Turn-taking and the structural legitimization of bias: The case of the Ford-Kavanaugh hearing by the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary

Raymond, Chase Wesley; Caldwell, Marissa; Mikesell, Lisa; Park, Innhwa; Williams, Nicholas

doi:10.1016/j.langcom.2019.09.002

Cited by 8 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…Accordingly, the temporal utterances made in Parliament are classified in the study in accordance with their interactional status as (1) contested, (2) uncontested and (3) ratified. The broad definition of contestation adopted in this study reflected not only the general competitive nature of political semantics (Gallie, 1956; Freeden, 2003: 71) but also the specificity of conversational collaboration in deliberative settings bent on self-regulation in the absence of proscribed adversarial roles (courts) or pre-set hierarchies (doctor–patient or teacher–pupil exchanges – see Foucault, 1971: 65; Lasswell, 1971: 282; Burton, 1981: 62–64; Heath, 1984: 247; Newmeyer, 1990: 244–245; Drew and Heritage, 1992: 5–6; Linell, 2001: 83; Thornborrow, 2002: 43; Philips, 2006: 479–480; Hanks, 2006: 301; Ladegaard, 2009; Junge, 2011: 29; Raymond et al, 2019). To be sure, outright rejections and contestations of comparisons did occur in the House of Commons during the period observed; however, the need to balance competition and coordination in the process of sustaining interactional routine led the members of the House of Commons to explore various mitigation strategies (Brown and Levinson, 1978: 40; Fraser, 1980; Leach, 1983: 108; Caffi, 1999), such as modifying, questioning and otherwise qualifying temporal comparisons of their interlocutors.…”

Section: Methods and Sourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Temporal comparisons, historical semantics of interaction and ‘post-war consensus’ in British Parliament: Studying time references in a deliberative environment

Postoutenko

Sabelfeld

2021

Time & Society

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This article aims to demonstrate that the transition from the mainstream narrative to the interactional history of concepts promises tangible benefits for scholars of social time in general and temporal comparisons in particular. It is shown that the traditionally close alignment of narration with the production of historical consciousness at various levels hinders the study of time as a semantic variable perpetually contested, amended and upheld across society. Alternatively, the references to time made in public settings, allowing for more or less instant reactions (turn-taking) as well as expression of dissenting opinions (stance-taking), offer a much more representative palette of temporal semantics and pragmatics in a given sociopolitical environment. In a particularly intriguing case, the essentially deliberative venue where contestation is supported by both institutional arrangements and political reasons (British House of Commons) is put to test under circumstances commonly known as ‘the post-war consensus’ – the unspoken convention directing opposing political parties to suspend stance-taking regarding the past actions of the government during WWII, its immediate aftermath and its future prospects. As a reliable indicator of this arrangement, the contestation of temporal comparisons between relevant pasts and futures is tested in oppositions reflecting party allegiances (Conservatives vs. Labour vs. Liberals) and executive functions (government vs. opposition) between 1946 and 1952. It is shown that, notwithstanding the prevalence of non-contested statements aimed at preserving interactional coherence and pragmatic functionality of the setting, the moderately active contestation of the adversary’s temporal comparisons in the House of Commons at that time helped all parties, albeit to a different degree, to shape their own political and institutional roles as well as to delegitimize their respective adversaries.

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Section: Methods and Sourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Temporal comparisons, historical semantics of interaction and ‘post-war consensus’ in British Parliament: Studying time references in a deliberative environment

Postoutenko

Sabelfeld

2021

Time & Society

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“…5-6;Thornborrow 2002, p. 43;Philips 2006, pp. 479-80;Hanks 2006, p. 301;Heritage 2006, p. 18;Ladegaard 2009;Postoutenko 2010, p. 21;Junge 2011, p. 29;Raymond et al 2019).…”

Section: Management Of Personality Cults: Random Signalingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Personality Cults from a Communicative Standpoint

Postoutenko

2022

Religions

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Drawing upon a wide variety of personality cults in religion, culture and politics from Ancient Egypt to our times, the author attempts to present a summary view of this phenomenon from a communicative standpoint. Personality cult is seen as an attribution of universal and eternal socio-cultural significance to certain beings, messages and interaction scenarios in defiance of changes in and diversity of the surrounding reality. The communicative implementation of such a cult involves the suspension of some of the most basic mechanisms of social coordination. Thus, deification of political, cultural or religious leaders eliminates the subordination of individuals to their social roles, whereas canonization severs the ties of certain selected texts with the contexts of their production and reception. Last, but not least, random signaling between the subject of cultic adoration and his or her subordinates runs counter the standard cooperation rules in interaction (‘turn-taking’). Illustrating these points, the article points out at specific communicative pathologies accompanying personality cults and jeopardizing the stability of their socio-cultural environments.

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“…Institutional multi-party interaction engenders specific practical problems for participants selecting next speakers and is often organized as pre-allocated turn-taking systems, such as those observables in court proceedings (Atkinson & Drew 1979; Drew 1992), mediation and judiciary hearings (Garcia 1991; Raymond, Caldwell, Mikesell, Park, & Williams 2019), news interviews (Heritage 1985; Greatbatch 1988), and political meetings (Mondada 2013). To publicly select and establish next speakers is not only a practical problem of audibility, for example, but an organizational issue intrinsic to the distribution of institutional roles (Atkinson 1984) and the participants’ rights and obligations concerning how to legitimately engage in the institutional activity (Lewellyn 2005; Mondada, Svensson, & van Schepen 2017; Raymond et al 2019).…”

Section: Publicly Selecting the Next Speaker(s)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Name(ing) norms: Mispronunciations and ethnic categories in political talk

Svensson

2022

Lang. Soc.

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This article investigates the situated orientation to and production of social and political norms related to the pronunciation of person names in the context of announcing next speakers during a political meeting. Through a detailed multimodal analysis of naturally occurring interaction, the article discusses how participants to a political party's congress in Sweden treat the chairpersons’ pronunciation of person names as rendering them (non)normative and as relating them to ethnic categories. In associating specific prosodic realizations of person names with ‘(non)Swedish-ness’ and orienting to this as inacceptable, the participants reflexively establish these membership categories as (non)normative and, moreover, as unequal. In this way, the article contributes to our understanding of normative aspects regarding public announcements of next speakers as a turn-taking procedure in political interaction and how names are invoked and established as related to (non)normative ethnic categories by virtue of the formal properties of their production. (Conversation analysis, ethnomethodology, person names, political interaction, turn-taking, ethnicity, prosody)*

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Turn-taking and the structural legitimization of bias: The case of the Ford-Kavanaugh hearing by the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary

Cited by 8 publications

References 30 publications

Temporal comparisons, historical semantics of interaction and ‘post-war consensus’ in British Parliament: Studying time references in a deliberative environment

Temporal comparisons, historical semantics of interaction and ‘post-war consensus’ in British Parliament: Studying time references in a deliberative environment

Personality Cults from a Communicative Standpoint

Name(ing) norms: Mispronunciations and ethnic categories in political talk

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