offers, requests, “drawing attention to the note”, etc. – relies on the reciprocity of perspectives being taken for granted by the participants, and is achieved in the appropriate sequential positioning of embodied conduct.

'''Additional Related Entries:'''

* '''[[Adjacency pair|adjacency pair]]'''
* '''[[epistemics]]'''
* '''[[epistemic authority]]'''
* '''[[epistemic stance]]'''
* '''[[indexing]]'''
* '''[[intersubjectivity]]'''

'''Cited References:'''

Albert, S. & Raymond, C. W. (2019). Conversation analysis at the ‘middle region’ of public life: Greetings and the interactional construction of Donald Trump's political persona. ''Language & Communication'', 69, 67–83.

Cicourel, A. V. (1974). ''Cognitive Sociology: Language and Meaning in Social Interaction'. Penguin.

Clayman, S. E. & Heritage, J. (2014). Benefactors and beneficiaries: Benefactive status and stance in the management of offers and requests. In P. Drew & E. Couper-Kuhlen (Eds.), ''Requesting in Social Interaction'' (pp. 55–86). John Benjamins.

Deppermann, A. (2015). When recipient design fails: Egocentric turn-design of instructions in driving school lessons leading to breakdowns of intersubjectivity. ''Gesprächsforschung: Online-Zeitschrift zur verbalen Interaktion'', 16, 63–101.

Garfinkel, H. (1963). A conception of, and experiments with, “trust” as a condition of stable concerted actions. In O. J. Harvey (Ed.), ''Motivation and Social Interaction: Cognitive Determinants'' (pp. 187–238). Ronald Press.

Goodwin, C. & Heritage, J. (1990). Conversation analysis. ''Annual Review of Anthropology'', 19, 283–307.

Llewellyn, N. (2011). The gift in interaction: a study of “picking-up the bill”. ''British Journal of Sociology'', 62(4), 718–738.

Mair, M. (2025). Editorial: Ethnomethodological readings of philosophy, social theory, and the social sciences. In A. P. Carlin, A. Dennis, K. N. Jenkings, O. Lindwall & M. Mair (Eds.), ''The Routledge International Handbook of Ethnomethodology'' (pp. 91–103). Routledge.

Rawls, A. W. & David, G. C. (2005). Accountably other: Trust, reciprocity, and exclusion in a context of situated practice. ''Human Studies'', 28(4), 469–497.

Schegloff, E. A. (2007). ''Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis' (vol. 1)'. Cambridge University Press.

Simonen, M., & Lohi, H. (2021). Interactional reciprocity in human–dog interaction. In J. Lindström, R. Laury, A. Peräkylä & M.-L. Sorjonen (Eds.), ''Intersubjectivity in Action: Studies in Language and Social Interaction'' (pp. 397–428). John Benjamins.

vom Lehn, D. (2019). From Garfinkel’s ‘experiments in miniature’ to the ethnomethodological analysis of interaction. ''Human Studies'', 42(2), 305–326.

=== EMCA Wiki Bibliography items tagged with 'reciprocity' ===
{{#widget:Iframe
|url=https://emcawiki.net/bibtex/browser.php?keywords=reciproci&bib=emca.bib
|border=0
}}

Hauser2026

2026-08-25T09:23:55Z

JakubMlynar: Created page with "{{BibEntry |BibType=ARTICLE |Author(s)=Eric Hauser; Younhee Kim; |Title=Membership categorization in children’s pretend play |Tag(s)=EMCA; standardized relational pair; play..."

{{BibEntry
|BibType=ARTICLE
|Author(s)=Eric Hauser; Younhee Kim;
|Title=Membership categorization in children’s pretend play
|Tag(s)=EMCA; standardized relational pair; play frame; bilingual interaction; language alternation; membership categorization device; pretend play; in press
|Key=Hauser2026
|Year=2026
|Language=English
|Journal=Pragmatics and Society
|URL=https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/ps.25141.hau?crawler=true
|DOI=10.1075/ps.25141.hau
|Abstract=Drawing on data from 24 hours of video-recorded interaction of two bilingual (Korean, English) children aged between three and five, we use multimodal conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis to show how pretend membership categories are invoked and mapped onto the children during social pretend play. In the examined data, the membership categories (person typifications) are organized into standardized relational pairs, such as “host” and “guest,” for which the existence of an incumbent of one category makes the existence of an incumbent of the other category programmatically relevant. The analysis shows some of the resources, which include place names and language alternation, through which the mapping of categories is contextualized, made relevant, and attempted or accomplished. The analysis also shows how mapping can be unproblematic and fleeting and how attempted mapping can be ignored, which highlights the necessity of collaboration for social pretend play. Data are in English and Korean.
}}

Robles2026d

2026-08-25T09:22:12Z

JakubMlynar: Created page with "{{BibEntry |BibType=ARTICLE |Author(s)=Jessica S. Robles; Natasha Shrikant; Cristian Tileagă; |Title=A discursive psychological approach to moral dilemmas in discrimination a..."

{{BibEntry
|BibType=ARTICLE
|Author(s)=Jessica S. Robles; Natasha Shrikant; Cristian Tileagă;
|Title=A discursive psychological approach to moral dilemmas in discrimination and racism in everyday life
|Tag(s)=EMCA; Membership categorization analysis; Conversation analysis; Discursive psychology
|Key=Robles2026d
|Year=2026
|Language=English
|Journal=Qualitative Psychology
|Volume=13
|Number=2
|Pages=392–404
|URL=https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fqup0000365
|DOI=10.1037/qup0000365
|Abstract=Racism continues to be a social problem in the context of far-right populism and some permissiveness against sharing views that would otherwise have been highly sanctioned. Qualitative research has demonstrated the important role that language, social organization, and interaction play in how racism is reproduced, accounted for, and resisted in various settings of everyday life. Discursive psychology in particular is an approach that has engaged nearly from its inception with racism, setting an ongoing agenda with regard to a critical examination of the language of racism. In this article, we draw on discursive psychology alongside membership categorization analysis and insights from conversation analysis to examine how racist talk is designedly defeasible in the current political climate in which racism is simultaneously emboldened by far-right successes but still constrained against overt racist claims. Our analysis presents two examples of public interactions where political figures are asked to address race and racism in institutional settings—such as confirmation hearings and news interviews—in the United States and the United Kingdom. We show how participants accused of being too sensitive to racism resist this positioning and how those accused of racist talk evade accountability. Using discursive psychology and compatible approaches reveals in detail the important moral dilemmas at the heart of how people deal with racism in everyday institutional interactions.
}}

Hutchinson2026a

2026-08-10T11:40:56Z

JakubMlynar: Created page with "{{BibEntry |BibType=ARTICLE |Author(s)=Phil Hutchinson; |Title=“Who Is Watching me?”: Recovering the Grammar of Stigma in Interaction |Tag(s)=EMCA; In press; Stigma; Goffm..."

