Evi Dalmaijer
Jikkie van Veen
In December 2023, Evi Dalmaijer and Jikkie van Veen, both PhD students from the Netherlands (Radboud University and Erasmus medical center), traveled to Loughborough to attend the 12th edition of the CA Day, organized by Loughborough University’s Discourse and Rhetoric Group (DARG). This is our report from these amazing days!
As we wanted to start the conference well-rested, we arrived in Loughborough on Sunday evening. During our stay, we slept in the student residence on the University campus (very cozy!). After a good night’s sleep, CA Day took place on Monday the 18th. We arrived early and started the day with great coffee, greeting familiar faces, and meeting new people. After that, everyone gathered in the conference room, and we listened to the first presentation of the day. Lotte van Burgsteden gave a very interesting presentation on the accountability of doubting and the Overton Window. Giorgia Pellegrino followed by presenting a great talk about reported speech as a resource for doing more than agreeing in parent-teacher conferences. We also enjoyed a lot of different laughing audio sounds during the fun presentation of Richard Ogden & Marina Cantarutti about the phonetics of laughing in conversation. And during the presentation of Stuart Reeves on humans and autonomous delivery robots in the street, we (and the rest of the audience) had to laugh a lot ourselves because of the funny interactions between robots and unsuspecting people on the street. But there were also more serious talks, for example by Jamie Aranthoon who showed us videos of taxi drivers who refused to allow assistance dogs in their cars. Also, the paper by Virginia Calabria about the negotiation of shushables in interaction, kept the audience engaged. And then there were also three very special invited speakers. First, Eric Laurier, who showed us detailed analyses of the 2021 Capitol Riot. The second invited talk was given to us by Charlotte Albury, who very convincingly argued that we benefit from combining CA with other disciplines and illustrated this using her research on health behavior change. Geoffrey Raymond concluded the oral presentations with his talk on reality disjunctures in news comedy interviews, which was super interesting. Between talks, there was time for more coffee, delicious cake (even vegan versions!), and networking. It was very nice to catch up with people we already knew, but also to meet a lot of interesting and especially nice people we had not met before; talking about each other’s research is not only fun but also inspiring and important for one’s own research! We ended the day with a pizza party and more time to chat about research but also about many other things (like Dutch and American politics 😉). During the pizza party, the poster session also took place, a first during CA day! Although the format of eating pizza combined with listening to the presenters was a bit challenging at times, most of us proved well equipped for this multi activity. As the CA Day came to an end, we went to a local pub ‘The Swan In The Rushes’ to end the evening with a pub quiz with some of the other attendees and a lot of locals (we lost, but had a great time).
For us, our Loughborough experience did not end there, as the next day we both got to attend an extra (internal) CA day filled with interesting data sessions with DARG members. We had the opportunity to look at amazing data that were very new to us (for example, dance classes and mock jury trials). We learned so much from the other participants and felt very honored to be there. After a day full of impressions, our trip to England came to an end and we took the train back to Amsterdam (luckily just before the tunnel flooded).
We would like to thank Saul and Emma and their colleagues again for having us. We learned a lot from this experience and are looking forward to next year’s CA Day!