This book aligns well with the critical trend in applied linguistics by proffering critical conversation analysis (CA) as a ‘stepping stone’ toward the potential use of CA in revealing ‘turn-by-turn enactment’ of racism and other inequalities in conversational interactions. What sets this approach apart from others? What unique contributions might it bring to the ongoing discussion of critical issues such as racism and sexism? Questions like these are likely to spark readers’ interest from the outset.
The introduction provides some answers by revisiting classic debates surrounding CA's capacity to address critical issues. While CA is traditionally framed as an ethnomethodological approach that strictly analyses the sequential order of conversations, several renowned CA analysts question whether such narrow focus can adequately interpret interactional rules within a reality shaped by complex social dynamics. After examining previous CA studies on inequality, the editors introduce critical CA as a synthetic approach that balances CA's principles of ‘analytic induction’ and ‘participant orientations’ with the contextual sensitivity of critical analysis. Chapter 5 further reinforces critical CA's theoretical foundation by underscoring its capacity to identify ‘structural problems that are visible in the interaction, but are not of the interaction’, setting it apart from applied CA. In this way, the authors justify critical CA's ability to transcend CA's limitations by connecting micro-level linguistic analysis with broader critical concerns.
Building on this, Part 1 illustrates critical CA's value in uncovering inequality and injustice across various settings: family and classroom interactions (chapter 2), racist mock languages (chapter 3), media representations (chapter 4), medical emergency services (chapter 5), and congressional town hall meetings (chapter 6). Through detailed analyses of interactional data, these chapters reveal how interactants construct and reinforce raciolinguistic ideologies, gender biases, and stereotypes about the marginalized groups within the subtle dynamics of talk-in-interaction.
Parts 2 and 3 delve further into the power of critical CA to resist injustice. In Sarah Chepkirui Creider's chapter 8, people of colour's repeated redefinitions of particular terms and formulations of racist actions—often introduced with “I am just saying”—demonstrate how an ostensibly neutral, non-racialized reality can be challenged by those suppressed in mixed-race conversations. This perspective supports Elizabeth Stokoe & Saul Albert's interpretation of CA in chapter 10 not just as a ‘method in search of a problem’, but as a potent tool for addressing the problems. Their examples of assessing power dynamics in professional contexts (e.g. recruitment and promotion) and organizing training workshops for communication specialists (e.g. mediators in community services) showcase how critical CA can be effectively applied to advance social justice across diverse settings.
This book provides a wealth of thought-provoking insights for both researchers and practitioners. However, it would benefit from an additional chapter that clarifies the distinctions between critical CA and other discourse analytic approaches, such as interactional sociolinguistics, critical discourse analysis, and politeness theory. Such a chapter would help newcomers to the study of language in use to gain a better understanding of the field's development and appreciate the unique contributions and value of critical CA.