{{BibEntry
|BibType=ARTICLE
|Author(s)=Phil Hutchinson;
|Title=“Who Is Watching me?”: Recovering the Grammar of Stigma in Interaction
|Tag(s)=EMCA; In press; Stigma; Goffman; HIV; Medical interaction
|Key=Hutchinson2026a
|Year=2026
|Language=English
|Journal=Symbolic Interaction
|URL=https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/symb.70068
|DOI=10.1002/symb.70068
|Abstract=This article offers a praxeological respecification of stigma. I argue that the term “stigma” is a category term and glossing device, used to gather together and stand in for a diverse range of interactional experiences, including, but not limited to, degradation, discrediting, discrimination, marginalization, and being demeaned. To understand stigma, we must turn from theorizing the concept to examining the lived and situated practices it glosses. The argument for this praxeological respecification unfolds in three stages. First, I argue that “stigma” does not name a discrete attribute or entity, but is a term used to denote and gloss a heterogeneous set of social experiences. Second, I show that these experiences are produced and made accountable in and through interaction. Third, I argue that our analyses must recover the Gestalt contexture—the praxeologically produced contextual whole—through which participants in an interaction see what is happening as stigmatizing or otherwise. This is an immanent, not theoretical, undertaking. Attempts to frame these experiences through the application of external explanatory frameworks often obscure the very dynamics under investigation. I conclude with a brief analysis of an extract from a publicly available interactional case: a live-streamed panel discussion on HIV stigma, available on YouTube. In this setting, stigma appears not as an abstract structure or inner experience, but as a public, contested, and reflexively managed feature of social life.
}}

Heritage2026

2026-08-09T07:54:21Z

JakubMlynar: Created page with "{{BibEntry |BibType=ARTICLE |Author(s)=John Heritage; Jeffrey D. Robinson |Title=On the perimeter of preference: Low-stakes polar questions |Tag(s)=EMCA; Polar question; Gramm..."

{{BibEntry
|BibType=ARTICLE
|Author(s)=John Heritage; Jeffrey D. Robinson
|Title=On the perimeter of preference: Low-stakes polar questions
|Tag(s)=EMCA; Polar question; Grammatical form; Interrogative; Information seeking; Preference; Response timing; Socio-relational risk
|Key=Heritage2026
|Year=2026
|Language=English
|Journal=Journal of Pragmatics
|Volume=262
|Number=September 2026
|Pages=42-59
|URL=https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S037821662600127X
|DOI=10.1016/j.pragma.2026.05.011
|Abstract=It is widely accepted that positively framed polar questions invite affirmative responses, and that this contributes to the implementation of preference organization. This article investigates the limits of such implementation with the aim of determining the perimeter of preference. Across American- and British-English corpora of ordinary conversation, we collected all positively framed polar questions that were answered with vocal, unmitigated disaffirmation (e.g., No) within 300 ms, a timeframe characteristic of preferred answer types. Using Conversation Analysis and descriptive statistics to inductively examine our core collection of 121 sequences, we identify three properties of what we term ‘low-stakedness’ in positively framed polar questions: The questions: (1) implement the action of information seeking (vs. recruitment, etc.); (2) are formatted as interrogatives (vs. more conducive formats, e.g., declaratives); and (3) propose states of affairs about facts in the world (vs. recipient or third-party conduct/actions). We argue that these ‘low stakes’ questions evoke low levels of socio-relational risk, which infuses many manifestations of preference organization. We conclude that, in the case of these ‘low stakes’ questions, question design, per se, does not contribute to preference-organizational features of responses. We examine boundary cases suggesting that, as socio-relational risk increases, so too do the pressures of preference organization.
}}

Burdelski2026b

2026-08-09T07:52:23Z

JakubMlynar: Created page with "{{BibEntry |BibType=ARTICLE |Author(s)=Matthew Burdelski; Olga Anatoli Smith; Asta Cekaite; |Title=Environmental noticings on the move: Interactional affordances and children..."

{{BibEntry
|BibType=ARTICLE
|Author(s)=Matthew Burdelski; Olga Anatoli Smith; Asta Cekaite;
|Title=Environmental noticings on the move: Interactional affordances and children’s engagement during preschool walks
|Tag(s)=EMCA; Affordance; Children; Conversation analysis; Environmental noticing; Japan; Sweden; Walking outdoors; Walking; In press
|Key=Burdelski2026b
|Year=2026
|Language=English
|Journal=Children's Geographies
|URL=https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/14733285.2026.2662331
|DOI=10.1080/14733285.2026.2662331
|Abstract=This paper examines how preschool children and teachers engage in environmental noticings of mundane phenomena (e.g., bird, spider web) during group walks outdoors. Drawing on over 100 hours of audiovisual recordings from preschools in Sweden and Japan, it uses multimodal conversation analysis to examine how such noticings are accomplished through talk, gesture, and movement. Rather than treating noticing as an internal cognitive process, we conceptualize it as a publicly organized practice through which participants draw one another's attention to features of their surroundings. The analysis shows that environmental noticings involve several interactional practices, including descriptive elaboration, confirming that others perceive the same features, and extending the interaction beyond the immediate scene. Through these practices, children and teachers attend to, characterize, and make sense of both human and non-human elements of their surroundings. We argue that environmental noticings constitute an important interactional vehicle through which children's social and emotional engagement with the environment is accomplished in everyday pedagogical mobility. By foregrounding the interactional organization of noticing during preschool walks, the study contributes to children's geographies by demonstrating how relations to environments are produced in situ through embodied, mobile interaction.
}}

Vanttinen2026

2026-08-09T07:49:43Z

JakubMlynar: Created page with "{{BibEntry |BibType=ARTICLE |Author(s)=Minttu Vänttinen; Mikko Kuronen; Pinja Kemppinen; Paulina Nyman-Koskinen |Title=Engaging a peer in task-interaction during a digital la..."

