A Conversation Analytic Study
Giving and receiving gifts is a fundamental aspect of human social life - the cement of social relationships. This talk develops earlier analyses of the gift relationship (as explored in relation to the potlach, the exchange of women as gifts, ceremonial gift-giving to mark rites of passage and public festivals, and gift-giving to the needy) by using conversation analysis to explore social norms relating to the giving and receiving of gifts are reflected and constructed in talk-in-interaction. Drawing in particular on a set of helpline calls, my analysis shows that and how the norm of reciprocity is displayed as a pervasive concern of social participants. I will discuss the different forms that reciprocity takes in talk, and the intimate relationship between the design of actions in talk and the construction of reciprocal gift-giving in interaction. Finally, I use the analysis to consider the relationship between language and social norms more generally
Celia Kitzinger is Professor of Conversation Analysis, Gender and Sexuality in the Department of Sociology, University of York, UK. Her other publications include: Heteronormativity in action, Social Problems, 2005: 52(4): 477-498; Is `woman' always relevantly gendered, Gender & Language 2007: 1(1); and (with Sue Wilkinson) Surprise as an interactional achievement, Social Psychology Quarterly
Restorative shaming: negotiating testimony in youth justice conferencing
J R Martin, Paul Dwyer & Michele Zappavigna
In this paper we explore the interplay of inerpersonal meaning and genre structure in New South Wales (Australia) Youth Justice Conferences (YJC). These conferences are meetings of young offenders and their victims, in the presence of a mediator and support people, to determine the punishment for a crime. Their function is to enact a form of restorative justice through a process of what Braithwaite has called 'reintegrative shaming'. As part of this process mediators invite young offenders, who have already pleaded guilty to their offence, to recount their crime. This generally involves a number of interactive exchanges in which the mediator in a sense leads the offender towards a full recount and reflective evaluations on what has taken place.
Systemic functional genre theorists (e.g. Martin & Plum 1997, Martin & Rose 2008), inspired by Labov, have long argued that the play of interpersonal meaning is central to enacting the social purpose of story genres. In Youth Justice Conferences, young offenders' recounts of their crime and the evaluation they negotiate with the mediator are crucial. This can be highlighted by examining an instance where an Ethnic Liason Officer (ELO) from the Australian Islamic community intervenes, apparently to ramp up a shaming process which he feels has not gone far enough. This involves a genre shift from an interactive recount to a moralising interrogation, enacted through a shift in the way interpersonal meaning is negotiated by means of appraisal resources and exchange structure. Cross-cultural tensions in other words engender a shift from a conciliatory genre (the recount) to a restorative macro-genre (recount plus interrogation), re-shaping this instance of Youth justice Conferencing in the process.
Martin, J R & G Plum 1997 Construing experience: some story genres. Journal of Narrative and Life History 7.1-4. (Special Issue: Oral Versions of Personal Experience: three decades of narrative analysis; M Bamberg Guest Editor). 299-308.
Martin, J R & D Rose 2007 Genre Relations: mapping culture. London: Equinox.
While some graffiti areas are tacitly sanctioned (the tourist gaze, especially when supported by tourist dollars, play a part in constructing the city, and artists such as Banksy in the UK have turned graffiti tourism and even wall-ownership into serious business), for many city officials, dwellers and visitors graffiti remain precisely that which should not be seen. A great deal of money is spent on buffing the city. While graffiti beckon from our peripheral vision as we traverse urban landscapes[Author ID1: at Thu Jun 7 01:21:00 2007 ] in cars, trains, buses, rickshaws. on foot, for many they are little more than passing flashes of indecipherable colour, reminders of anti-social tendencies and the ubiquity of global subcultures. In this paper, I want to make a case for an understanding of graffiti as part of the urban landscape, as one of the ways in which cities are brought to life and given soul, one of the ways in which space is narrated. Urban graffscapes, as both products of artists moving through an urban landscape and as art viewed in motion, are part of the articulation of the cityscape. That graffiti are deemed a threat to property, propriety and pristine walls has to be seen in terms of struggles over the preferred semiotics of a city. Insistently and colourfully reminded that graffiti will farewell and welcome them from city to city, the possible discomfort for global travellers needs to be understood in terms of the flattened class images of the global that tourism produces. This paper tries to develop an understanding of graffiti, its opponents and an alternative urban semiotics.
The global spread of English as seen in commerce, media, and education accompanies an assumption that English is a vital lingua franca in international communication. The spread is often viewed negatively as reinforcing cultural, linguistic, and structural inequality and extinction of minority languages. A rise of global migration in non-English-speaking countries, however, provides an opportunity to reexamine the nature of the hegemony of English as an international lingua franca (EILF). In many parts of the non-English-speaking world where migration of non-English-speaking workers has increased local linguistic diversity, English does not often serve as the common language of communication. Yet, in such communities, English exerts its hegemonic power through teaching and learning not in the sense of threatening the dominant language of the community but undermining people's recognition of diversity.
Drawing on critical ethnography in a mid-sized city in rural Japan, I explore how local people view and engage in diversity and how their views and engagements are related to their subjectivities and experiences developed through learning English. Interviews with English learners who are leaders of volunteer organizations revealed their strong investment in and attachment to English, which prevented them from actively supporting minority languages spoken in the community. Their subjectivities are constructed by symbolic colonialism that legitimates the superiority of English. They struggle with the contradiction that teaching English poses to linguistic diversity--i.e., while they strive to acquire English, minority languages have a larger presence than English does in the community. These learners are contrasted with two learners of Portuguese who have multilingual consciousness and a genuine interest in assisting minority residents. The narratives of these people indicate the need to transform language education to foster critical language awareness that questions the assumption of EILF and values multilingualism while problematizing linguistic, racial/ethnic, and economic hierarchies of power.
Also featuring (with Australian Linguistics Society):
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