‘Going mental’: The risks of assessment activities (in teenage talk)

Abstract

Using multi-modal Conversation Analysis (CA), this article demonstrates how teenage boys end assessments of social experiences with insults. When they participate in social activities, teenagers — as everybody else — routinely make assessments through which they produce social organization and create alignments. This article, however, analyzes structures of assessments that are contested in a counter-positional action. It will be demonstrated how the teenage boys end these challenged-assessment sequences through ‘insults’. A feature of these insults is that the conversationalists ‘go mental’, that is, they question the ‘mental’ abilities and competences of their co-participant and thereby exclude him from the status of being a competent member of the group. In and through such conduct, the participants make the social function as well as the risks of assessing explicit: as competent members of a social group (society) they are being held accountable for having claimed knowledge of the assessed target and may on these grounds be excommunicated as someone who does not understand social life.

Knowledge and Discourse Matters

“…The gisting work in Lines 244 -247 upgrades the prior reports (Rasmussen, 2010) Stuart is doing more than summing up prior talk, he is adding to its authenticity with his own first-hand knowledge, and thus its truth is made impeccable. As shown in Chapter 8, matters of authenticity and truth are bound to trust.…”

“…Wiggins and Potter (2003) propose that evaluative expressions serve to work up the speaker's entitlement to express an opinion, and, from this perspective, John can be heard as scripting not just the money move, but himself too, as being 'probably prudent'. The high stakes nature -and prudence -of the enterprise is further strengthened by John's account being laden with hedging (Rasmussen, 2010) over the probability of events ('should put', 'about the same', 'I think', 'probably prudent') and with a discourse of accuracy and truth with the connotations of authenticity and trustworthiness (Lines 15/16).…”

“…According to Rasmussen (2010), members of social groups assume that other members have the same view of the world as they do. The implication of this is that group members have group empathy, a socially shared perspective (Gergen, 1991).…”

"Du er syg i hovedet" - når interaktionelle handlinger lukker og udelukker

“…Naervaerende artikel saetter fokus på den risiko, der er impliceret, når der initieres vurderinger af sociale oplevelser. I et studie af en gruppe teenagerdrenges vurderingsaktiviteter, der ligger til grund for naervaer ende artikel (Rasmussen 2010…”

Participating with limited communication means: Conversation analytical perspectives on the interactional management of participation structures

“…However, the contributions to this special issue are representative for the kind of work that is currently going on, and is on the rise. impairment began to develop early in the 21st century, as exemplified by Lind's research (Lind, 2002;Lind, 2005) on interaction involving persons with aphasia in Norway and, further, Jensen & Stax (2005), Brouwer, Hougaard & Hougaard, (2008 and Rasmussen (2010) within speech and language therapy in Denmark. In Sweden, CA research on communication impairment also started out in the early 2000s, exemplified by Anward (2003) on aphasia, followed by two projects on interaction involving children with language impairment and adults with acquired aphasia (e.g.…”