Dennis2024

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Dennis2024
BibType ARTICLE
Key Dennis2024
Author(s) Alex Dennis
Title Hear them that way
Editor(s)
Tag(s) EMCA, Michael Lynch
Publisher
Year 2024
Language English
City
Month
Journal Ethnographic Studies
Volume 20
Number
Pages 80-101
URL Link
DOI 10.26034/lu.ethns.2024.6914
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

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Abstract

In May 2020, the UK Prime Minister’s chief advisor, Dominic Cummings, gave a press statement to explain his and his family’s apparently unlawful movement around the country during the first Covid lock-down. This statement was subsequently examined by the lawyer and journalist David Allen Green. Green argued that Cummings’ words could informatively be understood as a witness statement, i.e., as ‘lawyered’ speech. Green warranted this on the basis that ‘the style and the content’ of the statement diverged significantly from ‘ordinary speech’, and he ‘demonstrated’ that the statement’s structure and organisation [served to?] make legal liability difficult to establish. Green’s argument rests on the reader/watcher being able to read/hear Cummings’ statement in that way: as a witness statement. Green’s analysis speaks to ethnomethodology’s concerns in three ways. First, it reveals something about legal analysis as a professional activity: Green provides instructions on how lawyers hear statements of this sort, and his readers learn to do the work of that hearing themselves. Second, it allows us to reframe Sacks’s ‘hearer’s maxim’ as a form of unique adequacy, a means of demonstrating a particular kind of competence. Finally, it provides a novel way of thinking about ‘versions’ where these are generated as members’ problems rather than analysts’ choices.

Notes