Critical Conversation Analysis - (Critical Language and Literacy Studies) by Hansun Zhang Waring & Nadja Tadic (Paperback)

About the Book

This book presents the first collection of conversation analytic studies addressed exclusively to issues of inequality and injustice. The chapters produce a forensic analysis of how participants enact discriminatory ideologies, negotiate systemic power imbalances, and pursue social change in and through the nuances of their interactions.

Book Synopsis

This book presents the first collection of conversation analytic studies addressed exclusively to issues of inequality and injustice. The chapters produce a forensic analysis of how participants enact discriminatory ideologies, negotiate systemic power imbalances, and pursue social change in and through the nuances of their interactions.

Review Quotes

At last, a volume devoted to the promise of CA and MCA for equity-oriented praxis in applied linguistics. Waring and Tadic's timely collection substantively advances the debate about "motivated" CA and MCA, and will be of relevance to apprentice and experienced researchers concerned with how inequity and social injustice are produced, reproduced, and resisted in interaction.

For decades, issues of power, inequality, injustice, prejudice and discrimination have been simmering in the literature of Conversation Analysis. Now, in this remarkable volume, the pot that contains these issues has come to a full boil. The studies by seasoned authors and collaborators leave basic research in CA with its own continued integrity, but the cumulative, spillover effects of Critical Conversation Analysis will shift analytic attention in the field immediately and for years to come. Readers take note!

This is an exceptionally timely and important collection of critical CA work that powerfully demonstrates how inequalities and injustice are embedded and reproduced in talk-in-interaction. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the everyday production of discrimination and how it can be interactionally exposed and challenged.

About the Author

Hansun Zhang Waring is Professor in the Applied Linguistics and TESOL Program, Teachers College, Columbia University, USA. She is founder of LANSI (The Language and Social Interaction Working Group) and the co-editor of Storytelling in Multilingual Settings: A Conversation Analytic Perspective (with J. Wong, Routledge, 2021).

Nadja Tadic is Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics, Georgetown University, USA. Her research addresses issues of diversity, discrimination and social (in)justice through the lens of critically motivated conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis.