Summer Update 2022

The ISCA members’ forum newsletter is off on a break for a few months, but we wanted to share a few important updates and announcements from the EMCA community. We also want to remind everyone that if you have any news that you think is relevant for the larger community, please send us an email at pubs@conversationanalysis.org and we will try to include it in the newsletter.

State of Talk Podcast: Charles Antaki

We invite you to enjoy your summer/conference travels while listening to the latest episode of the State of Talk podcast featuring an interview with Charles Antaki, Professor Emeritus (as of this week) of Language and Social Psychology at Loughborough University. Charles is a member of the venerable Discourse and Rhetoric Group, which, with his central involvement, has helped to shape the field of applied CA and discursive psychology. He is also editor of one of the premiere journals in our field – Research on Language and Social Interaction, and his research interests lie in understanding ordinary and institutional interaction through CA. Charles talks about his first encounters with EM/CA and what captured his interest in studies of language and social interaction, he offers some advice for scholars just getting into studies of naturalistic interaction, and discusses his favourite bits of lesser-known research in the field.

Save the Dates

DMCA 2022

The Digital Meeting for Conversation Analysis will take place from October 31st until November 4th and will be completely online. Registration is now open. Speakers should register by August 15th to confirm their slot. If you want to participate in one of the workshops, the registration deadline is October 10th. For everyone else, registration is possible until October 28th.

The event has aimed to keep fees low, and ISCA member get an additional $15 discount:

  • Early Career Researchers $50 USD: You can participate for a discounted rate if:
    • you are a student;
    • you completed your PhD within the last 3 years;
    • more than 3, but less than 5 years since you completed your PhD, but you have not spent this time in full-time academic employment (e.g., you have been unemployed, worked part-time, been on sick leave or parental leave).
  • Faculty $75 USD: If you do not qualify as an ECR, you can participate for the full fee.
  • Workshop $25 USD

More details about DMCA such as the plenary events, workshop schedule, and program are available on the website.

IV EnACE Brazil 2023

The organizing committee is pleased to announce the 4th Meeting Conversation Analysis in Brazil (IV EnACE) which will take place on March 22, 23, and 24, 2023, at the School of Philosophy, Languages and Human Sciences of the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP), in the city of Guarulhos, São Paulo, in partnership with “Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos” (Unisinos University).

The theme chosen for this fourth edition is “Multimodality in human interaction”. EnACE would like to gather especially, although not exclusively, studies on human interaction and on talk-in-interaction that have been dedicated to exploring the coordination between body, gestures, material world, and language in the construction and organization of human interactions. In addition, it also it also aims at contemplating proposals that share or problematize questions about technical and methodological issues on multimodal research (e.g., notation and representation of audiovisual corpora).

​​Important dates:

  • Registration with the presentation of oral communication or for data sessions: from 1st July 2022 to 1st September 2022.
  • Listener registration (without presentation of papers): from 1 October 2022 to 30 October 2022
  • Payment/registration with the presentation of a paper: until 15 January 2023
  • Payment of registration without presentation of a paper: until 15 January 2023
  • Conferences date: 22-24 March 2023

​ABSTRACT SUBMISSION: https://bit.ly/3OOwqua.

Calls for Papers

Integrating Digital Health Technologies in Clinical Practice and Everyday Life: Unfolding Innovative Communication Practices – Frontiers in Communication

This Research Topic will focus on various communication practices related to the use of digital health technologies by patients and/or health care providers and will explore:

(1) The ways in which these technologies reconfigure and transform health care organizations and the patient/provider interaction and relationship.

(2) The social and affective relationships people develop with, and through, digital health technologies. Tracing the “sociability” of these innovations, to put it with Pols & Moser (2009, 161) “might teach us something about why people do or do not like to use [them], by attending to what norms or ‘normativities’ they enact, how they structure interaction, and thus in what ways technologies help to shape ways of living with disease.”

Empirical studies focusing on the use of care technologies in real-life settings are encouraged (e.g., ethnographic, narrative or visual approaches, interaction analysis based on ethnomethodological approach, conversational analysis, or multimodal analysis).

Abstracts should be submitted by 15 October 2022 with full manuscripts on 15 April 2023.

More information about the special issue can be located at the Frontiers website.

Job Opportunities

Post-doctoral fellow Multimodal Interaction – University of Alberta, Canada

The postdoc position is supervised by Prof. Xiaoting Li in the Department of East Asian Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Alberta. The research project that the postdoc will participate in is a multimodal study of the directive system in Mandarin and English interaction. The start date of this position is January 1, 2023. A slightly later start date in spring 2023 might be possible upon negotiation.

The successful candidate will work with Dr. Xiaoting Li on data collection in the field, supervising data transcription, participating in data analysis and research dissemination (publications and presentations). The position provides opportunities to work on interdisciplinary research team in collaboration with researchers in psychology, gesture studies, and computer engineering (machine learning). The successful candidate will assist Dr. Xiaoting Li to coordinate the interdisciplinary research team in the project.

More information about the post and how to apply is on the website.

Publications

Autistic Intelligence: Interaction, Individuality, and the Challenges of Diagnosis – Douglas W. Maynard & Jason Turowetz

Despite the dramatic increase in autism’s prevalence in recent decades, the diagnostic process has remained something of a black box. Autistic Intelligence examines that process in detail, raising questions about how we understand autism as a category. The book shows how to identify “uncommon sense”—forms of fundamental competence that are frequently missed by even the most skillfully accomplished diagnosis. Taking an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approach, and building on scholarship in science & technology as well as disability studies, the book draws on extensive fieldwork—hours of video recordings and observations of psychologists, pediatricians, and other clinicians as they interact with children and families, gather information, and fit that information to diagnostic criteria.

The book raises questions about what autistic behavior is, how measurement works, and how, ethnomethodologically, behavior that seems disordered (in the way that it challenges common sense) is often rational in its own terms. Close examination, by way of conversation analysis, of interactions during testing, reveals forms of autistic intelligence manifest at a subterranean level in the evaluation process. Overall, it is possible to appreciate the individuality of those who receive the diagnosis. Such appreciation means that rather than changing individuals to fit their social environments, we might instead change social environments to accommodate individuals. Such a matter is consistent with social theory inspired by ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approaches.

The book is available in paperback, hardcover and as an ebook through the University of Chicago Press

We also have an episode of the State of Talk Podcast with a feature long-form interview with Doug and Jason that we’ve just finished editing – and it will be out on the podcast feed soon for your summer listening pleasure!

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