The rise of UKIP began in the 1990s under the leadership of Nigel Farage, another admirer of Powell. From the 1990s on, prominent Conservative Party figures spoke against what they regarded as the foreignization of Britain, sometimes overtly sometimes by insinuation. The latter approach was continued in the malevolent poster slogans of the Conservative campaign during the 2005 general election. After the Conservatives gained power, this activity continued in the even more aggressive ‘hostile environment’ campaign. By the time of the 2016 referendum, anti-immigrant sentiment was mobilised in various ways that included hints and allusions, the citing of misleading statistics, emotive metaphor and barefaced reiteration of untruths. The most blatant example was the pro-Leavers’ assertions that Turkey was about to join the EU, contrary to the well-known fact that Turkey’s application was indefinitely stalled because of its human rights record. In Brexit propaganda, the danger of Turkish accession was tacitly racist, and represented in terms of an ‘invasion’ of the British Isles. The workings of these various types of truth-twisting are examined in depth in this chapter.

Since its inception, Conversation Analysis (CA) has been concerned both with the institution of social interaction and with how the work of institutions gets done through social interaction. Institutions – like medicine, law, or education – are central to the business of being human, making them of special interest to social scientists. Working with recordings of real interactions from a given institution, conversation analysts address three broad questions: (1) What makes this institution distinctive? (2) How does the institution function to meet its goals?

(3) How might we use our understanding to try to enhance the institution’s functioning? This chapter works through some key ways in which CA addresses questions (1) and (2) (see Barnes, this volume, re: question 3). Using the metaphor of an archeological dig, I suggest that the analytic process involves ‘digging down’ through four increasingly granular levels: (i) the overall structural organization of the interactions; (ii) activity ‘packages’; (iii) action sequences; and (iv) practices. I illustrate each level with worked examples from a study of UK neurology consultations. The chapter thus offers a wealth of practical tips drawn not only from the principles of CA, but from extensive experience of doing this kind of research.

The notion of identity plays a central role in contemporary culture, both as the core of individualism and as the proclaimed principle of nationalist populist movements – and thus also of Brexit ideology. To have a national identity implies being different from other persons, groups, nations and, in Brexitspeak, the EU. This means that Brexitism is not just a British phenomenon, but part of the wave of national populism that has swept across Europe and the Americas. This chapter includes a survey of European identitarian movements and of the far-right writers whose ideas were in tune with them. It was immigrants that were made into a threatening ‘other’ in the pro-Brexit campaigns, and the EU was blamed for increased immigration. While other factors, such as economic deprivations, levels of immigration in particular locations are part of the story, it can be argued, as this book does, that it was demagoguery targeting immigrants – loudly amplified by the popular press – that sufficiently persuaded voters to vote Leave.

While interaction cannot provide direct evidence for claims about interactants’ expectations, understandings, and reasoning, conversation analysts offer indirect evidence to substantiate claims about interactants’ sense-making processes and activities. This chapter focuses on the kinds of evidence that may be used to substantiate such claims. The chapter discusses the evidence used to support four sense-making claims that Pomerantz made in published papers: (1) participants orient to disagreeing as problematic; (2) participants orient to self-praise as improper or wrong; (3) participants orient to experiencing a referent as a necessary condition for being able to offer one’s own assessment of the referent; and (4) recipients of a report of an inappropriate or unpleasant event may turn their attention to identifying the actions of a person thought to be responsible for the event. Pomerantz assesses whether the evidence she offered for each claim stands up to scrutiny. In addition to discussing the kinds of evidence that may be used to substantiate claims involving sense-making processes, Pomerantz demonstrates that sense-making work is an essential part of interactional practices, she advocates that sense-making processes be included in CA studies of interaction, and she discusses how to describe cognitive matters without making claims that cannot be substantiated.

This chapter discusses different types of evidence that conversation analysts use to ground their claims about social action. We begin by reviewing the epistemological perspective of CA, which demands that evidence reflect participants’ orientations; as a critical part of understanding the terms ‘participant orientation’ and ‘relevance,’ here we also discuss two ways in which CA’s position and emphasis on them are commonly misunderstood. The bulk of this chapter then reviews and illustrates a range of types of participant-orientation evidence. We organize our presentation of types of evidence roughly by sequential position vis-à-vis the focal action about which the analyst is making claims, including evidence to be found in: (i) next-turn, (ii) same-turn (e.g., same-TCU self-repair, accounts), (iii) prior turn or sequence, (iv) third turn/position (e.g., repair after next turn, courses of action/activity), (v) fourth turn/position, and (vi) more distal positions. We also discuss other forms of evidence that are not necessarily defined by sequential position, including: (i) third-party conduct, (ii) reported conduct, (iii) deviant cases, and (iv) distributional evidence. We conclude by offering some brief reflections on bringing different types and positions of evidence together toward the construction of an argument.

