Elizabeth Stokoe

This book investigates the situated (re)production of categories, from the most mundane and unremarkable to those most strongly associated with power and privilege. By examining the reciprocal relationships between categorial phenomena and the basic structures and practices of social interaction, the book provides a new framework for integrating conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis.Across its ten chapters, the book describes a conversation analytic approach to studying categories and categorization, charts the development and history of membership categorization analysis, and addresses core methodological challenges and practices associated with using this approach. After mapping out the new framework developed in the book, each chapter describes intersections between categorial phenomena and the domains that comprise the infrastructure of social interaction. The book concludes by exploring applications, interventions, and impacts of understanding categories in ways examined across the preceding chapters, and by considering future avenues for excavating categorial practices in the ordinary, institutional, and technological settings of human social life.Categories in Social Interaction is essential reading for social scientists with an interest in categories of people and categorizing practices, and especially for practitioners and students of conversation analysis, membership categorization, ethnomethodology, and discursive psychology.

This book investigates the situated (re)production of categories, from the most mundane and unremarkable to those most strongly associated with power and privilege. By examining the reciprocal relationships between categorial phenomena and the basic structures and practices of social interaction, the book provides a new framework for integrating conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis.Across its ten chapters, the book describes a conversation analytic approach to studying categories and categorization, charts the development and history of membership categorization analysis, and addresses core methodological challenges and practices associated with using this approach. After mapping out the new framework developed in the book, each chapter describes intersections between categorial phenomena and the domains that comprise the infrastructure of social interaction. The book concludes by exploring applications, interventions, and impacts of understanding categories in ways examined across the preceding chapters, and by considering future avenues for excavating categorial practices in the ordinary, institutional, and technological settings of human social life.Categories in Social Interaction is essential reading for social scientists with an interest in categories of people and categorizing practices, and especially for practitioners and students of conversation analysis, membership categorization, ethnomethodology, and discursive psychology.

Based on extensive analysis of real-time, authentic crisis encounters collected in the UK and US, Crisis Talk: Negotiating with Individuals in Crisis sheds light on the relatively hidden world of communication between people in crisis and the professionals whose job it is to help them. The crisis situations explored in this book involve police hostage and crisis negotiators and emergency dispatchers interacting with individuals in crisis who threaten suicide or self-harm. The practitioners face various communicative challenges in these encounters, including managing strong emotions, resistance, hostility, and unresponsiveness. Using conversation analysis, Crisis Talk presents evidence on how practitioners deal with the interactional challenge of negotiating with people in crisis and how what they say shapes outcomes. Each chapter includes recommendations based on the detailed analysis of numerous cases of actual negotiation.Crisis Talk shows readers how every turn taken by negotiators can exacerbate or solve the communicative challenges created by crisis situations, making it a unique and invaluable text for academics in psychology, sociology, linguistic sciences, and related fields, as well as for practitioners engaging in crisis negotiation training or fieldwork.

Based on extensive analysis of real-time, authentic crisis encounters collected in the UK and US, Crisis Talk: Negotiating with Individuals in Crisis sheds light on the relatively hidden world of communication between people in crisis and the professionals whose job it is to help them. The crisis situations explored in this book involve police hostage and crisis negotiators and emergency dispatchers interacting with individuals in crisis who threaten suicide or self-harm. The practitioners face various communicative challenges in these encounters, including managing strong emotions, resistance, hostility, and unresponsiveness. Using conversation analysis, Crisis Talk presents evidence on how practitioners deal with the interactional challenge of negotiating with people in crisis and how what they say shapes outcomes. Each chapter includes recommendations based on the detailed analysis of numerous cases of actual negotiation.Crisis Talk shows readers how every turn taken by negotiators can exacerbate or solve the communicative challenges created by crisis situations, making it a unique and invaluable text for academics in psychology, sociology, linguistic sciences, and related fields, as well as for practitioners engaging in crisis negotiation training or fieldwork.

We spend much of our days talking. Yet we know little about the conversational engine that drives our everyday lives. We are pushed and pulled around by language far more than we realize, yet are seduced by stereotypes and myths about communication.This book will change the way you think about talk. It will explain the big pay-offs to understanding conversation scientifically. Elizabeth Stokoe, a social psychologist, has spent over twenty years collecting and analysing real conversations across settings as varied as first dates, crisis negotiation, sales encounters and medical communication. This book describes some of the findings of her own research, and that of other conversation analysts around the world. Through numerous examples from real interactions between friends, partners, colleagues, police officers, mediators, doctors and many others, you will learn that some of what you think you know about talk is wrong. But you will also uncover fresh insights about how to have better conversations - using the evidence from fifty years of research about the science of talk.

'Identity' is a central organizing feature of our social world. Across the social sciences and humanities, it is increasingly treated as something that is actively and publicly accomplished in discourse. This book defines identity in its broadest sense, in terms of how people display who they are to each other. Each chapter examines a different discursive environment in which people do 'identity work': everyday conversation, institutional settings, narrative and stories, commodified contexts, spatial locations, and virtual environments. The authors describe and demonstrate a range of discourse and interaction analytic methods as they are put to use in the study of identity, including 'performative' analyses, conversation analysis, membership categorization analysis, critical discourse analysis, narrative analysis, positioning theory, discursive psychology and politeness theory. The book aims to give readers a clear sense of the coherence (or otherwise) of these different approaches, the practical steps taken in analysis, and their situation within broader critical debates. Through the use of detailed and original 'identity' case studies in a variety of spoken and written texts in order, the book offers a practical and accessible insight into what the discursive accomplishment of identity actually looks like, and how to go about analyzing it. Features: *Accessible introduction to the study of discourse and identity across a variety of contexts. *Interdisciplinary in scope, the book is relevant to a wide range of courses such as English language and linguistics, psychology, media, cultural studies, gender studies and sociology. *Each chapter includes a critical overview of work in the area, original case studies, practical instruction for analyses, points for further discussion and suggested reading.