A Genealogy and Politics of Conversation Analysis

A stimulating debate has taken place between Critical Discourse Analysts (CDA) and scholars aligned with particular versions of Conversation Analysis (CA) over, among other matters, the hidden politics of CA, as well as the inattention of CDA to detailed empirical analysis. To further this debate, this project closely and critically examines one of the founding texts of CA, namely Sacks' Lectures on Conversation, in order to recover a variety of phenomena, often glossed, forgotten, even dismissed in the CA literature. The aim of the project is to document the extent and depth of Sacks' thinking on conversation in relation to gender and sexuality, as well as their connections to ethnicity and race, in everyday talk practices.