Young citizens are increasingly being invited to take part in participatory democracy meetings as joint decision-making has grown popular in public administration. The backbone of participatory democracy is that some authority is granted to the citizenry and by drawing on video data (38 hours) from a year-long participatory project, this conversation analytic study shows that the adolescents are instructed to a deontic role rooted in epistemics, benefactive considerations, as well as temporal aspects relating to future citizenship and hope. The institutional representatives perform actions that determine how the adolescents should, in their turn, perform actions of influence. In this way, authority is ascribed through an ambivalent configuration in which compliance with the directives is supposed to establish a strengthened deontic position.
Sexual consent is advocated around the world to reduce sexual assault. The widespread affirmative consent model emphasizes a need for unambiguous consent. In this paper, we contribute to a deeper understanding of how ambiguities in the initiations of sexual activities are routinely solved to achieve consent. Drawing on conversation analytic research on joint decision-making, and a dataset of 80 cases of sexual initiation in contemporary TV-series and movies, we investigate the interactional practices by which sexual activities are presented as consensual and how consent is achieved across sequences of interaction. We found there to be social advantages of synchronous initiation, compared to sequential verbal initiations, which were associated with various social vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities could however be circumvented by two practices, each of which made use of a distinct combination of verbal and embodied resources. While ambiguities exist, our results oppose the idea of sexual consent as a practically hopeless and awkward endeavor. Instead, consent consists of joint action that is achieved through recognizable and systematic ways.
What should count as legitimate forms of reasoning in public deliberation is a contested issue. Democratic theorists have argued that storytelling may offer a more accessible form of deliberation for marginalised citizens than ‘rational argumentation’. We investigate the
empirical support for this claim by examining Swedish citizens’ use of storytelling in written communication with the political establishment. We test whether stories are used frequently, as well as by whom, and how they are used. We find that storytelling is (1) rare, (2) not more frequent
among people with nonmainstream views, and (3) used together with rational argumentation. In line with some previous research, we show that stories still play other important roles: authorising the author, undermining political opponents and, most often, further supporting arguments made in
‘rational’ form. The results suggest that people rely more on rational argumentation than storytelling when expecting interlocutors to be hostile to their views.
This study explores the social organization and the necessary involvement in accomplishing sharedness in joint decision-making, by adopting a members' perspective on food preparation. Prior research on joint decision-making has mostly focused on verbal analysis of institutional interactions, e.g. medical encounters. In contrast, the current study carries out a multimodal interaction analysis of joint decision-making in everyday informal cooking among friends. The analysis demonstrates a crucial function of embodied actions, such as bodily stance, eye gaze and manipulation of objects, in organizing and coordinating decision-making sequences. Since the decisions in this particular setting often are based on a multisensory access to the objects of decision, establishing and displaying epistemic access comprise a constitutive part of joint decision-making. In line with this, we show that not allowing for an epistemically equal point of departure, the participants may be sanctioned when not accessing the empirical object of decision, e.g., not tasting the sauce. In addition to shedding light on the temporal organization of actions and the epistemic access central to organizing joint decision-making, the study offers an understanding of how participants as social actors constitute themselves as friends and family by means of making decisions shared in the midst of a mundane activity that constitutes daily life.
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