This paper explores experiences of practitioners and how this influences their professional identity. Based on analysis of data from a national sample of Communication Management (CM) practitioners in New Zealand, the article focuses on internal stakeholder perceptions of current practice in the industry alongside the aligned perspectives of professional and occupational identity.
Facilitated discussion with early childhood staff working with children and families affected by natural disasters in Queensland, Australia, raises issues regarding educational communication in emergencies. This paper reports on these discussions as ‘reflections on talk’. It examines discrepancies between the literature and staff talk, gaps in the literature, and the inaccessible style of some literature- demanded collaborative debate and information re-interpretation. Reframing of the discourse style was used to support staff de-briefing, mutual encouragement, and sharing of insights on promoting resilience in children and families. Formal investigation is required regarding effective emergency-situation talk between staff, as well as with children and families.
This article combines autoethnographic and ethnographic methods to examine the relationship between community and disaster resilience. My analysis draws from personal experience of flood recovery in a South Brisbane suburb in 2011-2012 and later material gathered from interviews conducted with flood-affected residents, community organisations, and elected decision-makers. From this material, I develop a thematically informed discussion that illustrates the conflicted feelings flood affected residents express when discussing their 'entitlement' to community assistance and the fractures that occur within community as disaster experiences persist through time. These findings challenge idealised perspectives of community and particularly the focus on reciprocal obligation that underpins discussion of the presumed benefits of community-based disaster relief.
This article presents the analysis of a single case interaction between two preschool children aged four-years-old and their male early childhood teacher during a routine excursion to the New Zealand bush. The findings build on prior research that revealed how child-initiated enquiries orienting to an environmental feature in the outdoor space provoked an affiliated interaction with the teacher, or not (Waters & Bateman, in press). The current article suggests that, although early childhood education promotes a socio-cultural co-construction of knowledge, asymmetries of knowledge are often present in everyday practice. A call to investigate the interactional features of co-construction and scaffolding is recommended.
Despite the importance of the school-based practicum experience in teacher education programs, only limited research has investigated how supervising and preservice teacher roles and relationships are interactively achieved in situ . Using conversation analysis, we interrogate extracts of practicum talk, showing that different structural conversational arrangements are used in providing positive feedback or raising potential issues. Asymmetrical institutional relationships are conversationally co-constructed. We identify, however, that these supervising teachers initiate a process of critical reflection in talk about improving their practice. We argue the need for sustained critical and collaborative reflection to provide preservice teachers with opportunities to extend their professional knowledge and skills, thereby potentially improving their classroom practices.
Many qualitative projects involve in-depth interviews that create a large quantity of quotable data. The sheer volume of material can cause problems when it comes to writing up the research and using verbatim comments as part of the evidence-base for an academic argument. What factors should a researcher take into account when deciding which sections of an interview to quote, and how should participants' words be integrated within the structure of a paper? Taking a published journal article as the basis for a case study, this essay unpacks the decisions made around the passages selected for publication and explains why particular segments were used. It also addresses the importance of marshalling materials to progress an argument, and of writing with a particular readership in mind. The perspective of the interviewer is valued in this model, since material that has the power to interest, intrigue, or astound the researcher collecting the data is also likely to have a memorable impact upon the intended audience, and this is to be welcomed.
This paper examines a single case of story telling between a couple in a long-distance relationship conducted via video calling. Drawing on Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA) we examine the way the teller incrementally reveals information about a character in order to build a story of coincidences. In doing this, however, the recipient begins to treat the evolving character as relevant to a different device, that of their relationship. Our discussion develops on the analysis of omnirelevance devices (Sacks, 1995) by examining how categories can be shifted between devices. In so doing, we highlight the way categories introduced for one task may be put to other uses; that is, how categories may become ‘promiscuous’.
Editor’s note: The following extended abstract represents the conceptual focus of Associate Professor’s Michael Emmison’s keynote address, the first Keynote Address of the AIEMCA 2012 Symposium. The performative nature of his keynote made it difficult to render in print, but his slide deck and other materials are available online via http://austjourcomm.org Abstract: Leaving to one side the contentious relationship between the ‘juggernaut’ (Stokoe, 2012) of the sequencing branch of Conversation Analysis (CA) and the now marginalised minority speciality of Membership Categorization Analysis, perhaps the most distinctive feature of CA for most of its recent history has been the remarkable uniformity that it has displayed in its approach to the study of talk-in-interaction. Understood in these terms, CA is a project of discovery. Indeed Clayman has likened CA practitioners to ‘explorers’ who set out to collect ‘specimens of interaction’ that they then systematically examine and analyse. This shared style of research practice has endowed CA with an almost Kuhnian degree of ‘normal science’, one which would be the envy of most branches of the social sciences.
This paper evaluates the work of Gene Youngblood on television in the context of a digital multiplatform television environment. In the 1970s, Youngblood called for a media revolution based on an inversion of the structure and function of the centralised mass media. For this to occur Youngblood proposed that the public be given access to a multiple-address communication system so that they could create and distribute content. Television has a special place in this process because, as Youngblood argues, it acts as a kind of expanded consciousness that connects people from across the planet. Today's digital television environment seems uncannily similar to that described by Youngblood over 40 years ago. It connects people with shared interests from across the globe; it offers interactive possibilities and avenues for production and self-distribution. This paper reflects on some of Youngblood's ideas about television, art, and consciousness to see what we might make of them in today's media environment. It does this with a focus on two specific forms of media art that have emerged in an online digital television environment: the video remix and the web documentary. These examples seem to embody much of Youngblood's ideas on how media can expand consciousness by making art an everyday practice.
