Ann Weatherall

This article examines multi-modal self-defence actions in personal safety training classes for girls and women. The actions have linguistic and embodied components. An example is shouting “back off” at an imagined attacker while assuming a self-defensive stance position. An additional distinctive aspect of the phenomenon of interest is that it is done collectively as a multi-person party. Our work builds on and extends prior research in multimodal conversation analysis which has shown the ways language and bodily actions fit together. Using a collection of 200 cases drawn from more than 50 hours of video footage, two broad kinds of recurrent practices are described that support the class to achieve the collective, co-production of multi-modal self-defence actions. One is the projective, embodied syntactic structures instructors use to demonstrate the action and co-ordinate its execution. The other is the grammar of the verbal component that scaffolds the timing of physical techniques, especially ones where there is a combination of moves. By examining how linguistic and embodied components of multi-modal self-defence actions are brought together and done by multiple participants at the same time, we find empirical support for the innovative theoretical idea that syntax can be emergent and embodied rather than predominantly hierarchical and psycholinguistic. Data is in New Zealand English.

Birthing is an exemplary setting for investigating how non-pathological painful sensations are intersubjectively established. Contractions are integral to giving birth and are physiologically normal events that can range from mild to intensely painful sensations. This conversation analytic study is the first to examine how first-stage labor contractions are made recognizable and shape interaction between laboring women, birth partners, and attending clinicians. Drawing on recordings from two British midwife-led units, we show how participants convey and recognize contraction pain through breathiness, pain cries, (limited) talk, and visible bodily actions. Contractions can be prospectively announced and/or retrospectively noticed. We demonstrate that breathing patterns become central to how participants collectively orient to and manage contractions, with the onset of pain temporarily suspending ongoing activities in favor of breath work. Data are in British English.

The under‐reporting of family violence is a global problem. Multiple barriers to help‐seeking have been identified, including some associated with social identities like race, age and gender. This discursive psychology study examines identity and help‐seeking in social interaction. We analysed 200 calls classified by police call‐takers as family harm using conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis. We found that callers oriented to a locally generated identity category ‘the one who called police’ as problematic. Callers sought anonymity or proposed cover stories to avoid being identified by others. Anonymity raised practical problems for recording callers' names and cover stories raised questions about the legitimacy of alternative accounts for police contact. We found callers' concerns with being identified create a dilemma produced through competing moral judgements tied to coexisting institutional and relational identity categories. Participants display understandings that calling the police may be the right thing to do as a help‐seeker, but the wrong thing to do as a friend or family member. Our findings reveal how a locally generated identity category was observable as a force shaping help‐seeking in real‐time high‐stakes encounters.

A call to medical reception is regularly an entry point into primary health care services. Telephone-mediated interactions between patients and receptionists have been found to temper demand for doctor's appointments and influence patient satisfaction ratings; yet little is known about what exactly happens to produce those effects. The present study asks how medical receptionists respond to telephone-mediated appointment requests. Audio recordings of 18 calls between receptionists and patients at a New Zealand University health care practice were collected, transcribed and examined in detail using conversation analysis. The findings reveal the complexity of telephone-mediated medical receptionist work which involves multiple engagements involving the caller and the on-line booking systems. The work has clinical components and evidence was found of receptionists' orientations to the potential urgency of callers' problems and how a triaging process was initiated. Overall, this study shows medical receptionists do skillful communicative work granting patient requests or progressing relevant courses of action in a clinically responsible way, thus delivering a valuable and unrecognized aspect of health care delivery.

This study investigates the practice of “sounding for others,” wherein one person vocalizes to enact someone else’s putatively ongoing bodily sensation. We argue that it constitutes a collaborative way of performing sensorial experiences. Examples include producing cries with others’ strain or pain and parents sounding an mmm of gustatory pleasure on their infant’s behalf. Vocal sounds, their loudness, and duration are specifically deployed for instructing bodily experiences during novices’ real-time performance of various activities, such as tasting food for the first time or straining during a Pilates exercise. Vocalizations that are indexically tied to the body provide immediate displays of understanding and empathy that may be explicated further through lexicon. The existence of this practice challenges the conceptualization of communication as a transfer of information from an individual agent – even regarding assumedly individual body sensations – instead providing evidence of the joint nature of action and supporting dialogic theories of communication, including when language-marginal vocalizations are used.

Societies are undergoing enormous upheavals in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. High levels of psychological distress are widespread, yet little is known about the exact impacts at the micro-level of everyday life. The present study examines the ordinary activity of buying bread to understand changes occurring early in the crisis. A dataset of over 50 social interactions at a community market stall were video-recorded, transcribed and examined in detail using multi-modal conversation analysis. With COVID-19 came an orientation to a heightened risk of disease transmission when selling food. The bread was placed in bags, a difference which was justified as a preventative measure and morally normalised by invoking a common-sense prohibition of touching produce. Having the bread out of immediate sight was a practical challenge that occasioned the expansion of turns and sequences to look for and/or confirm what was for sale, highlighting a normative organisation between seeing and buying. The analysis shows how a preventative measure related to the pandemic was adjusted to interactionally. More broadly, this research reveals the small changes to daily life that likely contribute to the overall negative impacts on health and well-being that have been reported.