This article investigates why moments of semiotic silence, or minimal engagement, occur in Facebook practices among Filipino migrant workers engaged in grassroots organizations working for migrants’ rights. We investigate how members and leaders of these organizations subjectively and intersubjectively assess moments of semiotic silence through their discourses. Taking a sociolinguistically grounded chronotopic approach, we show how they make sense of these moments by invoking a multiplicity of space-times related to sociopolitical constraints, their working situation, communication with family, and the organizing of migrants. This study provides empirical data, highlighting the importance of identity, materiality, and media ideology in understanding grassroots social media practices and political engagement. On this basis, we come to understand a broader range of ways in which migrant workers use or do not use social media in relation to community involvement and public discourse. (Social media engagement, grassroots organizing, chronotope, identity construction, media ideology, materiality, migrants’ rights)

The article examines ideologies behind linguistic conversion—a widespread transition to Ukrainian from Russian—which intensified in Ukraine after the onset of Russian aggression in 2014, and particularly after the 2022 full-scale invasion. Employing ‘new speakerness’ as a theoretical lens, the study draws on biographical interviews with twenty-one new full-time Ukrainian speakers recruited among participants in informal language-learning initiatives in Ukraine. The primary focus is on the ways in which the new speakers legitimise their ownership of the Ukrainian language: how they imagine their positions in the socially constructed traditional hierarchies of Ukrainian speakers, based on the mastery of the standard language, and what new ideologies arise out of their challenges. The findings reveal that, in most of the cases, traditional hierarchies are deconstructed as new ideologies prioritising fluency and elevating translingual practice emerge in the linguistic safe spaces of grassroots language courses and community clubs. (New speakers, language ideologies, linguistic conversion, suržyk, linguistic safe spaces, Russo-Ukrainian war)

Jury selection in the US involves voir dire, an examination process wherein prospective jurors are questioned about their potential for fairness or bias. Such inquiries are hampered by social desirability pressures inhibiting admissions of bias. Analogous pressures hamper survey interviews, but since voir dire examinations are unscripted their study can reveal how desirability pressures are addressed through naturally occurring variations in question design. This article combines sequential and distributional analyses of >100 transcribed question-answer sequences targeting juror fairness/bias, and documents various tendencies and preferences in question design. Court officials focus on bias rather than fairness by default, and the predominant bias-targeting questions are mitigated through: (i) indirect references to bias, (ii) diffusion of responsibility for bias, and (iii) projecting bias as minimal or unlikely. The findings shed light on the social dynamics of jury selection and, more broadly, how question design practices are adapted for inquiry into sensitive subjects. (Questions, law, voir dire, juries, social desirability bias, conversation analysis)

This article discusses the family language biographies of two Spanish-Catalan speaking, white middle-class mothers living in Catalonia, who raise their children in English. The rationale behind their choice is informed by the mothers’ experiences when trying to learn English as young adults in the late 1980s, mediated by their present socioeconomic conditions. In order to lay the groundwork for what is framed as a ‘good’ future for their children, these mothers embark upon a course of action designed to expose their children to English. The analysis, drawing upon a language biography approach and social positioning, reveals the role of parents’ pasts for the construction of the future. Beyond the widely understood tropes regarding the commodification of English within neoliberalism, the families’ actions reveal ideologies and future orientations informed by a complex interplay of historical, political, and economic factors wherein speaking English has become one of the markers of social access. (Family language biographies, Catalan children raised in English, anticipation, futurity)

This article presents a multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) of collective remembering of the American War in Vietnam, also known as the Vietnam War, as embodied in forty-nine photographs taken during the war and published in the digital edition of The New York Times on the Vietnam War’s forty-second anniversary commemoration. Collective memory and commemoration are understood as political and discursive practices that make up a site of contestation (Milani & Richardson 2022). This research attempts to unveil The New York Times’ semiotic control in presenting and recontextualizing a historical narrative of the Vietnam War to sustain a necropolitical architecture in the making of collective memory. Three major themes emerging from the data—dehumanized death, gendered death, and paternalized death—are discussed in the context of what we call necropolitical discourse of collective remembering of the Vietnam War. (Necropolitical discourse, Vietnam War, CMDA, collective remembering, lieu de dispute)

The proliferation of smartphone cameras and other portable recording devices has enabled the rise of so-called ‘copwatching’, people filming police-citizen encounters with the primary aim of increasing police accountability. Interactions between copwatchers and police officers generally take place under conditions of mutual mistrust and regularly lead to heated arguments over the recording activity and its precise modalities. Using conversation analysis, this article examines video recordings of encounters between police and copwatchers, focusing on how disalignment concerning the recording activity regularly manifests between them already during the opening phases of their interactions. We describe the interactional work that goes into organizing the pre-beginning and opening phases of these encounters and take stock of actions that recurrently engender disagreement and contention between law enforcement officers and videographers. Data come from recordings made by copwatchers and police officers’ body-worn cameras during public police operations in the US and the UK. (Conversation analysis, openings, police, copwatching, video recording, disalignment, disagreement)

This study examines Taiwanese netizens’ metapragmatic debates on tonal variation in Taiwan Mandarin, focusing on the pronunciation of 企業 qìyè ‘company/enterprise’ by two government officials during a nationally broadcast press conference. It investigates how the non-standard variant qǐyè, a relic feature historically present in Taiwan, becomes enregistered as a linguistic emblem of imported Chinese influence through the processes of clasping and semiotic differentiation. The study highlights the ideological stakes in linguistic boundary-making and explores how tonal variation functions as a site for negotiating national identity. It further connects this linguistic debate to broader ideological projects such as democratization, Taiwanization, and shifting Taiwan-China relations. By integrating variationist and metapragmatic approaches, this study contributes to discussions on the indexical field and the role of explicit metapragmatic commentary in shaping linguistic change. (Indexicality, language ideology, tonal variation, enregisterment, language policing, metapragmatics, Taiwan)

Using institutional conversation analysis, this article develops an account of the organisation of other-language recalibration repair in broadcast news interviews in Rwanda. Initial observation shows that the structure of other-language recalibration repair is significantly reduced compared to that of repair in everyday conversation. The study argues that this difference is due to the interactional use of the repair practice. To develop this argument, the article draws on the well-documented fact that, in institutional talk, repair can be deployed to serve relevant institutional goals. Analysis of the data not only confirms that, in broadcast news interviews in Rwanda, other-language recalibration is used as a device for relating to the overhearing audience, but it also reveals that this interactional use is consequential to the shape of the repair practice. Notably, analysis reveals that the structure of the repair practice is even more reduced than it was initially thought to be. (News interviews, other-language recalibration, repair, overhearing audience, structural organisation)*

This article addresses classical issues in conversation analysis related to the overall structural organization of social interaction, achieved through opening and closing sequences. While the integrity and autonomy of social interaction are most often oriented to by participants in single interactions, the study of some institutional interactions shows that forms of porosity between encounters do exist, in which one encounter impinges on another. This is the case of encounters-in-a-series, in which a new encounter is opened as the previous is not yet closed. The article examines interactions in which participants orient to the preservation of the integrity of successive encounters, contrasted with cases in which the initiation of the opening of a new encounter happens during or before the closing of the previous, and discusses how and when this is treated as normatively delicate or not, within the participants’ local endogenous analysis of the overall structural organization of the interaction. (Social interaction, conversation analysis, multimodality, overall structural organization, opening, closing, encounters-in-a-series, porosity)