Establishing Shared Knowledge In Political Meetings

This book investigates the ways in which participants in political activities use micro-practices for solving issues of speaking, hearing and understanding as fundamental for the activities they engage in. Based on extensive video recordings of public meetings within a political grassroots project in the field of urbanism, it adopts a conversation analytic and ethnomethodological approach to social action, examining the use of interactional repair in processes of claiming, negotiating, contesting, distributing and establishing knowledge in public. As a study of the ways in which people interact in political meetings, address problems of intersubjectivity and manifest their understanding – or lack of understanding – of political talk, Establishing Shared Knowledge in Political Meetings sheds light on the relationship between interactional problems and political problems. It will thus appeal to scholars in sociology and political sciences with interests in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, social interaction, social order, and political practice.

This book presents a vivid and close-up view of social science researchers engaged in fieldwork, in discussions with colleagues, and in writing. Adopting an ethnographic approach inspired by ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, the author pursues a praxeological analysis of social inquiry in situ. By conceiving of analytical practices such as observation, shop talk, and conceptualization in experiential terms, the seen but unnoticed structures of knowledge work are exposed and made available for empirical analysis. In a departure from ethnographic studies of research that focus on the physical sciences, the author uses the example of sociological research to shed new light on the role of self and mind for epistemic cultures, on the elusive materiality of conceptual objects, and on researchers’ experiential ways of seizing, reviewing, and accrediting knowledge. A rich and pervasive study of elementary sites in the research process, The Body of Knowledge will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, and the humanities with interests in the epistemic practice of their own discipline, as well as those working in fields such as the social study of science, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, and the sociology of interaction.

This book is devoted to the reintroduction of the remarkable approach to sociological inquiry developed by Harvey Sacks. Sacks’s original analyses – concerned with the lived detail of action and language-in-interaction, discoverable in members’ actual activities – demonstrated a means of doing sociology that had previously seemed impossible. In so doing, Sacks provided for highly technical, detailed, yet stunningly simple solutions to some of the most trenchant troubles for the social sciences relating to language, culture, meaning, knowledge, action, and social organisation. In this original collection, scholars working in a range of different fields, including sociology, human geography, communication and media studies, social psychology, and linguistics, outline the ways in which their work has been inspired, influenced, and shaped by Sacks’s approach, as well as how their current research is taking Sacks’s legacy forward in new directions. As such, the collection is intended to provide both an introduction to, and critical exploration of, the work of Harvey Sacks and its continued relevance for the analysis of contemporary society.

Do Irish superheroes actually sound Irish? Why are Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons funny? How do political cartoonists in India, Turkey, and the US get their point across? What is the impact of English on comics written in other languages? These questions and many more are answered in this volume, which brings together the two fields of comics research and linguistics to produce groundbreaking scholarship. With an international cast of contributors, the book offers novel insights into the role of language in comics, graphic novels, and single-panel cartoons, analyzing the intersections between the visual and the verbal. Contributions examine the relationship between cognitive linguistics and visual elements as well as interrogate the controversial claim about the status of comics as a language. The book argues that comics tell us a great deal about the sociocultural realities of language, exploring what code switching, language contact, dialect, and linguistic variation can tell us about identity – from the imagined and stereotyped to the political and real.

This Research Topic is a part of the Delft 2021: 1st Sociohydrology Conference series. To view the other sessions please follow the links below: Innovating a New Knowledge Base for Water Justice Studies: Hydrosocial, Sociohydrology, and Beyond Scale Issues in Human-Water Systems Water Resources and Human Behavior: Analysis and Modeling of Coupled Water-Human Systems Feedbacks and Coevolution Innovative Sensing, Observing, Measuring and Analysing Human-Water Data “Pluralistic water research” integrates the hydrological and the social to provide sustainable solutions to water crises. While relying upon robust quantitative modelling, sociohydrology captures crises across many waters (surface, ground and interstitial) along quantity and quality dimensions, hydrosocial unfurls power hierarchies in access to safe and required quota of water, be it for drinking or irrigation purposes. The success of engineering solutions laying out “hard” interventions such as solar powered irrigation, dams, high yielding crop varieties, water treatment plants and water distributions and purifications depend on “soft” socio-political, cultural and psychological variables like the political landscape, community behaviours and governance arrangements. How these soft parameters limit or advance the effect of hard interventions await more enhanced modelling and place-based qualitative analyses to disentangle various cause-effect pathways. While historical and process-based sociohydrology accommodates detailed temporal datasets and causal relationships across human-water systems, the hydrosocial paradigm reconciles “non-modern”, anti-hegemonic, water techniques and knowledge systems, animating local agencies within specific hydroscapes. This issue is dedicated to capture real time innovations through which water challenges have been confronted. It intends to unravel “storylines” along actionable water projects, reflecting on mediations across multiple actors and networks in specific spatio-temporal and cultural contexts, finally drawing our attention to the correlation between projected promises and actual realities. Situated at the crossroads of “boundary work”, we invite articles that will deploy a range of interdisciplinary frameworks like RANAS (Risk, Attitude, Norms, Ability, and Self-regulation), APIE (Awareness, Participation, Involvement and Engagement), HUPE (Historical Urban Political Ecology), etc. to demonstrate coupled sociohydrological and hydrosocial realties and in turn getting informed by empirical insights emanating from these actual water interventions. The final aim of the special issue is not to showcase water just actual interventions but to elicit a rigorous mapping of sustainable processes facilitating collective co-production of resilient water trajectories.

Human knowledge is growing faster today than at any time in history - far outracing our ability to share it. The gap between those with access to knowledge and those without has implications for future global stability. At the national level, the effectiveness of knowledge sharing influences the rate at which countries grow and achieve sustainability. Sharing Knowledge is a guide for scientific managers, researchers, communicators and policy makers on practical, low-cost ways to add value to science by assisting its adoption or commercialisation. It is also a valuable text for the teaching of public awareness of science and science communication at tertiary level.

Routledge Handbook on Middle East Security provides the first comprehensive look at Middle East security issues that includes both traditional and emerging security threats. Taking a broad perspective on security, the volume offers both analysis grounded in the ‘hard’ military and state security discourse but also delves into the ‘soft’ aspects of security employing a human security perspective. As such the volume addresses imminent challenges to security, such as the ones relating directly to the war in Syria, but also the long-term challenges. The traditional security problems, which are deep-seated, are at risk of being exacerbated also by a lack of focus on emerging vulnerabilities in the region. While taking as a point of departure the prevalent security discourse, the volume also goes beyond the traditional focus on military or state security and consider non-traditional security challenges. This book provides a state-of-the-art review of research on the key challenges for security in the Middle East; it will be a key resource for students and scholars interested in Security Studies, International Relations, Political Science and Middle Eastern Studies.

This volume asks and addresses elusive ontological, epistemological, and methodological questions about meetings. What are meetings? What sort of knowledge, identities, and power relationships are produced, performed, communicated, and legitimized through meetings? How do—and how might—ethnographers study meetings as objects, and how might they best conduct research in meetings as particular elements of their field sites? Through contributions from an international group of ethnographers who have conducted “meeting ethnography” in diverse field sites, this volume offers both theoretical insight and methodological guidance into the study of this most ubiquitous ritual.