The anti-apartheid struggle was characterized by tensions between the opposing ideologies of non-racialism (exemplified by the Freedom Charter) and racialism (exemplified by Black Consciousness). These tensions have remained prevalent in public policies and discourse, and in the writings of social scientists, in the post-apartheid period. In this paper I examine some ways in which issues of whether, when, and how race matters become visible in everyday interactions in South Africa, and what insights this may offer with respect to these ongoing tensions. Specifically, I employ an ethnomethodological, conversation analytic approach to examine some ways in which racial categories are treated as resources for action or constraints on action. I conclude by arguing that these findings point to the contingent and situational operation of a practical non-racialism (as well as practical racialism), and thus to the achievement of these ideologies in the moment-by-moment unfolding of interactions. © 2012 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.

In this article, I address some of the issues for the analysis of categorial features of talk and texts raised by Stokoe's 'Moving forward with membership categorization analysis: Methods for systematic analysis'. I begin by discussing a number of points raised by Stokoe, relating to previous conversation analytic work that has addressed categorial matters; the implicit distinction in her article between 'natural' and 'contrived' data; and ambiguity with respect to the (possible) relevance of categories, in particular practices or utterances. I then discuss how my own previous work could be located in light of Stokoe's discussion of debates and divergences between conversation analysis (CA) and membership categorization analysis (MCA), and argue that being bound by the integrity of the data on which an analysis is based (Schegloff, 2005) should take precedence over attempting to characterize the analysis as exemplifying either a CA- or MCA-based approach. I conclude by calling for a commitment to doing analysis, and pointing to the value of the resources Stokoe offers in this regard. © The Author(s) 2012.

In this paper, I consider one mechanism by which racial categories, racial "common sense," and thus the social organization of race itself, are reproduced in interaction. I approach these issues by using an ethnomethodological, conversation analytic approach to analyze a range of practices employed by participants of a "race-training" workshop. These practices manage the normative accountability involved in referring to the racial categories of others when describing their actions, and thus in using racial common sense in talk-in-interaction. This accountability arises in part because a speaker's use of a racial category to explain someone else's actions may provide a warranted basis for recipients to treat the speaker's own racial category as relevant for understanding and assessing the speaker's actions. I describe three main ways in which speakers can manage this accountability, namely generalizing race, localizing race, and alluding to race. My analysis shows that, even in attempting to resist racial common sense in accounting for their own actions and those of others, speakers orient to race as a normative framework according to which individuals will produce their own actions and interpret those of others, and thus reproduce it as relevant for understanding social action. This research contributes to advancing knowledge in the fields of ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, racial studies, and categorical inequality.

This primarily methodologically oriented article describes how an ethnomethodologically informed, conversation analytic approach can be used to investigate the ways in which racial categories become relevant in ordinary interactions in post-apartheid South Africa. Drawing on descriptions of the data and procedures employed in a broader study of the continuing centrality of race for everyday life in South Africa, the article explicates the central features and assumptions of the approach and its utility in studying the operation of social category systems (or 'membership categorization devices') such as race in recorded interactions. This methodological discussion is illustrated by presenting some excerpts from the data on which the broader study was based, thereby demonstrating some of the analytic payoffs of employing this type of approach. Specifically, I briefly describe a generalising practice through which speakers can treat race as relevant, or potentially relevant, for what they are doing. This empirical illustration demonstrates the utility of this approach in exploring how racial categories (and other social categories) may surface in interactions in which they have not been pre-specified as a topic of interest. The approach I describe thus offers insights into the deployment, and hence reproduction, of common-sense knowledge associated with social categories and racial categories in particular, in ordinary episodes of interaction. © 2011 Copyright South African Sociological Association.