{{BibEntry
|BibType=ARTICLE
|Author(s)=Minttu Vänttinen; Mikko Kuronen; Pinja Kemppinen; Paulina Nyman-Koskinen
|Title=Engaging a peer in task-interaction during a digital language game
|Tag(s)=EMCA; Multimodal conversation analysis; Engagement; Participation; Peer interaction; Digital language game
|Key=Vanttinen2026
|Year=2026
|Language=English
|Journal=Linguistics and Education
|Volume=94
|Number=August 2026
|Pages=101565
|URL=https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0898589826000744
|DOI=10.1016/j.linged.2026.101565
|Abstract=This study investigates adolescent students’ engagement during a digital language game that has been designed to facilitate learning Swedish as a second language (L2). Previous CA research on participation and engagement in educational contexts has focused on teachers’ practices of engaging students in pedagogical interactions, while student elicitations of their peers’ engagement have received less attention. The data consist of video recordings of eight Finnish-speaking learners playing a narrative language game with multiple-choice questions in Swedish. The participants played the game face-to-face in pairs on single tablet computers. The data have been analyzed using multimodal CA, which involves a micro-level, sequential transcription and analysis of human interaction. The analysis focuses on the verbal and embodied resources and practices that participants use to engage a peer in the game and task interaction. The findings illustrate the use of directive actions, recruitments, requests for confirmation, and response pursuits. We show how these practices can either primarily target the peer’s participation or indirectly prompt their engagement as a type of a side trajectory, with the primary orientation to finding the correct answer with the peer’s help. In both cases the interaction results in the peer displaying more engaged participation in task interaction. The study thus sheds light on the role of students in creating opportunities for participation in L2 learning.
}}

Waring2026a

2026-08-09T07:46:26Z

JakubMlynar:

{{BibEntry
|BibType=ARTICLE
|Author(s)=Hansun Zhang Waring; Yo-An Lee;
|Title=Conversation analysis for artificial intelligence
|Tag(s)=EMCA; Conversation analysis (CA); Artificial intelligence (AI); Wizard of oz (WoZ); Large language model (LLM); ChatGPT; Human-AI interaction (HAI); Artificial Intelligence; AI Reference List
|Key=Waring2026a
|Year=2026
|Language=English
|Journal=Research Methods in Applied Linguistics
|Volume=5
|Number=3
|Pages=100324
|URL=https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2772766126000303
|DOI=10.1016/j.rmal.2026.100324
|Abstract=Transforming the analytic and technological landscape, the recent rise of generative AI has sparked a surge of scholarly pursuits across a diversity of methodological terrains, and conversation analysis is no exception. With this exciting new direction also comes the need to examine the extent to which CA has advanced as a methodology for examining human-AI interaction (HAI). Based on a carefully curated corpus of “CA for AI” studies, this paper offers a brief summary of conversation analytic (CA) findings on HAI to date, examines the various methodological aspects of such studies, and provides a methodological illustration of what a CA analysis of human-AI interaction (HAI) looks like. These various attempts culminate in a reflection on a set of challenges that characterize the use of CA for investigating HAI as well as ways of navigating these challenges, thereby forming a benchmark for future research in CA-HAI in applied linguistics.
}}

Waring2026a

2026-08-09T07:46:06Z

JakubMlynar: Created page with "{{BibEntry |BibType=ARTICLE |Author(s)=Hansun Zhang Waring; Yo-An Lee; |Title=Conversation analysis for artificial intelligence |Tag(s)=EMCA; Conversation analysis (CA); Artif..."

{{BibEntry
|BibType=ARTICLE
|Author(s)=Hansun Zhang Waring; Yo-An Lee;
|Title=Conversation analysis for artificial intelligence
|Tag(s)=EMCA; Conversation analysis (CA); Artificial intelligence (AI); Wizard of oz (WoZ); Large language model (LLM); ChatGPT; Human-AI interaction (HAI)
|Key=Waring2026a
|Year=2026
|Language=English
|Journal=Research Methods in Applied Linguistics
|Volume=5
|Number=3
|Pages=100324
|URL=https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2772766126000303
|DOI=10.1016/j.rmal.2026.100324
|Abstract=Transforming the analytic and technological landscape, the recent rise of generative AI has sparked a surge of scholarly pursuits across a diversity of methodological terrains, and conversation analysis is no exception. With this exciting new direction also comes the need to examine the extent to which CA has advanced as a methodology for examining human-AI interaction (HAI). Based on a carefully curated corpus of “CA for AI” studies, this paper offers a brief summary of conversation analytic (CA) findings on HAI to date, examines the various methodological aspects of such studies, and provides a methodological illustration of what a CA analysis of human-AI interaction (HAI) looks like. These various attempts culminate in a reflection on a set of challenges that characterize the use of CA for investigating HAI as well as ways of navigating these challenges, thereby forming a benchmark for future research in CA-HAI in applied linguistics.
}}

Icbay2026b

2026-08-09T07:44:08Z

JakubMlynar: Created page with "{{BibEntry |BibType=ARTICLE |Author(s)=Mehmet Ali Icbay; |Title=Repair on the Page: Accountability in Handwritten Academic Writing |Tag(s)=EMCA; In press; Repair; Handwritten..."

{{BibEntry
|BibType=ARTICLE
|Author(s)=Mehmet Ali Icbay;
|Title=Repair on the Page: Accountability in Handwritten Academic Writing
|Tag(s)=EMCA; In press; Repair; Handwritten essays; Accountability; Ethnomethodology; Irreversibility
|Key=Icbay2026b
|Year=2026
|Language=English
|Journal=Human Studies
|URL=https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10746-026-09854-0
|DOI=10.1007/s10746-026-09854-0
|Abstract=This paper explores written repair in handwritten undergraduate essays from an ethnomethodological perspective. Rather than treating corrections as surface imperfections or indicators of deficient competence, this paper approaches strikethroughs, overwriting, insertions, arrows, and marginal additions as members’ methods for maintaining intelligibility in the course of text production. The data consist primarily of handwritten, in-class essays produced under timed, device-free conditions. The analysis shows that repair in handwriting is not external to writing but constitutive of it. Because inscription on paper is irreversible, revision cannot be fully erased. Instead, it remains publicly available as a record of practical reasoning. Rejected formulations, retrofitted additions, and re-routed reading paths display how writers monitor emerging trouble and locally recalibrate wording, relevance, and textual fit. In this sense, handwritten essays preserve a visible history of their own production. The paper contributes to ethnomethodological studies of written discourse by showing that repair is a documentable textual accomplishment through which academic writing is reflexively made accountable.
}}

Jimenez2026

2026-08-09T07:41:23Z

JakubMlynar: Created page with "{{BibEntry |BibType=ARTICLE |Author(s)=Patricia Jimenez; Younhee Kim; Richard Fitzgerald; |Title=Making sense of AI: how lay users negotiate the shifting human–machine bound..."