New technology has changed the face of global reporting. Digital technology has given citizens the capacity to report from restricted frontlines that professional journalists cannot access. This study investigates the role of citizen journalists reporting on the Cyclone Nargis disaster in 2008 from one of the world’s most repressive regimes—Myanmar. The paper shows how and why citizen journalists reported the catastrophe, which killed 140,000 people. Until recently in Myanmar, disasters were unreported and hidden from the outside world. But citizen journalists demonstrated during the disaster that digital technology has become an important tool in telling stories from inside repressive regimes.
Internet-connected tablets and smart phones are being used increasingly by young children. Little is known, however, about their social interactions with family members when engaged with these technologies. This article examines video recorded interactions between a father and his two young children, one aged 18 months using an iPhone, and one aged three years accessing an iPad. Drawing on Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, this analysis establishes ways the family members engage and disengage in talk to manage their individual activity with mobile devices and accomplish interaction with each other. Findings are relevant for understanding children's everyday practices with mobile technologies.
Our study investigates the 'dominance of English' as the language of retailing in the major shopping hub of Dubai, a city with 83% foreign residents and several million visitors annually, from the perspective of Emirati citizens. To explore the apparent acceptance of English as the lingua franca of retail in an Arab-Muslim context, we interviewed 129 Emirati nationals on their use of, and attitudes to, English versus Arabic. Our findings indicate that English is regarded as sufficiently culturally neutral to permit its continued dominance in retail. While our study is limited to a single market, it informs entry into other Muslim markets by identifying language issues that need to be considered by international retailers.
This paper concerns a single case of story telling between a long-distance couple via video chat. Our interest is on how a character’s relevance to the story is rendered uncertain by the teller, but how this uncertainty provides an avenue for the relevance of the character to be recast by the recipient. Using Membership Category Analysis and Sacks’ work on story telling and omnirelevance we examine the evolution of the character in the story while also tracing the way the character is treated by the recipient. Our analysis highlights both the way categories can be withheld from devices for effect and also the way unfixed categories can become ‘promiscuous’ in the sense that they are free roaming and available to be allocated to other devices. In doing this we respecify the ‘problem of promiscuous category analysis’ as a members phenomena.
A series of severe weather events in Queensland during 2010 and 2011 and a greater interest in national security have catalogued a renewed government interest in ensuring that Australians understand the risks and take proactive measures to prepare for disasters. The Living in Queensland Survey uses an ‘all hazards approach’ to ascertain respondents’ attitudes towards disaster preparedness, perceptions of risk, and perceptions of community capacity. The findings highlight what Queenslanders are doing to prepare for natural and terrorist disasters and further illustrate how preparedness behaviour, perceptions of community, and confidence in government have changed since the floods and cyclones of 2011.
On 10 January 2011, a series of triple zero (emergency) phone calls was made to the Toowoomba District Police Communications Centre by persons who had been caught in flash flooding. This paper examines the calls using conversation analysis and membership category analysis to consider the way in which expectations by the caller and call-taker, and the orientation to the role of ‘call-taker’ by the person assuming that role, impacted on the way in which the call was managed. The analysis has implications for training and implementation of policy and procedures when taking emergency calls while under duress.
Communities respond to disasters in different ways, depending to a large extent on the stories and narratives associated with their particular social memories. How the social memory of Theodore, a small rural Queensland town, influenced the recovery of this community is explored in this paper. The narrative associated with the 'bush character' forms the basis of much of this social memory, and while there are positives and weaknesses associated with this characterisation, it is argued that this contributes to the social resilience of the town in the wake of adverse events, including natural disasters.
This paper examines the discursive aspects of Twitter communication during the floods in the summer of 2010–2011 in Queensland, Australia. Using a representative sample of communication associated with the #qldfloods hashtag on Twitter, we coded and analysed the patterns of communication. We focus on key phenomena in the use of social media in crisis communication: communal sense- making practices, the negotiation of participant roles, and digital convergence around shared events. Social media is used both as a crisis communication and emergency management tool, as well as a space for participants to engage in emotional exchanges and communication of distress.
Sadly, Mark Rapley passed away in August 2012. He was a close friend and colleague and he will be sorely missed by all who know him.
Editor’s Note: The following extended abstract represents the conceptual focus of Dr Max Travers’s keynote address, the second Keynote Address of the AIEMCA 2012 Symposium. Other materials are available online via http://austjourcomm.org Abstract: This short paper gives a summary of a keynote address presented at the Australasian Institute for Ethnomethodology and Conversational Analysis (AIEMCA) conference held in Brisbane in November 2012. I reviewed recent studies about legal practice in the studies of work tradition, reminded the audience about different positions in ethnomethodology/conversation analysis (abbreviated in this paper as ethno/CA), and looked at some data. The main argument was that a communicative act is understood by participants as part of a wider context than the turns at talk that immediately preceed and follow the communicative act, even if this cannot be demonstrated in the conversation. To give an example, the language used, even the content of the argument, does not make this paper controversial. The controversial nature of the paper arises from how it is read, and from how we understand and produce the ethnographic context of ethno/CA, or communication studies, as academic fields.