This article examines features of preference organization in disaffiliative responses to possibly racist actions, drawing on a corpus of more than 120 hours of recorded interactions from South African radio call-in shows. My analysis demonstrates how features of dispreferred turn shapes provide producers of possibly racist actions with opportunities to withdraw or back down from them. In cases where these opportunities are not taken up, subsequent responses may progressively include more features of preferred turn shapes. Responses may also include features of preferred turn shapes from the outset, thereby treating the prior actions as unequivocally racist. Responses that treat prior actions as such, however, also recurrently exhibit features of dispreference, thereby displaying speakers’ orientations to “cross-cutting preferences” in responding to racism, with disaffiliative responses being “dispreferred” actions in some senses, but “preferred” actions in others. I conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for everyday antiracism in interactional settings.

Previous research on the use of head nods in talk-in-interaction has demonstrated that they can be used for various interactional purposes by speakers and recipients in different sequential positions. In this report, I examine speakers' uses of nods in "third position", in the course of "minimal post-expansions" (Schegloff, 2007). I identify three possible distinct types of nods. The first of these can be used to register a prior utterance as news; the second appears to be designed to register receipt of a prior utterance without treating it as news; and the third embodies features of the first two types, and may be designed to register receipt and acknowledgment of "dispreferred" news. These findings are suggestive of rich complexities in the use of head movements in the production of actions-in-interaction, and of the importance of a fine-grained analytic approach for understanding their situated uses. © 2011 John Benjamins Publishing Company.

While the specification of situating context(s) is commonly treated as an indispensable part of social scientific research, the choices this involves are rarely directly explicated. An exception is conversation analysis (CA), which differs from many other approaches in its privileging of participants’ orientations as a basis for empirically grounding analytic specifications of context. In this article, I demonstrate how this approach to context, along with CA methods and findings, can be employed in addressing challenges associated with identifying and analyzing (possible) instances of the implicit relevance of racial categories in everyday social interaction. Using the case of implicit whiteness in post-apartheid South Africa as a site for considering these challenges, I examine a collection of interactions in which race becomes (possibly) relevant during the course of complaints about violent crime. I begin with an ambiguous case of a speaker’s possible implicit orientation to whiteness, demonstrating the use of CA for the close examination of available evidence for this orientation. I then describe how an approach based on a collection of cases, constituted by similar sequential and action environments to those that characterize the ambiguous case, can be employed to strengthen the analysis of the ambiguous case. The analysis thereby demonstrates the powerful resources CA offers for addressing ambiguity with respect to social categories and the value of detailed examinations of interactional practices for documenting how participants manage and thereby reproduce the consequentiality of their position in a racialized social order.

This article addresses some ways in which stereotypes and stereotyping are treated as morally accountable by social psychologists, their research participants, and participants in everyday interactions. I focus in particular on closely examining some deployments and responses to stereotypes in everyday interactions by applying conversation analytic and discursive psychological approaches to recorded interactions from radio call-in shows. My analysis considers the different interactional trajectories that follow the production of (possible) racial stereotypes, demonstrating how participants treat their “inaccuracy” as a central basis for the production of challenges and moral sanctioning in response to their deployment. In addition, the analysis demonstrates some cases in which apparent stereotypes are accepted or aligned with, including those grounded in personal experiences, “self-stereotypes,” and humorous uses of stereotypes. I conclude by considering the implications of attending to the social–moral contexts in which stereotypes are produced, and the participant-administered accountability associated with these contexts.

Previous research examining online support forums has tended to focus either on evaluating their effectiveness while paying limited or no attention to the details of the interactions therein, or on features of their social organization, without regard to their effectiveness in fulfilling their stated purposes. In this article, we consider both the interactional features of a forum and participants' treatment thereof as being effective (or otherwise), thus adopting a view of effectiveness grounded in participants' proximate orientations and actions. Our analysis demonstrates some ways in which participants produce ratified displays of empathy in response to troubles expressed by another, as well as considering some designedly supportive actions that are treated by their recipients as unsupportive or antagonistic. Our findings indicate some structural features of such forums that facilitate the production of support, while suggesting that claims of knowledge tend to be treated as a basis of resistance to ostensibly supportive actions.