{{BibEntry
|BibType=ARTICLE
|Author(s)=Patricia Jimenez; Younhee Kim; Richard Fitzgerald;
|Title=Making sense of AI: how lay users negotiate the shifting human–machine boundaries in talking about AI
|Tag(s)=EMCA; Artificial intelligence; Explainability; Membership Categorisation Analysis; Membership Categorization Analysis; Occasioned semantics; Human-Computer Interaction; AI Reference List; In Press
|Key=Jimenez2026
|Year=2026
|Language=English
|Journal=AI & Society
|URL=https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-026-03164-w
|DOI=10.1007/s00146-026-03164-w
|Abstract=This paper examines how lay users make sense of artificial intelligence (AI) in everyday encounters and through practical reasoning and situated categorisation practices. Drawing on data from digital diaries and in-person group discussions, the study explores the local and situated ways lay users determine what kind of “thing” AI is, what it does, and how it should be judged. Rather than approaching AI as a fixed defined entity, the paper centres in participants procedures for meaning making. Specifically, the analysis focuses on three categorisation practices: the relational exclusion of the human-machine device, the assemblage of branched taxonomies, and the troubling of categorial boundaries. These practices reflect an ongoing negotiation of intelligibility, in which AI is explained not through formal and technically accurate definitions but through occasioned and socially recognisable use of every day categories. The paper draws on Membership Categorisation Analysis and Occasioned Semantics to show that the intelligibility of AI is both locally and culturally accomplished. In doing so, the paper reframes the notion of AI explainability as a situated achievement of human reasoning, rather than a system’s feature. An insight, we hope would have implications, if not at least a provocation, to the field of explainable AI and, more broadly, to the way we understand AI literacy, trust, and the everyday grammar of intelligence.
}}

Padua2024

2026-08-09T07:36:17Z

JakubMlynar: Created page with "{{BibEntry |BibType=ARTICLE |Author(s)=Joao Pedro Padua |Title=Ethnomethodology of written discourse: An analytical model for treating written discourse as ongoing social acti..."

{{BibEntry
|BibType=ARTICLE
|Author(s)=Joao Pedro Padua
|Title=Ethnomethodology of written discourse: An analytical model for treating written discourse as ongoing social action
|Tag(s)=EMCA; Written discourse; Text; Discourse analysis; Ethnomethodology; Qualitative methods
|Key=Padua2024
|Year=2024
|Language=English
|Journal=Journal of Pragmatics
|Volume=222
|Number=March 2024
|Pages=1-16
|URL=https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S037821662300320X
|DOI=10.1016/j.pragma.2023.12.017
|Abstract=Ethnomethodology has been influential in many social science fields, including and especially applied linguistics, where conversation analysis is a major subfield for analyzing oral data. Nevertheless, ethnomethodology can also be—and has been—fruitfully applied to written discursive data, using its tools and methods to describe in detail how written texts are assembled and reflexively used, as members’ methods, for doing and displaying social actions. This paper proposes an open analytical model to capture existing ethnomethodological analyses of written discourse and create a more transparent and replicable protocol for new analyses. I reconstruct ethnomethodology as set of assumptions and principles, review seminal research that used these principles to analyze written discourse, and present the master concept of “active text” that encapsulates them. I then construct a hierarchical prospective-retrospective model to formalize the methods used in ethnomethodology of written discourse. I use the model to reconstruct the analytical methods of two papers to show how it can be used for transparency and replication. The discussion section covers modelling in qualitative applied linguistics and ethnomethodology, and ends with some conclusions.
}}

Licoppe2026a

2026-08-09T07:34:42Z

JakubMlynar: Created page with "{{BibEntry |BibType=ARTICLE |Author(s)=Christian Licoppe; |Title=Personal noticings in video calls and doing being friends |Tag(s)=EMCA; Relationships; Friendship; Conversatio..."

{{BibEntry
|BibType=ARTICLE
|Author(s)=Christian Licoppe;
|Title=Personal noticings in video calls and doing being friends
|Tag(s)=EMCA; Relationships; Friendship; Conversation analysis; Noticing; Personal noticing: relevance rules; Video Calls
|Key=Licoppe2026a
|Year=2026
|Language=English
|Journal=Journal of Pragmatics
|Volume=264
|Number=October 2026
|Pages=17-33
|URL=https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378216626001542
|DOI=10.1016/j.pragma.2026.07.004
|Abstract=In this article, I focus on an interactional practice, personal noticings', in which a participant comments on something related to another's appearance, behavior, or environment. From the perspective of conversation analysis, I discuss the organization of these sequences and show how they put into play relational issues between participants. I then show that the affordances of video-mediated communication facilitate the production of personal noticings and analyze various examples of personal noticings made during video-mediated conversations between friends, as well as the relational work accomplished during these sequences. The case of personal noticings in video-mediated conversations illustrates how it is possible to precisely study the dynamics between interpersonal relationships and mediated forms of sociability at the level of the interactional practices themselves.
}}

Habscheid2025

2026-07-20T07:43:26Z

JakubMlynar:

{{BibEntry
|BibType=ARTICLE
|Author(s)=Stephan Habscheid; Tim Hector; Christine Hrncal;
|Title=Linguistic Practices as a Means of Domesticating Voice-Controlled Assistance Technologies
|Editor(s)=Stephan Habscheid; Tim Hector; Dagmar Hoffmann; David Waldecker;
|Tag(s)=EMCA; AI Reference List; Voice Assistants; Home
|Key=Habscheid2025
|Publisher=transcript Verlag
|Year=2025
|Language=English
|Address=Bielefeld
|Booktitle=Voice Assistants in Private Homes: Media, Data and Language in Interaction and Discourse
|Pages=207-239
|URL=https://www.transcript-verlag.de/chunk_detail_seite.php?doi=10.14361%2F9783839472002-008
|DOI=10.14361/9783839472002-008
|Series=Media in Action
|Abstract=This chapter explores the linguistic practices involved in the domestication of voice-controlled smart speakers, drawing on findings from our research project “Un/desired observation in interaction: Intelligent Personal Assistants”, conducted in Germany from 2020 to 2023. First, the characteristics of smart speakers and the methodological challenges of studying them empirically are outlined. This is followed by a theoretical discussion of how perspectives from interaction research and from linguistic media research can be integrated to complement one another. The empirical part of the chapter first elucidates the organizational characteristics of ‘VUI dialogue’ and then the organizational integration of VUIs in social interaction in multi-party constellations. Finally, we show how everyday usage practices in households are shaped by the linguistic conditions of their mediation on both organizational levels. The analyses also address the limitations of voice assistants asexperienced by users, particularly when devices fail to meet expectations. Thus, this chapter sheds light on the complex dynamics of human–technology relationships and takes into account social and linguistic dimensions of technology domestication.
}}

