Introduction

In September 2007, roughly 2 months before converging on a campus in East Jerusalem, Palestine, several of the authors who have contributed to this book were among the 60 or so American, British, Palestinian, and Israeli scholars and activists anticipating the logistical details of traveling to the second Dialogue under Occupation (DUO) conference. A boundary-setting exercise occurred via e-mail, foreshadowing the scope and relevance of what the conference could achieve. Not that we recognized the group-level significance of the interaction at the time! Mainly it was uncomfortable – emotional accusations and rationalizing arguments flew through internet space for a few hours until the matter was deemed concluded. There was, however, something salacious enough about the correspondence to catch our attention even though we were not yet clear on the extent of possible lessons. Indeed, the metaphor of a checkpoint was not recognized until a year and a half later during the presentation of a detailed textual analysis in Bogotá, Colombia at DUO III (Sibii & Napoleone, 2009). The process of ideological analysis, combined with Kent and Sibii's encounters (after DUO II) with three unannounced Israeli checkpoints on the Palestinian road between Qabbatya and Bethlehem, were all necessary to achieve the mix of distance and familiarity in order to realize a comprehensive application of Fairclough's (1992) three-dimensional theory of critical discourse, in which every utterance is simultaneously an act, an instance of discursive practice, and an instance of social practice.

In the pages that follow, we present selected communication acts from an e-mail episode deemed (by its interlocutors during the interaction) to be a simple misunderstanding triggered by carelessness. Some of the interlocutors themselves recognize, during the exchange, that with these acts they are enacting a specific discursive practice (Fairclough's second tier), which they label 'acute linguistic analysis'.