Speakers' Corner is a multicultural setting in a London park at which the general public can actively participate in popular debate. A successful “soap-box” orator should attract and keep an audience, elicit support from the crowd, and gain applause; indeed, a mastery of the crowd, the discourse, and the message is highly valued. However, although talk resources are deployed sensitively by speakers to elicit group affiliation and response, they are also exploitable by hecklers as resources for launching heckles and disaffiliative responses. Audiences at Speakers' Corner are not passive receivers of rhetorical messages; they are active negotiators of interpretations and alignments that may support, resist, or conflict with the speaker's and other audience members' orientations to prior talk. Using transcribed examples of video data recorded at Speakers' Corner, the timing, format, and sequential organization of heckling are described and analyzed with the tools and methods of conversation analysis. (Conversation analysis, audience response, popular public discourse, political speech, heckle)

No abstract

This paper analyses how adults and children elicit and share their everyday experiences of cycling together in a variety of circumstances. Video data were collected of commuter cyclists, family bike rides and school bike tours. Using an ethnomethodologically informed approach to talk, mobile action and interactional practices, the novel video recordings of these diverse vélomobile formations are analysed in order to document how cyclists organise and mobilise their experiences and accompanying emotions in relation to the concurrent activity of biking together. Assuming that displays of emotion are situated, social activities, the analysis focuses on how embodied displays of emotion are accomplished, maintained, assessed and resisted by co-riders in motion.

No abstract

No abstract