Sam Schirm and Veronica González Temer
With ICCA 2026 now behind us and a new academic term quickly approaching, we’re sending out this shorter, two-part newsletter issue. Speaking of ICCA: We in the Publications Committee are hard at work on a special ICCA newsletter issue, so keep your eyes out for it!
In her squib, Andrea Rodriguez explores how members of Spanish-speaking families negotiate whether or not something is beneficial or detrimental to co-family members. Using multimodal CA, Andrea analyzes two extracts in which one family member claims entitlement 1) to refuse another’s request for a piece of candy and 2) to suggest a family co-member avoid wearing inappropriate footwear at work. In these moments, family members negotiate their entitlement to “grant, control, and decide what counts as beneficial for the [other]”, that is, they negotiate what counts as ‘caring’. Rodriguez ends the squib with a reflection of the linguistic resources Spanish offers its speakers to negotiate this ‘benefactive order’, pointing to potential new areas of research. Read Andrea’s squib here.
In our second piece, Jenny Stock reports on the 25th Conference on Conversation and Discourse Analysis, which took place at the Institute for German Language in Mannheim from March 25th to 27th (2026). This year’s conference topic was “Technology use and social interaction: New interactive practices, new data and methods”, and was the first time the conference took place in English. In her report, Jenny discusses how the contributions of the conference approached technology as an object of study – that is, as a medium of interaction (e.g., in digital interactions, VR), an object in interaction (e.g., smartphones, smart appliances) and a co-interactant (e.g., AI, robots) – as well as emerging technologies for research on interaction. Jenny also highlights the diversity of contribution formats offered at the conference, from the typical presentations, keynotes and workshop, to the fast-paced methodological research talk. Read all about the conference here.