Oloff2025

2026-07-20T07:43:03Z

JakubMlynar:

{{BibEntry
|BibType=INCOLLECTION
|Author(s)=Florence Oloff;
|Title=“Oh, Now I have to Speak”: Older Adults’ First Encounters with Voice-based Applications in Smartphone Courses
|Editor(s)=Stephan Habscheid; Tim Hector; Dagmar Hoffmann; David Waldecker
|Tag(s)=EMCA; AI Reference List; Conversation analysis; Voice assistants; Smartphone use
|Key=Oloff2025
|Publisher=transcript Verlag
|Year=2025
|Language=English
|Address=Bielefeld
|Booktitle=Voice Assistants in Private Homes: Media, Data and Language in Interaction and Discourse
|Pages=147-179
|URL=https://www.transcript-verlag.de/chunk_detail_seite.php?doi=10.14361%2F9783839472002-006
|DOI=10.14361/9783839472002-006
|Series=Media in Action
|Abstract=This chapter deals with the question of what we can learn from interaction in institutional settings about the usability and learnability of everyday technologies such as voice-based Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs), especially for older adults or, more generally, less-expert technology users. Based on an analysis of video recordings made during smartphone courses in adult education centers in Germany, this contribution provides a qualitative and micro-analytical perspective on non-expert adult users’ processes of discovering and exploring voice-based technologies. Using the framework of multimodal conversation analysis, both linguistic formats and embodied actions are examined, revealing the participants’ situated and dynamic understandings of how one type of IPA (as a smartphone app or widget) works and operates. The analysis of these either guided or accidental discoveries of a new technology can provide new insights regarding the specific challenges associated with handling IPAs and instructing new users how to do so. Based on these observations, this chapter also provides some general thoughts on teaching digital skills to less-expert users.
}}

Oloff2025

2026-07-20T07:39:37Z

JakubMlynar:

{{BibEntry
|BibType=INCOLLECTION
|Author(s)=Florence Oloff;
|Title=“Oh, Now I have to Speak”: Older Adults’ First Encounters with Voice-based Applications in Smartphone Courses
|Editor(s)=Stephan Habscheid; Tim Hector; Dagmar Hoffmann; David Waldecker
|Tag(s)=EMCA; AI Reference List; Conversation analysis; Voice assistants; Smartphone use
|Key=Oloff2025
|Publisher=transcript Verlag
|Year=2025
|Language=English
|Booktitle=Voice Assistants in Private Homes: Media, Data and Language in Interaction and Discourse
|Pages=147-179
|URL=https://www.transcript-verlag.de/chunk_detail_seite.php?doi=10.14361%2F9783839472002-006
|DOI=10.14361/9783839472002-006
|Abstract=This chapter deals with the question of what we can learn from interaction in institutional settings about the usability and learnability of everyday technologies such as voice-based Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs), especially for older adults or, more generally, less-expert technology users. Based on an analysis of video recordings made during smartphone courses in adult education centers in Germany, this contribution provides a qualitative and micro-analytical perspective on non-expert adult users’ processes of discovering and exploring voice-based technologies. Using the framework of multimodal conversation analysis, both linguistic formats and embodied actions are examined, revealing the participants’ situated and dynamic understandings of how one type of IPA (as a smartphone app or widget) works and operates. The analysis of these either guided or accidental discoveries of a new technology can provide new insights regarding the specific challenges associated with handling IPAs and instructing new users how to do so. Based on these observations, this chapter also provides some general thoughts on teaching digital skills to less-expert users.
}}

Habscheid2025

2026-07-20T07:38:00Z

JakubMlynar:

{{BibEntry
|BibType=ARTICLE
|Author(s)=Stephan Habscheid; Tim Hector; Christine Hrncal;
|Title=Linguistic Practices as a Means of Domesticating Voice-Controlled Assistance Technologies
|Editor(s)=Stephan Habscheid; Tim Hector; Dagmar Hoffmann; David Waldecker;
|Tag(s)=EMCA; AI Reference List; Voice Assistants; Home
|Key=Habscheid2025
|Publisher=transcript Verlag
|Year=2025
|Language=English
|Booktitle=Voice Assistants in Private Homes: Media, Data and Language in Interaction and Discourse
|Pages=207-239
|URL=https://www.transcript-verlag.de/chunk_detail_seite.php?doi=10.14361%2F9783839472002-008
|DOI=10.14361/9783839472002-008
|Abstract=This chapter explores the linguistic practices involved in the domestication of voice-controlled smart speakers, drawing on findings from our research project “Un/desired observation in interaction: Intelligent Personal Assistants”, conducted in Germany from 2020 to 2023. First, the characteristics of smart speakers and the methodological challenges of studying them empirically are outlined. This is followed by a theoretical discussion of how perspectives from interaction research and from linguistic media research can be integrated to complement one another. The empirical part of the chapter first elucidates the organizational characteristics of ‘VUI dialogue’ and then the organizational integration of VUIs in social interaction in multi-party constellations. Finally, we show how everyday usage practices in households are shaped by the linguistic conditions of their mediation on both organizational levels. The analyses also address the limitations of voice assistants asexperienced by users, particularly when devices fail to meet expectations. Thus, this chapter sheds light on the complex dynamics of human–technology relationships and takes into account social and linguistic dimensions of technology domestication.
}}

Habscheid2025

2026-07-20T07:37:02Z

JakubMlynar: Created page with "{{BibEntry |BibType=ARTICLE |Author(s)=Stephan Habscheid; Tim Hector; Christine Hrncal; |Title=Linguistic Practices as a Means of Domesticating Voice-Controlled Assistance Tec..."

