There is a growing body of academic work analysing presentations of the attacks on the USA on 9/1... more There is a growing body of academic work analysing presentations of the attacks on the USA on 9/11/2001 and their consequences. This includes recent special issues of Discourse and Society (2004, vol. 15, No. 2&3) and Journal of Language and Politics (2005, vol. 4, No. 1), Lincoln (2003), Chilton (2004, chapters 9, 10) and Hodges and Nilep (2007). One shortcoming in much of this excellent work is that it adopts a western perspective: as a matter of routine the corpus used gives voice to some participants in the hostilities rather than others. This is apparent even in explicitly politically aligned and critical work such as Richardson’s (2004) book on misrepresenting Islam. No analysis can, of course be ‘transcendental’ each has grounding, perspective and a purpose. Yet, if the aim is not just to subject a particular text to a formal analysis, using it as ‘evidence’, but to make visible the links between texts so as to grasp the conflict, analysts need to aim at a practically accompl...
'Dialogical networks' are communications which occur in mass media. One of their characteristics ... more 'Dialogical networks' are communications which occur in mass media. One of their characteristics is that contributions of individual actors-politicians, journalists, representatives of pressure groups, etc.-are distributed in time and space. (A politician can, for instance, react in the media to what another politician expressed publically elsewhere). Another central property of dialogical networks is that an individual's contribution to a network can be duplicated, or even multiplicated (e.g. what is said in a TV studio may be reproduced in several newspapers). Dialogical networks are in certain respects like everyday conversations, but they also have unique characteristics. Working in a broadly ethnomethodological and conversation analytical framework, we focus on two aspects of sequential organisation-adjacency pair structures and repair structures, with the aim to clarify the respects in which they differ in dialogical networks and in everyday conversations.
Drawing on ethnomethodology, this article addresses what participants do as 'practical historians... more Drawing on ethnomethodology, this article addresses what participants do as 'practical historians'-how they use and produce history in and through their activities. Specifi cally, it studies how historical contingencies are built into antagonistic political talk and to what effect. To that end, the authors revisit three of their own papers, all of which analysed how the 9/11 attacks in the United States were represented. The authors reanalyse the texts focusing on how the protagonists in the confl ict (Bush, Blair and bin Laden) 'did history'. The analysis reveals two related methods of 'practicing history': one is to situate contemporary events relative to historical antecedents and so provide them with history-contingent meanings; the other is to constrain the historical understanding of the events in future.
This paper is a case study of the Czech central bank's communication with the public followin... more This paper is a case study of the Czech central bank's communication with the public following the bank's decision to devalue the Czech currency. The aim is to contribute to knowledge of how central banks discharge their obligations to be transparent in communicating controversial decisions and actions. It is argued that transparency cannot be considered an individual act of the bank, but a joint dialogical accomplishment, which includes, among others, media and the public. The analysis of the interactions shows that the concepts of “dialogical networks” and “practical historians” are useful tools for elucidating how controversies in media develop over time.
In this chapter we discuss the historical origins and conceptual debts of the theory of mind para... more In this chapter we discuss the historical origins and conceptual debts of the theory of mind paradigm (ToMism).1 We argue that this paradigm should be thought of as a model of communication. We find that ToMism has roots in Noam Chomsky’s psychology, and Paul Grice’s work on meaning. It is based on their ideas, inherits some of their problems but adds little new. What is new in ToMism in fact makes matters worse by profoundly intellectualizing social interactions. We find that it inherits and tries to solve the Cartesian ‘problem of other minds’. Not surprisingly, it fails to solve this unsolvable problem.
The contributions to the second part of this two-part issue of Ethnographic Studies focus on the ... more The contributions to the second part of this two-part issue of Ethnographic Studies focus on the practices of public discourse pertinent to conflicts and identities in the Arab and Muslim world. They all take an ethnomethodological stance, which reveals the illusionary character of any ‘culturalist’ interpretation of conflicts related to the Middle-East and Islam of the kind proposed, for example, by Huntington. It instead points to the close association of the categorization processes, the audiences toward which speeches are oriented, and the media used.
