Emma Tennent

Taken‐for‐granted presumptions about race are incorporated into the operating logic of many institutions. In emergency police calls, racialization is routinely used to accomplish visual descriptions of persons of interest. This use of racial categories relies on and reproduces inferences about race as visually discernible. These inferences are bound up in colonial histories and ongoing racist violence and discrimination. Our discursive psychology study documents how participants make links between racial category membership and visual appearance and orient to racialization as a delicate but necessary part of an emergency call. We thus show how examining racialization can illustrate the workings of racial inferences even in the absence of overt orientations to prejudice. Understanding how racialization is built into the institutional infrastructure provides an important ‘upstream’ perspective on issues of racialized policing and is a necessary first step in moves towards social justice.

Purpose: Domestic violence is a global problem that reached new visibility during the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdowns were predicated on the idea of home as a site of safety. Yet for many people, home is a site of violence and abuse. This study aims to document how lockdowns provided a new form of spatial-moral order where previously ordinary activities of coming or going from home took on new moral meanings. Design/methodology/approach: This paper uses discursive psychology and conversation analysis to examine calls to police about violence made during lockdown. The data are 200 calls to emergency and non-emergency police lines in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. We analyse how callers describe movements to and from home as policeable matters and how call-takers respond to those descriptions. Findings: Callers described others’ behaviours as transgressions of the spatial-moral order of lockdown. Call-takers responded in different ways that configured lockdown breaches as either relevant policeable problems or as matters of personal responsibility. Descriptions which cast the problem as “live” occasioned a police response, while those that did not convey the same urgency were met with advice to resolve the matter locally. Originality/value: Examining interactions between callers and call-takers provides unique insights into how movement to and from home was understood as possibly policeable during lockdown. Our interactional approach highlights how understandings of “criminal behaviour” are accomplished and negotiated in real-life encounters. We also uniquely illustrate callers’ fears from their own perspective and how these are met with different institutional responses.

Hatred and fear of trans people, particularly trans women, are worldwide social phenomena. Transphobic rhetoric rests on essentialist understandings of sex and gender, but ethnomethodology shows how the “natural attitude” to sex/gender is a practical accomplishment. We use conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis to examine the workings of the natural attitude in a public submission to a government select committee about a law that would affect transgender people. We adapt Garfinkel's concept of the status degradation ceremony to show how the submission systematically used categories of sex and gender to present trans women as illegitimate and dangerous in women's spaces. We also show how the submission was recognized as transmisogynistic and challenged by government ministers of the select committee. We thus show how people can accomplish and challenge transmisogyny through common‐sense knowledge about sex and gender.

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.

The pandemic has exacerbated moral panics about conspiracy theories. Yet defining what conspiracy theories are is just as fraught as figuring out what to do about them. This article provides the first empirical demonstration of how the categories ‘conspiracy theory’ and ‘conspiracy theorist’ are used in social interaction. We examined comments from a New Zealand politician about a Covid-19 outbreak at the start of the election period. Using conversation analysis, membership categorisation analysis, and discursive psychology, we tracked how his talk was built and interpreted by participants. The findings show how a conspiracy theory was made recognisable through the machinery of storytelling and how its status as a conspiracy theory was accomplished and challenged through categorisation. We argue that conceptualising conspiracy theories as social actions offers a way to move beyond definitional debates to examine how participants understand and use conspiracy theories in everyday life. (Conspiracy theory, social interaction, categorisation)

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.

The nature of the link between identity and action is a fundamental question for social science. One focus in psychology is how actions like seeking help are implicated in matters of identity. This paper presents a discursive psychology study of identity and help in social interaction. Drawing on a corpus of nearly 400 recorded calls to a victim support helpline, I analysed how participants oriented to the link between identity and help. With attention to epistemic, deontic, and affective relations between participants, I analysed how identity was demonstrably relevant and procedurally consequential for building and interpreting help‐seeking requests. Participants displayed an understanding that seeking help from Victim Support necessarily implicates identity. Callers’ identities as victims or clients rendered their help‐seeking accountable and invoked identities for call‐takers as representatives of a support service. The findings show that identity and help are mutually constitutive. Seeking help constituted callers’ identities as victims; and their identities as victims constituted their requests for help. I suggest that analysing identity and help in social interaction provides evidence for the mutually constitutive link between identity and action.