Suspended in 2025/26
PB437      Half Unit
Conversation Analysis and the Science of Social Interaction

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

We spend much of our days talking, at work and in our private lives, yet we know little about the conversational engine that drives these social interactions. We are pushed and pulled around by language far more than we realize yet are seduced by stereotypes and myths about human communication. The aim of this course is to develop students’ understanding of conversation analysis as an approach to studying social life and conversation itself as a tool for personal and professional practice. The course will consider how such understandings can challenge existing theories of human communication as well as underpin interventions, applications, and policy impacts across the third, public, commercial, and technology sectors.

The course will introduce students to the field of conversation analysis (CA) across ten lectures and seminars. It seeks to develop students’ knowledge of, and critical thinking about, how human communication is understood and misunderstood across social science disciplines. It will also develop students’ awareness of the importance of CA as an epistemic tool for challenging popular conceptions of conversational practice, and as an ethical tool for identifying and describing the communicative practices that comprise 'isms' (e.g., racism, ageism, classism, cisgenderism) and support or undermine social justice.

Each lecture will cover theoretical and empirical aspects of conversation analysis. Indicative topics include why and how conversation analysts study social interaction; the relationship between CA and other approaches to human communication; the CA transcription system and why it matters; social categories and identities; simulated interactions; high stakes encounters; conversation design and technology; impact and policy. Each seminar will enable students to work directly with audio or video recordings and transcripts of real conversations, choosing from a range of settings (e.g., dating, political interviews, protests, encounters involving ‘isms’) in which human sociality is laid bare.

10 hours of seminars and 10 hours of lectures in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

The course will be delivered through a combination of lectures and seminars, the latter involving discussing foundational papers as well as practical ‘data sessions’ in which students will be introduced to social interactional materials (transcripts and recordings, provided as part of the course). These will be structured learning activities and will include group work and student presentations of their observations and insights.

• Antaki, C. (Ed.) (2011). Applied conversation analysis: Intervention and change in institutional talk. Palgrave.
• Clayman, S.E., & Heritage, J. (2021). Conversation analysis and the study of sociohistorical change. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 54 (2), 225-240. DOI: 10.1080/08351813.2021.1899717
• Sidnell, J., & Stivers, T. (Eds.) (2013). The handbook of conversation analysis. Wiley-Blackwell.
• Park, S.H., & Hepburn, A. (2022). The benefits of a Jeffersonian transcript. Frontiers in Communication, 7, 779434. DOI: 10.3389/fcomm.2022.779434
• Stokoe, E., Fernandez-Dols, J., Albert, S., Reeves, S., Porcheron, M., Hepburn, A., Mandelbaum, J., Hoey, E., & Hofstetter, E. (2018). How real people communicate. The Psychologist, 31, 28-47.

Emily Hofstetter’s (EM does CA) YouTube tutorials on conversation analysis:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClsFYWz5vIm8pFYFfpcrQaA

The conversation analysis community resource page:
http://emcawiki.net/Main_Page

Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis for Racial Justice
https://emca4rj.conversationanalysis.org/

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