Sam Schirm and Veronica González Temer
This is an exciting time for ISCA! Not only do we have ICCA coming up, members of the ISCA community have stimulating activities on going and future projects that we get to read about in this issue.
First, Marie Flinkfeldt, Jon Symonds and Clara Iverson tell us about the Conversation Analysis and Social Work (CASW) network that has been established over the past years. They report about how the network first began in 2018 (teaser: it started in someone’s kitchen!), the network’s regular online conferences, as well as reflect on the relevance of CA to social work. Read about CASW here.
In a second network report, Gerardo Chávez-Lazo, Brunella Basile, Belén Muñoz, & Alonso Vásquez-Kanashiro write about Secuenciando (“Sequencing” in Spanish), a student-led initiative started by undergraduate students in Peru. The network welcomes any Spanish speaker, interested in learning CA, to take part and collaborate in regular online meetings and data sessions in a “collaborative environment oriented toward joint exploration and collective discussion”. Read about Secuenciando (including about how to become a member) here.
Next we have a squib from Paul Sbertoli-Nielsen and Dorothée Kraus on Response particles in multilingual interaction: One family’s mhm in English and m᷉m in Norwegian. In their squib, the authors introduce their collaborative project investigating how, in multilingual family settings, multilingualism is embedded “in the participants’ holistic use of available interactional resources”. Their analyses of two excerpts from the same Norwegian-English-speaking mother-daughter dyad suggest that participants’ choice of either English mhm or Norwegian m᷉m demonstrates their local orientation towards the language of the interaction. Read about their project and their analyses here.
We then have news about two novel international projects that have recently been awarded research funding. First, Richard Ogden and Marina Cantarutti tell us about their project on Enhancing our understanding of breathing in non-lexical vocalisations in interaction. A collaboration between the York University and Saarland University, this project will investigate the role of breathing and non-lexical vocalizations in English (L1 and L2), German, and French interactions by combining recordings of interactions with non-invasive respiratory kinematic data. Their project has received a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the German Research Foundation. Read about their project and their plans here.
In the next piece, Simona Pekerak Doehler and Klara Skogmyr Marian give an overview of their new project The grammar-body interface in second language interaction: a developmental perspective, for which they have been awarded a joint grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Swedish Research Council Formas. In this project, they investigate the interplay between the body and language as it pertains to the development of a second language. Simona and Klara take us through the motivations, goals, and research questions of their project in their piece, which you can read here.
Last but not least, we have reports from two conferences from the last few months. First, Elina Nuutinen takes us to the 8th Nordic Interdisciplinary Conference on Discourse and Interaction (NORDISCO 2025) and the broad range of topics covered at the conference. She also tells us about her own experience at the conference as an early-career research as well as what plenary speaker Pentti Haddington took away from this year’s NORDISCO. Read about the conference here. Then we have Mathew Butler’s report on LANSI, which took place in October 2025. Mathew highlights the conference’s intimate, community-focussed atmosphere and the benefits of LANSI’s distinctive presentation format. Read about the conference here.
Announcements
SNSF project — An open paid 4-year doctoral position is available at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, within an international SNSF project on multimodal analysis and second language acquisition, in collaboration with Stockholm University. The project examines how second language learners coordinate language with gestures, gaze, posture and other embodied resources in authentic interaction. Applicants should have a Master’s degree in language sciences or a related field, strong research motivation, and mastery of French; good English is also required, and comprehension of Swedish would be an advantage but is not mandatory. More information and application details can be found here.
CARM training — CARM: The Conversation Analytic Role-Play Method – Training for Conversation Analysts will take place online via Zoom on Friday 5 June 2026, 10:30–16:30 GMT. The training introduces CARM for academics who want to develop research-based communication training grounded in conversation analysis. It covers the main steps involved in designing and delivering CARM training, from identifying “trainables” to presenting content, and also addresses how to evaluate CARM’s impact. The course is also a prerequisite for those wishing to become CARM Affiliates. The session will be recorded for registered participants, with reduced fees available for PhD students and unwaged participants. More information and registration details can be found here.
ICCA 2026 — The International Conference on Conversation Analysis will be held at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, from 23–29 June 2026. The main conference runs from 26–29 June, preceded by a rich programme of workshops from 23–25 June on core and emerging areas in CA, including turn-taking, repair, action formation, sequence organization, epistemics, deontics, phonetics, particles, multilingual interaction, multimodal transcription, silence, healthcare interaction, and AI within CA workflows. The conference theme, Diversities, Language, Interaction, invites reflection on diversity across languages, interactional settings, data, tools, technologies, methods, modalities, identities, and lived experiences. More information about the programme, registration, speakers and workshops is available on the ICCA 2026 website.
Oxford intro to CA/healthcare 2026 — The University of Oxford will run Introduction to conversation analysis and health care encounters as a two-day in-person course on 10–11 June 2026 at St Anne’s College, Oxford. The course introduces conversation analysis as a method for studying communication in healthcare, including how to collect audio/video recordings of naturally occurring encounters, transcribe data, build collections, and analyse interactional practices. It combines lectures, practical exercises, demonstrations and a supervised small-group practicum. The course is led by Dr Rebecca Barnes and is suitable for researchers, students, health professionals and others interested in applying CA to healthcare data; no prior CA experience is required. There are 21 places available. More information and booking details can be found here.