Conference Abstracts

1 Abstracts. Please note that this book of Abstracts will not be available in print form at the conference; delegates are advised to consult it online or to download it from the conference website Pål Aarsand Anna Sparrman Assistant Professor Associate Professor, Department of Thematic Department of Education, Uppsala University, Studies – Child Studies Linköping University, Sweden Sweden. [email protected] [email protected] Visual transcriptions as theory (and methodology) During the last 30 years transcription methodologies have changed and developed. Due to this technological development, researchers within the field of social studies now use video cameras in the study of situated practices. In line with the question of transcribing, this has generated discussions about what kind of data and knowledge that is created. When transcribing visual material similar concerns Ochs raised 30 years ago in her classic article “Transcription as theory” is work: what and why are made visual in transcripts? What is the theoretical stance for transcript conventions and what is the purpose of visualizing the transcriptions? Thereby, it is also highlighted how video data is created through series of choices for practical purposes. Based on the increased use of digital video recordings and the increased mix of visual and audible material in research articles, we study how and what is gained by using visual data, and the ontological status given to it. The presentation shows examples of visual transcriptions chosen from slightly different research areas and with different transcription solutions. All the transcribed material is based on video recordings, which in one or the other way has been digitalised and transformed into new visual forms. We see two patterns in the way that visual data is used; first as a way to illustrate people in action but with no reference to the visual in the analyses, and second the visual as a possibility to increase the complexity of the research data that are analysed. Importantly is however, that whether visual data are used as part of the analysis, or as illustrations that works as proof of an activity, the visual is more or less repeatedly treated as taken for granted and as an objective reality that the reader just has to accept. The paper concludes that these new ways of transcribing seldom are problematized as part of the research process. Emad Abdul-Latif Cairo University [email protected] The Rhetoric of Revolution: Discourse and Power at 'Tahrir Square' The 25th January Egyptian Revolution was an arena of conflict between the discourses of Hosni Mubarak' ex-regime on the one hand and those who protested against him on the other. These discourses were promoted and shared out to the public via a huge number of mediums of communication. Perhaps, for the first time in the history of mankind, governmental and private TV channels, local and international radio stations, personal and public electronic web sites, as well as printed and electronic newspapers played such significant role in determining the course and returns of a revolution. This, in fact, provided an additional reason for making the forms of conflict more complicated between the rhetoric of the then- existing regime and the rhetoric of those protesting against it. It, further, provided opportunities for its political discourses to integrate with other religious, economic, social and scientific ones, alongside with rich artistic manifestations apparent in revolution songs, signboards, icons, names, poems, paintings, plays, stories and memories. Note that Abstracts will not be printed: please consult online or download from conference website 2 Amal Alahmady Umm Al-Qura University [email protected] Politeness formulas in English and Saudi Arabic Requests, Thanks and Apologies In this paper I investigate the various politeness formulas that are used in three speech acts: requests, thanks, and apologies. The study aims at exploring the different ways that speakers of English and Arabic use to perform the selected speech acts in order to help learners of English to be aware of such differences in communicating with native speakers of English. I draw on materials from English and Arabic making the point that these acts are the most recurrent in everyday situations. The analysis indicates that in each of these acts the primary goal of the speaker is to lessen any threat to his/her face or to the hearer’s face. It deals with politeness principle as a pragmatic phenomenon proposed by Leech 1983. In this paper, the focus will be on linguistic politeness. What linguistic formulas or expressions speakers of both languages, English and Arabic use to perform the speech acts of requesting, apologizing and thanking. It is hoped that this comparative study of English and Arabic languages will aid in developing FLE learners communicative competence and promoting their listening and speaking skills. Francesca Alby LinC - Interaction and Culture Laboratory Department of Social and Developmental Psychology Sapienza University of Rome [email protected] “Out-think the user through collaboration in engineering practice” This work analyzes how web engineers and designers plan, through collaborative practice s, user- friendly technologies. Through an analysis of multimodal interactions in an Italian Internet company, the paper shows how collaborative situations are essential for web designers to be able to ‘outthink the user’(Sharrock and Button, 1997), that is, imagine the user’s viewpoint and take account of it in the design. Observation-based studies on technical professions (see in particular those by Orr, 1996 and Suchman, 2007) have already evidenced that through joint accounts and interpretations, within triangular relations which also include the technology itself, technicians construct a stock of distributed knowledge and pragmatic understanding which is one of the most valuable and enduring outcomes of their collaboration. I will analyze how this kind of practice supports process of joint imagination and it is used to create user-friendly technologies. To perform these activities, designers draw on specific interactive resources, such as a repertoire of skills shared by groups of different professionals and their overlapping identities as designers and users. The findings are based on data gathered during an ethnographical study and are supported by the analysis of video recordings , visual and conversational transcripts, representations of interfaces and artefacts used by participants. The theoretical framework will include references to cultural and discursive psychology, distributed cognition and workplace studies; methods used in the data analysis refer to visual and conversational analysis (Goodwin 2000). Angeliki Alvanoudi Aristotle UniversityThessaloniki [email protected] Note that Abstracts will not be printed: please consult online or download from conference website 3 The social and cognitive dimension of grammatical gender: exploring the interplay between the use of grammatical gender, culture and cognition in interaction Grammatical gender is related with the sex of nouns’ referents in person reference (Pavlidou 2003), contributes to the representation and construction of gender (Hellinger & Bussmann 2001) and gives rise to gendered categorizations of the world (Lakoff 1987). Drawing on research on linguistic relativity in relation with indexicality (Silverstein 1976), grammatical gender is theorized as a compulsory deictic element which presupposes and constructs the sex of referents and marks the indexical effect of referring expressions (Hanks 2007) as gendered. This paper employs CA in order to study empirically the ways through which the relationship between grammatical gender, cognition and culture is manifested in interaction, theorizing CA’s emic perspective as a potential ‘cognitive’ perspective (Schegloff 1991). By analyzing cases of self-repair, where the use of grammatical gender constitutes a source of trouble for speakers, in fully transcribed data of naturally occurring interaction among friends and relatives in Greek, this paper shows that participants orient to linguistic items marked by grammatical gender as gender membership categories which are important for person reference and social action. Saliha Anjum and Andrew McKinlay Chris McVittie University of Edinburgh Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh [email protected] Discourses of Cultural and Religious Identity by British Muslims According to the 2001 UK Census, Muslims are the second largest community in Britain after Christians (Office of National Statistics, 2004). Britain is considered multicultural but according to a recent Gallup report (2009) Muslims are less happy and less integrated in Britain than elsewhere in Europe and USA. They are facing many private and public threats to their religious and cultural identity. The UK Prime Minister has recently declared that the doctrine of multiculturalism has failed and should be abandoned and that Muslims should embrace British values. Indeed, a senior conservative, Baroness Warsi, had even suggested in a recent speech “Prejudice against Muslims has passed the dinner-table test and become socially acceptable in the UK”. In the face of these changing social and political scenarios Muslims are reconstructing their cultural and religious identities. The present study focuses on one aspect of this: the cultural and religious identities of Muslims living in Britain and the major challenges that

Load more