Derek Edwards

I begin with the origins of Loughborough University's Discourse and Rhetoric Group (DARG), and in particular discursive psychology (DP). Rather than attempting to summarize DP, versions of which are plentiful, the article attempts to clarify various relationships and tensions between DP and other kinds of social psychology, particularly experimental. Common sense psychology is defined as DP's topic rather than rival; the aim is to study how people deploy everyday psychological notions and manage psychological business within talk and text, and what they accomplish by such deployments, rather than trying, as experimental psychology is often characterized as doing, to replace it all with something purportedly better. Claims for DP being particularly interpretative rather than scientific are rejected, by appeal to an ‘interpretative gap’ between phenomena, data, analysis, and conclusions that all research must manage, that gap being often much larger in quantitative and experimental work. The importance of pursuing causal explanations of psychological phenomena is questioned, and the importance asserted, of discovering, through rigorous empirical and conceptual analysis, the normative bases of human conduct and accountability.

We examine the location and function of lawyers' contributions in police interrogations of crime suspects, focusing on sequence organization to identify a typology of lawyers' contributions. Lawyers' contributions occurred in four main environments: (a) as compound turns built off police officers' routine elicitations of self-identification by all parties present at the interview; (b) as responses to police officers' routine invitations, prior to closing the interview, for lawyers to add anything further; (c) as responses to suspects' appeals for advice during the interview; and (d) as spontaneous interventions at junctures such as between first and second parts of an adjacency pair (typically, police questions and suspects' answers), or as interjected clarifications for the suspect, of what a police question may be implying. We also address how regular features of lawyers' contributions instantiate the lawyers' role in the setting, including features that make for success in objecting to a line of questioning.

We examine the location, design and uptake of reported racial insults and abuse across two interactional sites: telephone calls to UK neighbourhood mediation centres and police interviews with suspects in neighbourhood crimes. In the mediation data, talk about ethnicity and racism was formulated almost exclusively in `reported speech', as a listed complain-able item about neighbours rather than as the reason for the dispute. In the police data, suspects reported racial insults as counter-complaints against other parties, and police officers quoted insults reported in witness testimony as part of their interrogation. We found systematic, oriented-to practices for constructing and reporting racial insults, involving pairing national or ethnic identity categories with another word (for example, `Paki bastard', `gypsy twat', `bitch Somali'). Although speakers often `edited' insults (`nigger this', `white that'), they nevertheless maintained two-word formulations, indexing the swear-word and stating just the ethnic or national category. Speakers further oriented to the `two-wordedness' of racial insults in their carefully managed use of one-word formulations. Insults regularly contained locative phrases (for example, `fuck off back to your own country') and generalizing devices (for example, `and stuff '). Finally, we found a continuum of response types, from explicit second assessments done in ordinary talk, to minimal but aligned acknowledgements in mediation calls, to no affiliative response in police interviews. We discuss the implications of our findings for understanding the impact and relevance of racism in everyday life, as well as providing insights into the sorts of daily conflicts that occur between neighbours, as these are recounted in two institutional settings.

No matter what the debate, whatever its content or its medium (text or talk), there is likely to be some furniture around. While we talk about things and events, principles and abstractions, cognition and reality, or read about construction and objectivity, we do so in chairs and in rooms, at desks and tables, or even out in the open, where the rocks and trees are. The appeal of these things is that they are external to the talk, available to show that it is just talk, that there is another world beyond, that there are limits to the flexibility of descriptions. Hitting the furniture also works as a nonverbal act, offering the advantage of getting outside of language; its force is that it avoids the rhetorical danger of appealing to nonverbal reality by putting it into words.