Congratulations to our 2023 ISCA awardees!

Best Student Paper Award

Kristina Eiviler, (PhD Student, University of Zürich): “‘The Silence’ in the crowd: How visitors of venerated places display and make the self-focused state of non-talk accountable to the others”.

Best Dissertation Award

Kristella Montiegel (2022) “Use Your Words”: A Conversation Analytic Perspective on Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing Children’s Socialization into Oral Communication. University of California, Los Angeles.

Satomi Kuroshima (chair of the selection committee): “Kristella’s dissertation, drawing on the data collected during her extensive fieldwork in Deaf or Hard of Hearing (D/HH) oral preschool classrooms for over 9 months, represents a significant contribution not only to interaction studies but in a much wider context, including language socialization, the sociology of childhood, and special education for children with disabilities. The dissertation begins with a literature review that is both wide-ranging and thorough-going, which comes with critical discussions of issues pertinent to the main themes of the work. Each subsequent chapter undertakes the unprecedented task of analyzing teacher and D/HH child interaction practices as well as socialization practices among those children who are taking an agentive role in interacting with their peers. By analyzing those practices that are also observable in interaction involving hearing children, her work has made it possible for us to realize how much we rely on conversational practices in mundane ordinary interactions, such as other-initiated repair, embodied directives, and recipient-designed corrections, in managing communicating with D/HH children by socializing them into the social norms and goal orientations of activities in class. The analysis also clearly demonstrates how participants orient to particular conversational preferences, culturally specific norms, and children’s adaptation to interactional participation organizations among peers. As such, this dissertation is outstanding and original in its analysis of disabled children’s social interaction. It succeeds in integrating careful ethnographic observations with incisive sequential analysis. Its depth of treatment and clarity of exposition are exemplary for emerging scholars in the field.”

Best Article Award

Elliott Hoey (2020). “Waiting to inhale: On sniffing in conversation”. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 53(1), 118-139.

Arnulf Deppermann (chair of selection committee): “Speaking on behalf of the best paper award committee: Simona Pekarek Doehler, Renata Galatolo, Kaoru Hayano and myself. We are particularly pleased that this year, the award goes to a younger, however already very experienced scholar: Elliott Hoey for his paper: Waiting to Inhale: On Sniffing in Conversation. It was published in ROLSI 2020 (53:1, 118-139). Elliott Hoey is assistant professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He completed his PhD at Radboud University in conjunction with the MPI Nijmegen on lapses in interaction, to which the awarded paper is related. The PhD has been published as When Conversation Lapses: The Public Accountability of Silent Copresence (Foundations of Human Interaction series). Oxford University Press, in 2020. Elliott held postdoctoral positions at Basel University and for shorter periods in Siegen and in Loughborough. Elliott’s about 20 papers and articles cover a remarkably broad range of different topics in CA, ranging from children’s play, bad news delivery, the use of grammatical formats, to vocal and other embodied practices. He is also co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA and IL (together with Alexandra Gubina and Chase Raymond), an ongoing published project which has just started to go online and which includes many important members of our community.

In the nomination we received for the paper on sniffing, the nominator wrote: ‘This is a highly original take on a phenomenon that has hitherto not been targeted in interaction analysis, while constituting a salient practice. Hoey elegantly walks us through the well-chosen excerpts and solidly anchors it on the research frontline.’ This recommendation statement very nicely pinpoints the major achievements of Elliott’s paper: The phenomenon he studies, sniffing, that is, “the swift, audible intake of breath through the nasal passage”, had not been researched before in depth, at least not in CA and, most importantly, not that systematically and thoroughly. The paper could serve as a model exercise in doing CA: It presents a well-informed review of the state of the art; it marks the unique contribution the paper makes; it builds on a robust collection of cases; it systematically investigates how turn-position impinges on what the sniff is used to accomplish; and it compares sniffs with a closely related, yet different phenomenon, in-breath for respiration or claiming speakership, in order to deepen the analysis of the target phenomenon by contrast in a revealing way. In sum, this is a paper that is definitely a recommended reading for a graduate or even undergraduate course on learning how to do CA.

Beyond these methodological features, Elliott’s study is an eminent example of the analytic mentality of CA. It starts from an observation that has been striking to the skilled and sensitive interaction analyst’s ear, regardless of whether it concerns an already established topic of research and regardless of disciplinary boundaries. Instead, Elliott manages to show that the phenomenon of sniffing participates in systematic practices that matter to participants. In this way, it is one of the papers that lives up to CA’s maybe most valuable and most risky claim, namely, to be a discovering science. We congratulate Elliott Hoey to his impressive work and are looking forward to hearing and reading more thought-inspiring research from him in the future.”

Best Book Award

Lorenza Mondada (2021). Sensing in Social Interaction: The Taste for Cheese in Gourmet Shops. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.

Galina Bolden (chair of the selection committee): “On behalf of the committee, it is my great pleasure to introduce this year’s ISCA book award to Lorenza Mondada for her book Sensing in Social Interaction: The Taste for Cheese in Gourmet Shops, published by Cambridge University Press.

The book advances the field of Conversation Analysis and EMCA – both theoretically and methodologically – by presenting a highly sophisticated and insightful analysis of (multi)sensorality as an interactional and intersubjective phenomenon. The book argues for and embodies a conceptual shift from studying senses (as internal private processes) to sensing (as a public activity). Methodologically, the book is a demonstration of how to conduct an analysis of social interaction in all of its multi-sensorial richness. 

The book has received a lot of praise. For example, Anita Pomerantz writes: “Lorenza Mondada presents a new and profoundly exciting conception of sensorial engagements in social interaction. She uses that conception for an empirical analysis of sensorial practices within courses of actions. Her exceptionally insightful work serves as a model for future conversation analytic and ethnomethodological studies of multi-sensoriality studies.”

In my view, the book is typical Lorenza – it’s a master class on how to combine extensive fieldwork with precise and insightful analyses of micro-moments of interaction – and, of course, have a lot of fun while doing it.”

Lifetime Achievement Awards

Auli Hakulinen

Gene Lerner

Doug Maynard