Book review: Kristin Enola Gilbert and Gregory Matoesian, Multimodal Performance and Interaction in Focus Groups

Speaking out against everyday sexism : Gender and epistemics in accusations of “mansplaining”

In everyday interaction, subtle manifestations of sexism often pass unacknowledged and become internalised and thus perceived as “natural” conduct. The introduction of new vocabularies for referring to previously unnamed sexist conduct would presumably enable individuals to start problematising hitherto unchallengeable sexism. In this paper, we investigate whether and how these vocabularies empower people to speak out against sexism. We focus on the use of the term “mansplaining” which, although coined over 10 years ago, remains controversial and contested. Using Conversation Analysis and Membership Categorisation Analysis, this paper excavates the interactional methods individuals use to f…

Evidence About Harm: Dual Status Victim Participant Testimony at the International Criminal Court and the Straitjacketing of Narratives About Suffering

AbstractAlthough victims at the International Criminal Court (ICC) are not parties, they can apply to become “victim participants” and may be authorized by an ICC Chamber to directly and orally express their views and concerns in court. Most ICC Trial Chambers, however, have preferred allowing legal representatives of these victim participants to call victims as witnesses to give testimonial evidence about the harm they suffered. Our article focuses on the practical-epistemological challenges that come with forcing accounts of harm into this testimony-format. We draw upon ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to elucidate the discursive techniques by which legal actors in the Ongwen tr…

Two ways of spilling drink : The construction of offences as ‘accidental’ in police interviews with suspects

This article explores the construction of offences as ‘accidental’ in police-suspect interactions. The data comprise audio-recorded investigative interviews, which were analysed using conversation analysis. In these interviews, suspects often do not explicitly state the nature of their defence when answering police officers’ questions; instead, suspects’ defensive practices or techniques are embedded in the narrative accounts they give of what happened, thus exhibiting rather claiming their ‘innocence’. My focus here is on a particular type of defence, namely, one in which suspects portray an event as having been ‘accidental’. I show that this defence of ‘accident’ is associated with sever…