Elsevier

Journal of Pragmatics

Volume 143, April 2019, Pages 201-204
Journal of Pragmatics

Editorial
Methodological insights from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2019.02.017Get rights and content

Introduction

Research exploring the social world has always been dynamic, shaped by new paradigms, social contexts, and technologies available to support analytic processes. Methods designed to examine everyday action and interaction, such as ethnomethodology, conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis, have evolved to support the examination of new forms of social action as they emerge or are identified as potentially fruitful areas for research. Sacks' work highlights the inherent potential of EM/CA methods to examine how people conduct social life in a broad range of contexts. As such, the methods need to expand and evolve to reflect changes in the social world and how it might be researched.

The collection of papers in this special issue emerged from discussions of methodological issues explored by researchers at the 10th Australasian Institute of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (AIEMCA) Conference held at the University of Melbourne in November 2016. Several presentations at the conference prompted deeper consideration of some of the challenges associated with the study of talk-in-interaction, ranging from issues of examining interaction facilitated by new forms of technology, challenges of working with expanding collections, pressures to engage with quantitative forms of research, and the need to translate research findings to members of other professions. While each of these papers has used ethnomethodology, conversation analysis and/or membership categorization analysis, the issues that they raise have broader implications for social research, particularly in applied settings. The key aim of this special issue is to provide detail for researchers of language and social interaction how methodological decision-making – and problem solving – can allow for a greater depth of understanding of social action.

Section snippets

Showcasing new approaches to examining social action

These papers engage with and respond to emergent methodological issues in ethnomethodology, conversation analysis and pragmatics that have not been fully explored elsewhere. The goal of this collection is to provide insights into both theoretical and applied issues in using EMCA approaches to understand social action and language-in-use across a range of settings (e.g. classrooms, early-childcare settings, WeChat) and for a range of purposes (e.g. understanding atypical interaction,

Contributions to this special issue

As a scholar who has spent extended periods of time with the archives of Harvey Sacks at the University of California Los Angeles, Richard Fitzgerald, in ‘The data and methodology of Harvey Sacks: Lessons from the archive’ provides commentary on the value of these materials, including the recorded lectures, in showing Sacks as a methodologist-in-action. The prominence of Sacks' work in social science provokes the necessity of re-visiting his early writings, paying closer attention to the

Concluding comment

These papers propose new ways of approaching traditional research literature and resources and also consider innovative methods for the collection and analysis of interactional data. In doing so, the authors are able to explore the methodological challenges and innovations of studying language and social interactions across a range of settings and modalities, and examine how methodological adaptations are being used to address current applied problems across a range of fields. A unifying theme

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Our thanks to the reviewers for their time and insight into the papers that they have helped to shape for this issue and to the Special Issues Editor Anne Bezuidenhout for her patience and support.

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