{{BibEntry
|BibType=ARTICLE
|Author(s)=Stephan Habscheid; Tim Hector; Christine Hrncal;
|Title=Linguistic Practices as a Means of Domesticating Voice-Controlled Assistance Technologies
|Editor(s)=Stephan Habscheid; Tim Hector; Dagmar Hoffmann; David Waldecker;
|Tag(s)=EMCA;
|Key=Habscheid2025
|Publisher=transcript Verlag
|Year=2025
|Language=English
|Booktitle=Voice Assistants in Private Homes: Media, Data and Language in Interaction and Discourse
|Pages=207-239
|URL=https://www.transcript-verlag.de/chunk_detail_seite.php?doi=10.14361%2F9783839472002-008
|DOI=10.14361/9783839472002-008
|Abstract=This chapter explores the linguistic practices involved in the domestication of voice-controlled smart speakers, drawing on findings from our research project “Un/desired observation in interaction: Intelligent Personal Assistants”, conducted in Germany from 2020 to 2023. First, the characteristics of smart speakers and the methodological challenges of studying them empirically are outlined. This is followed by a theoretical discussion of how perspectives from interaction research and from linguistic media research can be integrated to complement one another. The empirical part of the chapter first elucidates the organizational characteristics of ‘VUI dialogue’ and then the organizational integration of VUIs in social interaction in multi-party constellations. Finally, we show how everyday usage practices in households are shaped by the linguistic conditions of their mediation on both organizational levels. The analyses also address the limitations of voice assistants asexperienced by users, particularly when devices fail to meet expectations. Thus, this chapter sheds light on the complex dynamics of human–technology relationships and takes into account social and linguistic dimensions of technology domestication.
}}

Oloff2025

2026-07-20T07:32:37Z

JakubMlynar: Created page with "{{BibEntry |BibType=INCOLLECTION |Author(s)=Florence Oloff; |Title=“Oh, Now I have to Speak”: Older Adults’ First Encounters with Voice-based Applications in Smartphone..."

{{BibEntry
|BibType=INCOLLECTION
|Author(s)=Florence Oloff;
|Title=“Oh, Now I have to Speak”: Older Adults’ First Encounters with Voice-based Applications in Smartphone Courses
|Editor(s)=Stephan Habscheid; Tim Hector; Dagmar Hoffmann; David Waldecker
|Tag(s)=EMCA; AI Reference List; Conversation analysis; Voice assistants; Smartphone use
|Key=Oloff2025
|Publisher=transcript Verlag
|Year=2025
|Language=English
|Booktitle=Voice Assistants in Private Homes: Media, Data and Language in Interaction and Discourse
|Pages=147-180
|URL=https://www.researchgate.net/publication/390034630_Oh_Now_I_have_to_Speak_Older_Adults'_First_Encounters_with_Voice-based_Applications_in_Smartphone_Courses
|DOI=10.14361/9783839472002-006
|Abstract=Voice Assistants such as Amazon's Alexa populate private homes as well as smartphones, TVs and cars. While suggesting easy living with smart devices, these assistants are criticized as the next step of corporate and state surveillance of the private home, or as harbingers of new and simplified linguistic practices. The contributors to this volume focus on the transformation and persistence of everyday linguistic, media and data practices under platformized conditions and new interfaces. This collection thus brings together perspectives from media sociology, media studies, media linguistics and domestication research.
}}

Stokoe2026b

2026-06-23T07:07:56Z

JakubMlynar: Created page with "{{BibEntry |BibType=ARTICLE |Author(s)=Elizabeth Stokoe; Saul Albert; Cathy Pearl |Title=What is “conversational” about conversational technologies, products, and services..."

{{BibEntry
|BibType=ARTICLE
|Author(s)=Elizabeth Stokoe; Saul Albert; Cathy Pearl
|Title=What is “conversational” about conversational technologies, products, and services? Insights from conversation analysis
|Tag(s)=EMCA; Conversation analysis; Technology; AI; LLMs; Language; Social interaction; AI Reference List; In press
|Key=Stokoe2026b
|Year=2026
|Language=English
|Journal=Annual Review of Applied Linguistics
|URL=https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/annual-review-of-applied-linguistics/article/what-is-conversational-about-conversational-technologies-products-and-services-insights-from-conversation-analysis/E9B905F354920A46EBE73985AD8C9D5C
|DOI=10.1017/S0267190526100233
|Abstract=“Conversational” technologies, products, and services are in the headlines more than ever. But what does it mean to be “conversational?” We address this question through the lens of six decades of empirical research in conversation analysis, which has identified and described the foundational structure and interactional machinery of human sociality. We consider not only how tacit notions of “conversationality” manifest in technologies, products, and services, such as role-play, communication training, and chatbots, but also in research methodologies such as focus groups, semi-structured interviews, and laboratory studies – all of which rarely acknowledge how researcher–participant interaction shapes the data collected. Drawing on a range of examples from different institutional settings, we consider how and whether such technologies can or should leverage “conversation” in ways that reproduce “naturalistic” interactions – and ask what might count as “naturalistic” in this context anyway? We argue that if human conversationality becomes a benchmark, then humans themselves will fail tests derived from normative, not empirical, understandings of how social interaction works.
}}

Yang2026

2026-06-23T06:45:09Z

JakubMlynar: Created page with "{{BibEntry |BibType=ARTICLE |Author(s)=Bo Yang; Oskar Lindwall; Christian Licoppe |Title=Coherence through sedimentation: Temporal organization and emergent interaction in Dan..."

{{BibEntry
|BibType=ARTICLE
|Author(s)=Bo Yang; Oskar Lindwall; Christian Licoppe
|Title=Coherence through sedimentation: Temporal organization and emergent interaction in Danmaku
|Tag(s)=EMCA; Danmaku; Coherence; Discourse; Computer-mediated-communication; Asynchronous interaction; pseudo-synchronous interaction
|Key=Yang2026
|Year=2026
|Language=English
|Journal=Discourse, Context & Media
|Volume=72
|Number=August 2026
|Pages=101033
|URL=https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211695826000607
|DOI=10.1016/j.dcm.2026.101033
|Abstract=This paper examines how coherence and participation are accomplished in danmaku, a commentary system on Chinese and Japanese video platforms where user comments scroll across the screen and are time-stamped to specific points on the video timeline. Although comments are produced asynchronously, they appear synchronously during playback, creating what has been described as pseudo-synchronicity (Johnson, 2013; Liang, 2021). Building on research in computer-mediated communication (CMC), the paper investigates how interaction in danmaku is organized through multiple temporalities: the time of video playback, the time of message production, and the time of subsequent viewing. Drawing on a dataset of educational danmaku videos, we analyze how comments become sequentially and thematically linked through practices such as noticings, choral clustering, and indexical reference. The analysis demonstrates that coherence in danmaku emerges through stigmergic processes of sedimentation: participants leave visible traces that persist and accumulate, gradually transforming the comment stream into an interactional infrastructure that future viewers orient to. Much like graffiti layered across a public wall, danmaku commentary builds into an accumulated record of participation that becomes integral to the video itself. By foregrounding these temporal and stigmergic dimensions, the paper shows how danmaku reconfigures audience roles, blurs distinctions between live and asynchronous participation, and extends participation frameworks, contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of emerging digitally mediated interaction in asynchronous, distributed settings.
}}

IIEMCA 2027 Call for Presentation Abstracts

2026-06-22T13:35:31Z

JakubMlynar: Created page with "{{Announcement |Announcement Type=Conference |Full title=IIEMCA 2027 Call for Presentation Abstracts |Short title=IIEMCA 2027 Papers |Short summary=The call for IIEMCA 2027 pr..."

