ICA 2016 PRECONFERENCE | FUKUOKA, JAPAN | THURSDAY, JUNE 9, 2016
HOW TO ANALYZE AUTHORITY AND POWER IN INTERACTION
**New deadline for 500-word abstract and analysis outline: February 15, 2016 **
Convened by Nicolas Bencherki (SUNY Albany; nbencherki@albany.edu), Frédérik Matte (U. of Ottawa; fmatt3@uottawa.ca), and François Cooren (U. de Montréal;f.cooren@umontreal.ca)
Historically, studies on language and social interaction have often been criticized for their alleged incapacity to deal with questions of power, coercion and domination (Cooren, 2007). By exclusively focusing on what people do in interactional scenes, LSI scholars have indeed been accused of being ill equipped to address and analyze what makes the interactions they study possible (Reed, 2010). In response, macro-sociologists and critical scholars keep reaffirming the key role that structures, ideologies and power relationships play in the constitution of interactions. However, they rarely analyze conversations or dialogues per se, which means that interaction studies seem often immune to this kind of consideration.
For the past twenty years, however, a growing movement of scholars has decided to go beyond the sterile opposition between agency and structure by openly analyzing everything that happens to make a difference in a given interaction (Bartesaghi, 2009, 2014, Bencherki and Cooren, 2011; Benoit-Barné and Cooren, 2009; Castor and Cooren, 2006; Chiang, 2015; Cooren and Matte, 2010; Taylor and Van Every, 2011, 2014). Instead of exclusively focusing on what people do, these scholars have also taken into account other forms of agency or authorship that seem to make a difference through people's turns of talk.
How to participate
For this preconference, we would like to encourage scholars to submit papers that explicitly (1) deal with questions of power/authority and (2) illustrate their approach by studying the detail of the interaction that organizers selected (see the preconference website below).
In other words, each participant is invited to shed his or her own original light on the same common interaction.
Any kind of perspective – Conversation Analysis (Pomerantz & Fehr, 1997; Sacks & Jefferson, 1992; Sanders, 2005), Actor Network Theory (ANT) (Latour, 1986; Law, 1991), CCO (Communicative Constitution of Organization) (Benoit-Barné & Cooren, 2009; Bourgoin & Bencherki, 2015; Taylor & Van Every, 2014), Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 2013; Fairclough & Wodak, 1997; van Dijk, 1993), ethnography of communication (Carbaugh & Boromisza-Habashi, 2015; Hymes, 1964; Kalou & Sadler-Smith, 2015), etc. – is welcome as long as these two requirements are met.
This preconference could be of interest to Language and Social Interaction and Organizational Communication scholars, but others are, of course, also welcome.
Submit a 500-word abstracts including an analysis outline on the preconference website by February 15th. Responses will be send by February 28.
For more information including the video and the transcript of the interaction all participants are invited to analyze, and to submit your abstract: http://authorityinteraction.wordpress.com
Nicolas, Fred and François
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Nicolas Bencherki, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Communication
Affiliate Faculty
Informatics Ph.D. Program
University at Albany
State University of Albany
Social Sciences 337
1400 Washington Avenue
Albany, NY 12222
p. 518-442-4874
e. nbencherki@albany.edu