Featured Book
Carly Butler (2008) Talk and Social Interaction in the Playground, Aldershot, UK: Ashgate
Carly Butler's book book offers a rich and detailed empirical account of children's play and interaction in the school playground. Drawing on the approaches of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, Butler examines the organisation of membership and social action in a game created by a group of children. It offers rich insights into the methods and practices used by children to produce play and social order, making a significant and substantial contribution to the study of talk-in-interaction, as well as to studies of children's play, competencies, and social interaction.
Reviews
"Butler's Talk and Social Interaction in the Playground challenges orthodoxy. This book examines locally situated playground interaction over consecutive lunch-times for its sequential and categorical organization.
Examining a 'fairy club' (a 'game' invented and engaged in by a group of children), this study is part of the 'new social studies of childhood' in which children are not seen as incompetent adults, but as competent at 'being a child' and at constructing peer cultures. Firstly, Butler studies interactional competences as used by children without having children as an analytic a priori category. She does not see the competences that children use as exclusively 'child-like' or 'adult-imitation', but as interactional competences shared by adults.
Secondly, and more controversially, she combines the analysis of conversation analysis (CA) with that of membership categorisation analysis (MCA). [...] I believe the combination works in this study, although, as Butler notes, others may not be so keen on the use of inferential order in a CA analysis." Neil Jenkings, Network
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NEWS
March-June 2010 |
New CRC members
 
Carly Butler and Daniel Chernilo joined the Department in January 2010. We are delighted to welcome them as members of the CRC. |
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Selected publications by CRC members
Billig, M. (2010). Metaphors and repression: a comment on Rank. Political Psychology, 31, 21-25.
Carly Butler Richard Fitzgerald, Rod Gardner (2009) (Eds.), Ethnomethodological Approaches to Communication, Australian Journal of Communication, 36/3, Special Issue |
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Grants awarded to CRC members
Emily Keightley and Mike Pickering have secured funding for the 3-year CRC research project Media of Remembering: Photography and Phonography in Everyday Remembering, from the Leverhulme Trust, 2010-2013: £106, 810. The project will commence in June of this year. |
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Presentations by CRC members
Peter Golding gave a Keynote to the Communication, Cognition and Media conference, Portuguese National University, Braga. 'What we know and what the media tell us': a sociologist's view of media, knowledge, and ignorance.
Emily Keightley and Mike Pickering organised as symposium on Forward to the Past: On the Return of Politics in Cultural Studies, Loughborough University, March 2010.
Jack Demaine will be presenting two invited papers, one on Citizenship education and one on Paolo Freire at the 2010 International Sociological Association (ISA) World Congress of Sociology, Gothenburg, in July.
Graham Murdock is giving this year's Dallas Smythe Memorial lecture in honour of one of Canada's best known radical economists and one of the founding figures in the political economy of communications. The lecture is hosted by Simon Fraser University. |
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CRC members in the media
Simon Weaver was interviewed by Laurie Taylor on BBC Radio Four's Thinking Allowed (10th March 2010). The discussion was about Simon's article "The 'Other' Laugh Back: Humour and Resistance in Anti-Racist Comedy", Sociology, 44(1) 31-48
Michael Billig was interviewed on BBC Radio Four by Michael Rosen, the Children's Poet Laureate. The two discussed the psychology of humour and the mysteries of laughter.
Liesbet van Zoonen discussed Dutch satire with Rory Bremner on BBC's Radio Four (8th March 2010), in an episodes of his series about international satire. Bremner focused especially on Hans Teeuwen, a Dutch comedian who is also popular in Britain. |
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Other CRC news
Mike Pickering acted as the supervisor/mentor for Dr Simon Weaver, who received ESRC funding as Postdoctoral Fellow in the CRC, and organised and hosted the one-month visit to CRC of Magdalena Kania, a doctoral student from the Dept of Sociology, Uppsala University. She was attracted to Lbro because of Pickering's work on research methodology in cultural studies. The visit was funded by The Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund Programme.
Graham Murdock been elected Visiting Professor at the University of Helsinki where he will deliver a series of lectures entitled Media, Economy and Power to graduate students in the Department of Communication.
Cristian Tileaga spent three weeks in January 2010 organising and delivering Discursive Psychology workshops and talks in the Faculty of Education at the Catholic University of Temuco, Chile. |
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