School of Human and Community Development (Journal Articles)

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10539/37884

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    Everyday Antiracism in Action: Preference Organization in Responses to Racism
    (Sage, 2015) Whitehead, Kevin A
    This paper examines features of preference organization in disaffiliative responses to possibly racist actions, drawing on a corpus of over 120 hours of recorded interactions from South African radio call-in shows. My analysis demonstrates how features of dispreferred turn shapes provide producers of possibly racist actions with opportunities to withdraw or back down from them. In cases where these opportunities are not taken up, subsequent responses may progressively include more features of preferred turn shapes. Responses may also include features of preferred turn shapes from the outset, thereby treating the prior actions as unequivocally racist. Responses that treat prior actions as such, however, also recurrently exhibit features of dispreference, thereby displaying speakers’ orientations to “cross-cutting preferences” in responding to racism, with disaffiliative responses being “dispreferred” actions in some senses but “preferred” actions in others. I conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for everyday antiracism in interactional settings.
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    Racial Categories as Resources and Constraints in Everyday Interactions: Implications for Racialism and Non-Racialism in Post-Apartheid South Africa
    (2013-03-13) Whitehead, Kevin A
    The anti-apartheid struggle was characterized by tensions between the opposing ideologies of non-racialism (exemplified by the Freedom Charter) and racialism (exemplified by Black Consciousness). These tensions have remained prevalent in public policies and discourse, and in the writings of social scientists, in the post-apartheid period. In this paper, I examine some ways in which issues of whether, when, and how race matters become visible in everyday interactions in South Africa, and what insights this may offer with respect to these ongoing tensions. Specifically, I employ an ethnomethodological, conversation analytic approach to examine some ways in which racial categories are treated as resources for action or constraints on action. I conclude by arguing that these findings point to the contingent and situational operation of a practical non-racialism (as well as practical racialism), and thus to the achievement of these ideologies in the moment-by-moment unfolding of interactions.
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    An ethnomethodological, conversation analytic approach to investigating race in South Africa
    (2013-03-12) Whitehead, Kevin A
    This primarily methodologically-oriented article describes how an ethnomethodologically informed, conversation analytic approach can be used to investigate the ways in which racial categories become relevant in ordinary interactions in post-apartheid South Africa. Drawing on descriptions of the data and procedures employed in a broader study of the continuing centrality of race for everyday life in South Africa, the article explicates the central features and assumptions of the approach and its utility in studying the operation of social category systems (or ‘membership categorization devices’) such as race in recorded interactions. This methodological discussion is illustrated by presenting some excerpts from the data upon which the broader study was based, thereby demonstrating some of the analytic payoffs of employing this type of approach. Specifically, I briefly describe a generalising practice through which speakers can treat race as relevant, or potentially relevant, for what they are doing. This empirical illustration demonstrates the utility of this approach in exploring how racial categories (and other social categories) may surface in interactions in which they have not been pre-specified as a topic of interest. The approach I describe thus offers insights into the deployment, and hence reproduction, of common-sense knowledge associated with social categories, and racial categories in particular, in ordinary episodes of interaction.