{{Announcement
|Announcement Type=Conference
|Full title=IIEMCA 2027 Call for Presentation Abstracts
|Short title=IIEMCA 2027 Papers
|Short summary=The call for IIEMCA 2027 presentation abstracts is open: inviting submissions of presentations that are aligned with the conference theme and fit within the fields of ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and related fields.
|Announcement text=IIEMCA27 will be held at Wits in Johannesburg South Africa from 6 - 9 July 2027.

We welcome submissions of presentations that are aligned with the conference theme and fit within the fields of ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and related fields. Submissions are inclusive of a title, keywords and 500-word abstract. Individual paper presentations will be 15 - 20 mins long, followed by a 5 - 10 min Q&A.

Note: During the submission process, applicants can select to present within a general or specific panel. Selecting a panel does not guarantee acceptance into the panel. To aid the blind review process, you will need to select the approach that best fits your paper: Ethnomethodology; Conversation Analysis; Membership Categorisation Analysis; Interactional Linguistics; Ethnography; Discursive Psychology; Other.

*Submissions are restricted to one first author application per applicant. However, co-authorship of additional papers is supported.

CALL DETAILS

Opens: 1 September 2026

Closes: 23 October 2026, midnight SAST

Information and Submission link: For more information and to access the submission portal visit https://www.iiemca27.org/calls

Queries: interact.hmn@wits.ac.za or catherine.tam@wits.ac.za
|Year=2026
|Web link=https://www.iiemca27.org/calls
|Categories (tags)=Uncategorized;
|From date=2026/09/01
|To date=2026/10/23
|Submission deadline=2026/10/23
}}

IIEMCA 2027 Call for Panel Abstracts

2026-06-22T13:31:56Z

JakubMlynar:

{{Announcement
|Announcement Type=Conference
|Full title=IIEMCA 2027 Call for Panel Abstracts
|Short title=IIEMCA 2027 Panels
|Short summary=The call for IIEMCA 2027 panels is open: inviting submissions of panel proposals within the fields of ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and related fields.
|Announcement text=IIEMCA27 will be held at Wits in Johannesburg South Africa from 6 - 9 July 2027.

The call for panels is open. We invite submissions of panel proposals within the fields of ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and related fields. We welcome proposals aligned with the conference theme. Submissions are inclusive of a title, keywords and 700-word abstract.

To aid the blind review process, you will need to select the approach that best fits your paper: Ethnomethodology; Conversation Analysis; Membership Categorisation Analysis; Interactional Linguistics; Ethnography; Discursive Psychology; Other.

Note: Accepted panels will consist of 4 to 10 individual paper presentations. For the conference, panel organizers will be required to peer review individual paper submissions for their panel, register for and attend the conference and to facilitate the panel (introduce presentations, facilitate Q&As, &, where possible, run a final panel discussion).

*Submissions are restricted to one panel application per applicant.

CALL DETAILS

Opens: 1 April 2026

Closes: 17 July 2026 (this is the new date incl. an extension), midnight SAST

More Information and FAQs: https://www.iiemca27.org/calls

Submission link: http://www.exbo.co.za/abstracts/index.php?conf=IIEMCA27P

Queries: interact.hmn@wits.ac.za or catherine.tam@wits.ac.za
|Year=2026
|Web link=http://www.exbo.co.za/abstracts/index.php?conf=IIEMCA27P
|Categories (tags)=Uncategorized;
|To date=2026/07/17
|Submission deadline=2026/07/17
}}

IIEMCA 2027 Call for Panel Abstracts

2026-06-22T13:30:46Z

JakubMlynar: Created page with "{{Announcement |Announcement Type=Conference |Full title=IIEMCA 2027 Call for Panel Abstracts |Short title=IIEMCA 2027 Panels |Short summary=The call for IIEMCA 2027 panels is..."

EMCATeaching

2026-06-22T07:04:45Z

JakubMlynar: Created page with "{{Announcement |Announcement Type=Other |Full title=EMCATeaching |Short title=Teaching EMCA |Short summary=Survey study on "Teaching EMCA: Practices, challenges, and reflectio..."

{{Announcement
|Announcement Type=Other
|Full title=EMCATeaching
|Short title=Teaching EMCA
|Short summary=Survey study on "Teaching EMCA: Practices, challenges, and reflections in a diverse community"
|Announcement text=The project is titled “Teaching EMCA: Practices, challenges, and reflections in a diverse community.” It explores how Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (EMCA) is taught across different academic and institutional contexts worldwide.

This study builds on earlier ethnographic exploration of the EMCA community (Icbay, 2026, published in Symbolic Interaction and avaliable here https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/symb.70010) and aims to document and reflect on teaching practices, challenges, and rewards across the community.

The survey consists of six sections of open-ended questions and takes approximately 45 minutes to complete: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/pages/responsepage.aspx?id=IfcEBVHUK0C4hDgUKFWeOaCxuUYkslpNhxS2cen8etJUN0JOM1pPUlVSNFlUQzg0M0FPQ1IwWTI0QS4u

Participation is entirely voluntary. Respondents may also request a Word version of the survey if they would prefer to complete it at their own pace. They can contact Dr. Mehmet Ali Icbay at micbay@wu.ac.at or maicbay@gmail.com.
|Year=2026
|Web link=https://forms.cloud.microsoft/pages/responsepage.aspx?id=IfcEBVHUK0C4hDgUKFWeOaCxuUYkslpNhxS2cen8etJUN0JOM1pPUlVSNFlUQzg0M0FPQ1IwWTI0QS4u
|Categories (tags)=Uncategorized;
|To date=2026/12/31
|Location=-0.11959, -85.03664
}}

Wiggins2026

2026-06-21T12:10:09Z

JakubMlynar: Created page with "{{BibEntry |BibType=ARTICLE |Author(s)=Sally Wiggins; Leelo Keevallik; |Title=Disgust at the Table: The Sequential Location and Production of Young Children's Food Disgust Exp..."

