The article focuses on the opening sequences in qualitative research interviews and in particular examines the interactive work of achieving ‘topic talk’. Using the concepts of activity types, activity frames and contextualization cues, a close-up analysis of eight focus-group interviews and 12 semi-structured interviews was conducted. The findings show that the interviewees display familiarity with the interview as an activity type and how it is to be socially organized. However, to create a joint focus of attention, thereby getting off to an adequate start, the participants also need to agree upon an activity frame and a distribution of positions to achieve a frame switch, which here emerges through the interactional work of announcing, customizing and approving. Accordingly, by highlighting the communicative and practical circumstances of qualitative research interviewing, the opening sequences are considered to be a delicate interactive affair, however, where the interviewer has to take the main responsibility.

Parenting is a recurring topic in books, newspapers, magazines and TV shows in Western societies. Often it involves experts giving advice to adults. Hence, parenting is made visible, categorised, evaluated and corrected in public. Judgements on what is desirable are demonstrated, and objectives to be achieved are pointed out. In the present study, norms and claims for parenting are investigated through the discourse analysis of a Swedish TV show. Drawing upon the notions of governmentality, power/knowledge relations and subject positioning, it will be argued that regularities are displayed, negotiated and established in the dialogue; first, to make childhood experience matter, second, to expose reproductive strategies, and third, to claim identity work in parenting activities. Located in the discourse of lifelong learning, parenting may be depicted as valid knowledge and competence. Norms for what is considered skilful parenting and positive progress reveal a pattern that appears to be more or less 'fixed'. However, the process seems mutual rather than one-sided, and, moreover, whose interest this may serve is a main theme in the concluding discussion.

This article draws upon concepts of liminality and Third Space to explore what happens when undergraduate students become research partners and illustrates how various positions emerge, change, and fluctuate within the educational space of an interdisciplinary course. Based on perspective dialogues with student groups who have worked on research projects concerned with learning environments in higher education, we discuss which experiences from various academic spaces the students make relevant and useas resources in their group work. Furthermore, we highlight how the act of challenging traditional knowledge hierarchies and well-established roles also involves a revision of students’ relations to each other.

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