This chapter describes ways to approach the phonetic analysis of talk-in-interaction. It starts off with a brief overview of some of the general issues. These include how we go about observing and transcribing. These are practices common to Conversation Analysis and phonetics, and the discussion aims to bridge different disciplinary norms. The chapter also presents a phonetically informed approach to analysing speech in data sessions. The main part of the chapter works through a short fragment of data line by line, showing how conversational data can be approached from a phonetic perspective while adopting a CA approach to analysis, and connecting the reader to wider concerns that have been addressed in the literature. The topics covered include sequential organisation, including turn beginnings and ends; speech timing across turns, including an illustration of rhythmicity; discussion of intonation and its functions in conversation; the relationship between phonetic design and social action; ways of building a collection of examples for analysis.

While the preceding chapters of the Handbook have focused on practical skills in CA research methods, this chapter looks towards the path ahead. A diverse group of conversation analysts were asked to outline possible projects, point readers toward un- or under-described interactional phenomena, and discuss persistent issues in the field. The contributions address future advances in data collection, specific interactional practices, the complex interplay between language and the body, and cross-cultural and crosslinguistic comparisons, among other issues. The chapter concludes with a concise reiteration of the bedrock principle that underpins all CA research methods.

When examining any form of recorded synchronous human interaction – be it casual or institutional – conversation analysts monitor for, and organize collections of target phenomena around, structural position: Where on a transcript and when in an unfolding real-time encounter does a participant enact some form of conduct? This chapter demonstrates the importance of paying close attention to structural position as requisite for understanding how participants design their conduct to be recognizable as particular social actions in interaction. After first considering how to identify the position of participant conduct, this chapter presents several forms of evidence that an action takes on different meaning based upon how it is positioned, including how the position of a silence affects its meaning; the reflexive relationship between position and turn design; and the position of an action within a sequence, explicating how CA work on preference organization necessitates analyses of how participants position both their sequence-initiating and sequence-responding actions. To exemplify how structural position can serve as a key avenue leading directly to findings about the orderliness of human action, this chapter describes how its author has gone about analyzing participants’ positioning of sequence-initial actions in both institutional and casual interactions.

How do we find a candidate phenomenon in interactional data? In this chapter we examine a number of methods for doing so. We make an initial distinction between observations and discoveries. Drawing on the cumulative experience of a number of conversation analysts, we provide some guidelines to help analysts develop observations into discoveries. We then investigate a range of approaches to identifying action: the heart of CA method. This includes an overview of Schegloff’s analytic ‘keys’ as a way into data. All of these approaches have the radically inductive methods of CA at its core. However, there are other starting points, and we discuss some of these alternative ways of bringing CA methods to bear on the data of interaction.

A significant part of our work as conversation analysts is to persuade different disciplinary communities of the insights from CA. Here, conversation analysts working within the broader domains of sociology, linguistics, psychology and communication, education, and health services discuss the ways in which our findings may be shaped for publication in journals particular to our own domains, and thereby engage with our wider disciplinary audiences. In the first instance, we situate CA with respect to its development in each of our disciplines and identify the core issues with which CA is engaging. We then examine some of the challenges in presenting CA to our disciplines. These include addressing the question that CA scholars often face from colleagues in those disciplines: ‘Why should this matter to us?’. We finally offer some practical guidance on writing CA for our particular audiences, including: how to manage the length constraints often imposed by journals, the issue of sampling size, and how to balance the demands of transcriptional detail as required by CA with those of clarity and legibility for those not accustomed to it. Such challenges can be highly creative – and worthwhile in showing how CA can enhance received theory in our own disciplines.

The national populism of the Brexit movement builds up its political worldview on the basis of an ethnocentric myth of continuous homogeneous British nationhood. This was a construct of the imagination that included nostalgia for lost British empire. It was tightly bound up with the Brexiters’ concept of ‘the people’, which brought into their campaign rhetoric the idea of ‘the will of the people’ and ‘the mandate of the people’, as well as ideas from social contract theory. ‘The will of the people’ was a phrase that ran throughout Brexitspeak, deployed by the ex-Remainer Theresa May and ardent Leavers alike, and backed up by the populist press. Brexitspeakers knew what the people’s will was, by implication at least. And the claim that this ‘will’ gave the government an unquestionable mandate followed automatically, despite the narrow margin by which the Leavers had won, and despite the fact that before it the result had been defined as ‘advisory’ only. There was also the question of who precisely constituted ‘the people’ at the referendum, for there were important groups of potential voters who were excluded by the Brexiter-influenced Referendum Act.

Farage also used ‘we’ to show that he identified with ‘the people’. The ideas underlying this phrase need to be understood in their historical context, since they vary depending on particular national histories, but all share a common ancestor in ancient Greek and Roman thinkers. British democracy needs to be traced back to British thinkers such as Buchanan, Hobbes and the philosophers of the Enlightenment. This is relevant because the historical discourse surrounding the phrase ‘the people’ was central to the development of democracy, and is continuous with today’s challenges to it. The various notions of ‘the people’ were connected with the ‘sovereignty of the people’ and the ‘sovereignty of parliament’, the latter being expressly challenged by populist parties like UKIP, in favour of direct democracy, and the same trend was evident in the post-referendum governments. The expression ‘the common people’ played an important role in British political discourse. Its early meaning changed radically until it was replaced by ‘ordinary people’, which in the Brexiter demagoguery was equated with ‘the people’, in opposition to ‘the elite’.