In this paper we provide a synopsis of our research ondialogical networksin media (Leudar 1998; L... more In this paper we provide a synopsis of our research ondialogical networksin media (Leudar 1998; Leudar and Nekvapil 1998; Nekvapil and Leudar 1998; Nekvapil and Leudar 2002a, 2002b, Leudar, Marsland and Nekvapil 2003, Nekvapil and Leudar in press). We outline the concept, provide an example of analysis with that concept, and summarize constitutive properties of these networks. The analysis uses materials from both Czech and British newspaper articles and television debates, all of which relate to politically sensitive events. The Czech materials in particular concern inter-ethnic problems which were acute between 1992–1995, first in the now dissolved Czechoslovakia and then in the Czech Republic.
The value of the notion of ‘indeterminacy in the past’ continues to be contested. Ian Hacking’s c... more The value of the notion of ‘indeterminacy in the past’ continues to be contested. Ian Hacking’s claim that the notion is perspicuous in the examination of historical instances is questioned through discussion of the possibility of retrospective application of the relatively recent diagnostic category ‘Post-traumatic stress disorder’. Kevin McMillan maintains that there are deeper philosophical merits to the idea–particularly with respect to questions of truth–but neither Hacking’s treatment of historical cases nor McMillan’s directly philosophical elaboration of Hacking’s position sustain this claim.
John Bunyan was a seventeenth-century religious reformer who is nowadays widely known for his Pil... more John Bunyan was a seventeenth-century religious reformer who is nowadays widely known for his Pilgrim's Progress and also for his spiritual autobiography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. In the nineteenth century he was diagnosed, on the basis of his revelations in that autobiography, as suffering from a variety of mental pathologies. In this study we track his 'psychiatric career' through the work of H. Taine and J. Royce (Part 1), and W. James and P. Janet (Part 2). The examination of these authors' practices of 'retrospective psychiatry' allows us to bring to light some changes in psychiatric concepts in the late nineteenth century, and to investigate both the use of cases in psychogical reasoning, and translations from religious to psychiatric idioms.
This article concerns the attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001. We use Membership... more This article concerns the attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001. We use Membership Categorization Analysis to establish how the key figures involved in the conflict represented these events and the participants in them. We analyse public addresses made soon after the attacks by the US President George W. Bush, the British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Osama bin Laden of Al Qaeda. Each speaker distinguished ‘us’ from ‘them’ and formulated this distinction so as to justify past violent actions and to prepare grounds for future ones. Bush and Blair both distinguished ‘us’ from ‘them’ in social, political and moral terms, whereas bin Laden did so in religious terms. The categorizations were not done in isolation from each other, but were instead networked. We discuss the relation between membership categorizations, presentations of happenings and violent actions, prior and subsequent and we extend our concept of a ‘dialogical network’.
This article extends the idea of ‘structured immediacy’ (Leudar et al., 2008b) by investigating m... more This article extends the idea of ‘structured immediacy’ (Leudar et al., 2008b) by investigating methods that adversaries use to make the past relevant and consequential in conflicts. Our strategy was to revisit our analysis of political discourse immediately following the 9/11 attacks in the USA (Leudar et al., 2004; Leudar and Nekvapil, 2007). We did this to document what the adversaries did as ‘practical historians’. We found that they used two related methods. One was to situate contemporary events relative to historical antecedents, alongside other contextual particulars, and by doing this provide these events with history-contingent meanings. The other was to attempt to constrain historical understandings of the contemporary events in the future. We interpret the results using the concept of ‘structured immediacy’ that points to how context — historical and otherwise — enters immediate settings of talk as a source of meaning.
Text - Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse, 2001
Members of parliamentary institutions have a special feature of their discourse community open to... more Members of parliamentary institutions have a special feature of their discourse community open to them in argumentationÐ the use of the public record as an authority for others' exact words. We show how members of the British House of Commons use the ocial record explicitly to recruit their political opponents' words to promote their own projects. We identify a robust set of elements in which a speaker quotes someone understood to be a political opponent, invoking the unimpeachable source of the parliamentary record. Speakers can exploit the basic framework of the device to emphasize (with dramatic or comic eect) the identity of the quoted source. The rhetorical eect in all cases is that such words are especially unchallengeable, and the fact that they are sourced from an opponent's own mouth makes the message they carry immune to attack as interested or partial.
