In a Special Issue of Discourse Studies titled ‘The Epistemics of Epistemics’, contributing authors criticize Heritage’s research on participants’ orientations to, and management of, the distribution of knowledge in conversation. These authors claim that the analytic framework Heritage developed for analyzing epistemic phenomena privileges the analysts’ over the participants’ point of view, and rejects standard methods of conversation analysis ; that and are adopted in developing and defending the use of abstract analytic schemata that offer little purchase on either the (...) specific actions speakers accomplish or the understanding others display of them; and that, by virtue of these deficiencies, claims about the systematic relevance of epistemic phenomena for talk-in-interaction breach long-standing norms regarding the relationship between data analysis and generalizing claims. Using a collection of excerpts bearing on the import of epistemics for action formation and action sequencing, I demonstrate that these claims are patently false and suggest that they reflect the authors’ effort to recast CA as a kind of fundamentalist enterprise. I then consider excerpts from a second collection to illustrate how the form of social organization described by Heritage can be used to explicate other phenomena that depend on systematic alterations to its basic features. In conclusion, I suggest that CA’s success in enhancing our grasp of the organization of talk-in-interaction derives from its unique commitment to both generalization and context specificity, collections and single cases, findings plus a continual openness to the ‘something more’ that each particular case can provide. (shrink)

Using data from American emergency call centers, this article focuses on the coordination, and mutual relevance, of participants’ effort to manage two forms of unit completion – sequence closing and concluding the occasion in which the project was pursued. In doing so, we specify the import of sequence organization as one method for conducting, organizing, and resolving interactional projects participants may be said to pursue, and describe a range of possible relations between project completion and occasion closure and the locations (...) from which problems come to be introduced as parties move to resolve projects and close calls. As we show, sequence and occasion closings produced in the service of projects are fateful: they inexorably demand that the participants arrive at some alignment – or make visible their failure to do so – regarding the projects pursued in it, the status of those projects, and thus who, as a consequence, the parties are for another, that is, their ‘identities’. For strangers and familiars both, the management of projects and the manner in which closing is achieved matters. (shrink)

Ever since language has been examined as a vehicle for action, scholars have been interested in its authorized use. Typically described under the rubric of `felicity conditions', the authorized use of language involves, among other conditions, the right or authority of a member to engage in, or deploy, some named action. This paper begins by examining how participants authorize the discourse of a co-interactant in one specialized setting: a live news broadcast. I argue that the successful exploitation by a reporter (...) of his/her right to authoritatively describe a scene all are witnessing rests in part on the displayed mutual orientation of his or her co-interactants to that right through the local, contingently achieved deployment of complex discursive practices. After exploring the special case of live news broadcasts, I link this study to other studies of mass media that have explored the link between discursive practices in news broadcasts and reportorial authority. Finally, I argue that the resources I have identified have a more general provenance than live news broadcasts, and reflect on the relation between these findings and recent discussions that explore the authorized use of language. (shrink)

This article addresses a vital concern in current society by showing what participants themselves may treat as ways to transcend their differences. Actors’ shared understanding has been of longstanding interest across the social sciences. Conversation analysis treats the procedural infrastructure of interaction as the basis for participants to manage intersubjectivity. The field of dialogue studies has made occasions in which people transform their relationship by discussing their differences, central to their research project, and called them “dialogic moments.” This study draws (...) on CA to investigate “dialogic moments,” but now through the eyes of participants themselves. Using single-case analysis, we argue that such moments require participants to go against normative orientations in talk promoting social solidarity and progressivity, by soliciting differences to understand and transcend them. This “going against the interactional tide” may explain both why dialogue is difficult to achieve and why it is appreciated by participants as dialogue. (shrink)