{{BibEntry
|BibType=ARTICLE
|Author(s)=Sally Wiggins; Leelo Keevallik;
|Title=Disgust at the Table: The Sequential Location and Production of Young Children's Food Disgust Expressions in the Home and Preschool
|Tag(s)=EMCA; Eating; Conversation analysis; In Press
|Key=Wiggins2026
|Year=2026
|Language=English
|Journal=Research on Children and Social Interaction
|URL=https://utppublishing.com/doi/10.3138/rcsi-2025-0006
|DOI=10.3138/rcsi-2025-0006
|Abstract=Children's understanding of disgust has been investigated experimentally from an individual perspective, but little is known about their expressions of disgust in everyday settings. Disgust has also been associated with, but not directly examined within, food refusal during mealtimes. Using a discursive psychological analysis of food disgust expressions in the home and preschool, this article examines how disgust becomes interactionally relevant at key moments within eating trajectories during everyday mealtimes. Data are taken from two corpora of video-recorded meals in Scotland (homes) and Sweden (preschool) with a focus on expressions such as bleurgh or ugh. The analyses evidence the production of children's disgust expressions at transitional moments during the meal, when food is brought to the table, to the plate, or to the mouth. The implications of the findings for work on disgust expressions and children's refusal of food during eating trajectories are discussed.
}}

Due2026

2026-06-21T12:07:26Z

JakubMlynar: Created page with "{{BibEntry |BibType=ARTICLE |Author(s)=Brian L. Due; |Title=A Post-Praxeological Approach to Multispecies Assemblages: The Case of Human-Plant Interactions at a Farm |Tag(s)=E..."

{{BibEntry
|BibType=ARTICLE
|Author(s)=Brian L. Due;
|Title=A Post-Praxeological Approach to Multispecies Assemblages: The Case of Human-Plant Interactions at a Farm
|Tag(s)=EMCA; In press; Conversation analysis; Assemblage theory; Multispecies; Human-plant interaction; Ethnomethodology; Post-praxeology
|Key=Due2026
|Year=2026
|Language=English
|Journal=Human Studies
|URL=https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10746-026-09843-3
|DOI=10.1007/s10746-026-09843-3
|Abstract=This article develops a post-praxeological approach to multispecies assemblages through a video-based study of human-plant interaction on a regenerative farm. Combining ethnomethodology and conversation analysis with process philosophy and assemblage theory, the paper examines how planting cucumbers emerges as a distributed accomplishment among humans, plants, soil organisms, tools, plastic infrastructures, weather conditions, and a companion dog, among other elements. The study shows how agency is not located in individual actors but distributed across heterogeneous participants. By integrating a flat ontological stance with a first-person ethnographic account and fine-grained multimodal analysis of transcribed segments, the article offers a methodological contribution to multispecies and interactional research, demonstrating how non-human participation can be rendered empirically observable without resorting to abstract generalisation or critical accounts of multispecies, posthuman justice.
}}

Housley2026

2026-06-21T12:04:01Z

JakubMlynar: Created page with "{{BibEntry |BibType=BOOK |Author(s)=William Housley; Patrik Dahl; |Title=Digital Society, Interaction Order and Automation |Tag(s)=EMCA; AI Reference List; Ethnomethodology; C..."

{{BibEntry
|BibType=BOOK
|Author(s)=William Housley; Patrik Dahl;
|Title=Digital Society, Interaction Order and Automation
|Tag(s)=EMCA; AI Reference List; Ethnomethodology; Conversation analysis; Interaction order; Digital technology
|Key=Housley2026
|Publisher=Emerald Publishing
|Year=2026
|Language=English
|URL=https://www.emerald.com/books/monograph/21455/Digital-Society-Interaction-Order-and-Automation
|DOI=10.1108/978-1-83753-878-2
|Abstract=In a world transformed by digital innovations and a social life increasingly digitally automated and augmented, Digital Society, Interaction Order and Automation advances our understanding of how interactionist thinking can be leveraged as a conceptual and methodological resource for approaching digital societies in relation to automation and the emerging contours of interaction order in the 21st century.

Drawing on the inspirational work of Erving Goffman, Harold Garfinkel and Harvey Sacks, alongside empirical inquiry, Housley and Dahl consider how the study of interaction order might shape a contemporary and future-oriented sociological understanding of social interaction, automation and organisation in digital times. Adopting a creative and distinct approach situated within sociological inquiry, namely interactionist sociology, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, the authors explore the relationship between interaction order, synthetic sociality and socio-digital change through the lens of punctuation and automation and it’s situated production and incorporation within contemporary contours of interaction.

A timely contribution to mediating the emerging contours of digital society, this is important reading for an interdisciplinary audience that includes, sociologists, cultural theorists, social psychologists, linguists, ethnographers and computer scientists.
}}

Rudaz2026a

2026-06-21T11:53:28Z

JakubMlynar: Created page with "{{BibEntry |BibType=ARTICLE |Author(s)=Damien Rudaz; Mathias Broth; Jakub Mlynář; |Title=Everything Counts: The Managed Omnirelevance of Speech in Human–Voice Agent Intera..."

{{BibEntry
|BibType=ARTICLE
|Author(s)=Damien Rudaz; Mathias Broth; Jakub Mlynář;
|Title=Everything Counts: The Managed Omnirelevance of Speech in Human–Voice Agent Interaction
|Tag(s)=EMCA; Turn-taking models; Ethnomethodology; Voice Agents; Praxeology; Conversation analysis; AI Reference List; In press
|Key=Rudaz2026a
|Year=2026
|Language=English
|Journal=ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction
|URL=https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3820655
|DOI=10.1145/3820655
|Abstract=To this day, turn-taking models determining voice agents’ conduct have been examined primarily from a technical point of view, while the ways in which they emerge as interactional constraints or resources for human conversationalists in situ remain underexplored. Drawing on a detailed analysis of corpora of naturalistic data, we document how humans’ conduct was produced in reference to the ever-present risk that, each time they spoke, their talk might trigger a new uncalled-for contribution from the artificial agent. We examine this phenomenon in interactions involving rule-based robots from a ‘pre-LLM era’ as well as the most recent voice agents. This ‘omnirelevance of human speech’ (i.e., the possibility that a conversational agent may erroneously respond to any speech it detects) emerged as a constitutive feature of these human-agent encounters. We describe some of the practices through which humans managed these artificial agents’ turn-taking conduct. Given recent improvements in voice capture technology, we ask whether this ‘omnirelevance of human speech’ weighs even more heavily on human practices today than in the past.
}}