There is a growing body of academic work analysing presentations of the attacks on the USA on 9/1... more There is a growing body of academic work analysing presentations of the attacks on the USA on 9/11/2001 and their consequences. This includes recent special issues of Discourse and Society (2004, vol. 15, No. 2&3) and Journal of Language and Politics (2005, vol. 4, No. 1), Lincoln (2003), Chilton (2004, chapters 9, 10) and Hodges and Nilep (2007). One shortcoming in much of this excellent work is that it adopts a western perspective: as a matter of routine the corpus used gives voice to some participants in the hostilities rather than others. This is apparent even in explicitly politically aligned and critical work such as Richardson’s (2004) book on misrepresenting Islam. No analysis can, of course be ‘transcendental’ each has grounding, perspective and a purpose. Yet, if the aim is not just to subject a particular text to a formal analysis, using it as ‘evidence’, but to make visible the links between texts so as to grasp the conflict, analysts need to aim at a practically accompl...
'Dialogical networks' are communications which occur in mass media. One of their characteristics ... more 'Dialogical networks' are communications which occur in mass media. One of their characteristics is that contributions of individual actors-politicians, journalists, representatives of pressure groups, etc.-are distributed in time and space. (A politician can, for instance, react in the media to what another politician expressed publically elsewhere). Another central property of dialogical networks is that an individual's contribution to a network can be duplicated, or even multiplicated (e.g. what is said in a TV studio may be reproduced in several newspapers). Dialogical networks are in certain respects like everyday conversations, but they also have unique characteristics. Working in a broadly ethnomethodological and conversation analytical framework, we focus on two aspects of sequential organisation-adjacency pair structures and repair structures, with the aim to clarify the respects in which they differ in dialogical networks and in everyday conversations.
Drawing on ethnomethodology, this article addresses what participants do as 'practical historians... more Drawing on ethnomethodology, this article addresses what participants do as 'practical historians'-how they use and produce history in and through their activities. Specifi cally, it studies how historical contingencies are built into antagonistic political talk and to what effect. To that end, the authors revisit three of their own papers, all of which analysed how the 9/11 attacks in the United States were represented. The authors reanalyse the texts focusing on how the protagonists in the confl ict (Bush, Blair and bin Laden) 'did history'. The analysis reveals two related methods of 'practicing history': one is to situate contemporary events relative to historical antecedents and so provide them with history-contingent meanings; the other is to constrain the historical understanding of the events in future.
This paper is a case study of the Czech central bank's communication with the public followin... more This paper is a case study of the Czech central bank's communication with the public following the bank's decision to devalue the Czech currency. The aim is to contribute to knowledge of how central banks discharge their obligations to be transparent in communicating controversial decisions and actions. It is argued that transparency cannot be considered an individual act of the bank, but a joint dialogical accomplishment, which includes, among others, media and the public. The analysis of the interactions shows that the concepts of “dialogical networks” and “practical historians” are useful tools for elucidating how controversies in media develop over time.
In this chapter we discuss the historical origins and conceptual debts of the theory of mind para... more In this chapter we discuss the historical origins and conceptual debts of the theory of mind paradigm (ToMism).1 We argue that this paradigm should be thought of as a model of communication. We find that ToMism has roots in Noam Chomsky’s psychology, and Paul Grice’s work on meaning. It is based on their ideas, inherits some of their problems but adds little new. What is new in ToMism in fact makes matters worse by profoundly intellectualizing social interactions. We find that it inherits and tries to solve the Cartesian ‘problem of other minds’. Not surprisingly, it fails to solve this unsolvable problem.
The contributions to the second part of this two-part issue of Ethnographic Studies focus on the ... more The contributions to the second part of this two-part issue of Ethnographic Studies focus on the practices of public discourse pertinent to conflicts and identities in the Arab and Muslim world. They all take an ethnomethodological stance, which reveals the illusionary character of any ‘culturalist’ interpretation of conflicts related to the Middle-East and Islam of the kind proposed, for example, by Huntington. It instead points to the close association of the categorization processes, the audiences toward which speeches are oriented, and the media used.
