Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 16, Issue 1, 2017

Conversation analysis (CA) and ethnomethodology (EM) have long dealt with political talk, but this is the first thematic volume showing the continuity and diversity of EMCA studies in this field. This introduction provides an overview of early to recent EMCA contributions to the study of political talk and discusses how they developed a distinctive field of investigation and how the papers of the special issue draw on and contribute to it. The introduction also clarifies how specific sequential and categorial organizations of social interaction manifest and foster political action and participation, and are locally treated as of political importance by the participants themselves. The study of micro-politics of sequentiality focuses on the temporal, emergent, and sequential unfolding of interaction and the way its organization opens/closes possible occasions for politically relevant actions. By showing how these are established, responded and oriented to by the participants, it offers a respecification of political issues.

The design of questions in news interviews and news conferences has proven to be an illuminating window into the tenor of press-state relations. Quantitative studies have charted aggregate variations in adversarial questioning, but less is known about variations in the intensity of adversarialness within any particular question. Such variation is captured by the vernacular distinction between “hardball” versus “softball” questions. Hardballs advance an oppositional viewpoint vigorously, while softballs do so at most mildly. In this paper we investigate recurrent language practices through which journalists modulate the oppositionality of a question, thereby either hindering or facilitating response. The objective is to better understand how adversarialness is enacted in direct encounters between politicians and journalists.

Despite the emergence of newer forms of web-based political engagement, radio phone-ins continue to have a significant role in the enactment of the democratic process, providing a live forum for direct encounters between members of the public and politicians, beyond the professional forms of mediated encounters between studio journalists and politicians. In this paper, drawing on data from the BBC’s 2015 phone-in Election Call, we use Membership Categorisation Analysis to examine the ways in which political engagement is configured within this forum in the run up to the UK General Election in 2015. In particular, we examine how callers and politicians engage in live political debate through transforming personal experiences into politicised social categories. What emerges most significantly here is that, whereas in previous Election Call series participants configured political categories through personal social identities, in 2015 there is a particular emphasis on callers’ geographical locations as political categories.

Launching a protest movement implies the establishment of a self-categorisation that sets forth the terms of its membership and its political aims from within. Claiming all members’ right to collective legalisation, immigrants without residence/working permits have constituted the “sans-papiers”/“undocumented” category to counter other-categorisations, such as “illegal immigrants” and “clandestine”, which associate the designated population with illegality, and to apply pressure for political change. This paper offers detailed analyses of the ways members of a protest movement (2001, Fribourg, Switzerland) established and used the “sans-papiers” category as official speakers during press conferences. It shows on the one hand speakers’ ingenious in situ deployment of resources offered by the press conference format for doing protest. On the other hand, it reveals speakers’ transforming categorial work that indexes inherent tensions that the setting-up of a “revolutionary category” might imply for its members when confronted to politico-institutional challenges engendered by their protest.

Turn-taking in political settings faces the problem of how to enable the participation of larger numbers of speakers in orderly ways; solutions have been described as offered by constrained formats like the turn-type pre-allocation system or the mediated turn-taking system. This paper describes another specific solution, a table-based turn-taking system.

The study describes how facilitators managing brainstorming sessions in a participatory project exploit the spatial distribution of the citizens around tables scattered in the meeting room. By organizing discussions table by table, rather than selecting next individual speakers, the facilitators select groups and attributes specific rights and obligations to talk to “tables”, which are then treated not as a mere spatial location but as a political entity. The table-based device does not just solve problems of turn-taking management but also fosters the expression of collective opinions of the “table” as a place for building consensus.

A notable feature of the participatory communication repertoire developed by the Occupy movement is known as the “Human Microphone” or “People’s Mic”, reminiscent of the call-and-response format of action. A collection was made of more than 160 online amateur videos recorded at an Occupy protest site or event in which the Human Mic and the disaffiliative “mic check” were used in diverse ways. In 19 separate cases, more than one video recording was independently uploaded of the same event, thus giving a unique insight into the constitution of participation in a collective (and yet potentially dissensual) politico-interactional space from disparate technology-mediated spatial positions at the site. Ethnomethodological conversation analysis (EMCA) is used to analyse the social interactional accomplishment and collective organisation of the ‘voice’ of the Human Mic, including its propagation to larger audiences and its interdiscursive translation into new settings as a strategic tool of political communication that attempts to ‘occupy’ institutional speech.