In this article, we use the concept of `dialogical network' systematically to analyse hostilities towards refugees and asylum seekers in the UK and their effects on refugees' and asylum seekers' biographical self-presentations and psychological adjustment. We find that hostility towards refugees took different forms which were in part contingent on contemporary social and political activities. We also found that all our refugee and asylum-seeker informants constructed their identities around hostilities expressed towards them in the media and by the local inhabitants. In particular, their identities were constructed in terms of biographical contrasts that made the grounds of contemporary hostile rejections false and irrelevant to themselves. Most refugee/asylum-seeker informants in our study experienced psychological problems and attributed these to enforced idleness.

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 concerns categorizations of Romanies in Czech media. We analysed four television debates which were broadcast in the Czech Republic between 1990 and 1995. All of them concerned Romanies, and Czechs and Romanies participated in each of them. The analytic technique we used was membership categorization analysis (MCA), associated with Sacks (1992), and with contemporary ethnomethodology. Our analysis focused on how descriptions of Romanies were used and warranted, and how the membership categorizations both changed in arguments and resisted change. We found that participants did not simply describe Romanies, they warranted the descriptions and, in doing so, presented some of the descriptions as matters of common knowledge and others as facts. Not all `common knowledge' of Romanies was, however, held in common by both Czechs and Romanies. Czechs know Romanies as those who do not live like normal people, who create problems and commit crimes, but the facts about Romanies as unique people with a valid form of life are only known to Romanies.

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