In this paper we provide a synopsis of our research ondialogical networksin media (Leudar 1998; L... more In this paper we provide a synopsis of our research ondialogical networksin media (Leudar 1998; Leudar and Nekvapil 1998; Nekvapil and Leudar 1998; Nekvapil and Leudar 2002a, 2002b, Leudar, Marsland and Nekvapil 2003, Nekvapil and Leudar in press). We outline the concept, provide an example of analysis with that concept, and summarize constitutive properties of these networks. The analysis uses materials from both Czech and British newspaper articles and television debates, all of which relate to politically sensitive events. The Czech materials in particular concern inter-ethnic problems which were acute between 1992–1995, first in the now dissolved Czechoslovakia and then in the Czech Republic.
The value of the notion of ‘indeterminacy in the past’ continues to be contested. Ian Hacking’s c... more The value of the notion of ‘indeterminacy in the past’ continues to be contested. Ian Hacking’s claim that the notion is perspicuous in the examination of historical instances is questioned through discussion of the possibility of retrospective application of the relatively recent diagnostic category ‘Post-traumatic stress disorder’. Kevin McMillan maintains that there are deeper philosophical merits to the idea–particularly with respect to questions of truth–but neither Hacking’s treatment of historical cases nor McMillan’s directly philosophical elaboration of Hacking’s position sustain this claim.
John Bunyan was a seventeenth-century religious reformer who is nowadays widely known for his Pil... more John Bunyan was a seventeenth-century religious reformer who is nowadays widely known for his Pilgrim's Progress and also for his spiritual autobiography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. In the nineteenth century he was diagnosed, on the basis of his revelations in that autobiography, as suffering from a variety of mental pathologies. In this study we track his 'psychiatric career' through the work of H. Taine and J. Royce (Part 1), and W. James and P. Janet (Part 2). The examination of these authors' practices of 'retrospective psychiatry' allows us to bring to light some changes in psychiatric concepts in the late nineteenth century, and to investigate both the use of cases in psychogical reasoning, and translations from religious to psychiatric idioms.
This article concerns the attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001. We use Membership... more This article concerns the attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001. We use Membership Categorization Analysis to establish how the key figures involved in the conflict represented these events and the participants in them. We analyse public addresses made soon after the attacks by the US President George W. Bush, the British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Osama bin Laden of Al Qaeda. Each speaker distinguished ‘us’ from ‘them’ and formulated this distinction so as to justify past violent actions and to prepare grounds for future ones. Bush and Blair both distinguished ‘us’ from ‘them’ in social, political and moral terms, whereas bin Laden did so in religious terms. The categorizations were not done in isolation from each other, but were instead networked. We discuss the relation between membership categorizations, presentations of happenings and violent actions, prior and subsequent and we extend our concept of a ‘dialogical network’.
This article extends the idea of ‘structured immediacy’ (Leudar et al., 2008b) by investigating m... more This article extends the idea of ‘structured immediacy’ (Leudar et al., 2008b) by investigating methods that adversaries use to make the past relevant and consequential in conflicts. Our strategy was to revisit our analysis of political discourse immediately following the 9/11 attacks in the USA (Leudar et al., 2004; Leudar and Nekvapil, 2007). We did this to document what the adversaries did as ‘practical historians’. We found that they used two related methods. One was to situate contemporary events relative to historical antecedents, alongside other contextual particulars, and by doing this provide these events with history-contingent meanings. The other was to attempt to constrain historical understandings of the contemporary events in the future. We interpret the results using the concept of ‘structured immediacy’ that points to how context — historical and otherwise — enters immediate settings of talk as a source of meaning.
Text - Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse, 2001
Members of parliamentary institutions have a special feature of their discourse community open to... more Members of parliamentary institutions have a special feature of their discourse community open to them in argumentationÐ the use of the public record as an authority for others' exact words. We show how members of the British House of Commons use the ocial record explicitly to recruit their political opponents' words to promote their own projects. We identify a robust set of elements in which a speaker quotes someone understood to be a political opponent, invoking the unimpeachable source of the parliamentary record. Speakers can exploit the basic framework of the device to emphasize (with dramatic or comic eect) the identity of the quoted source. The rhetorical eect in all cases is that such words are especially unchallengeable, and the fact that they are sourced from an opponent's own mouth makes the message they carry immune to attack as interested or partial.
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Papers by Ivan Leudar