Identity
| Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA and IL: Identity | |
|---|---|
| Author(s): | Jessica S. Robles (Loughborough University, UK) (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2360-650X) |
| To cite: | Robles, Jessica S. (2026). Identity. In Alexandra Gubina, Elliott M. Hoey & Chase Wesley Raymond (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics. International Society for Conversation Analysis (ISCA). DOI: [ ] |
In ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA), identity is generally conceptualised as “how people themselves, in everyday social life, orient to and describe, classify or assess each other as particular kinds of people” (Benwell & Stokoe, 2016: 68). There is no a priori definition of identity in EMCA research, nor an assumption of its omnirelevance to social interaction. Rather, there is a recognition that identities may become relevant in the doing of social actions, in certain settings, or in particular sequential environments, and that this relevance may be procedurally consequential for how a trajectory of action unfolds (Antaki & Widdicombe, 1998). This position is consistent with ethnomethodological indifference, which, in this case, would recommend a focus on participants’ orientations to and accomplishment of identity rather than relying on analysts’ assumptions about participants’ identity as explanations for social actions. This position is part of what makes EMCA distinctive: it avoids treating identities as demographic variables or taking identity for granted in an uncritical way (Garfinkel, 1967; Lynch, 2000).
While some identities (age, gender, occupation, etc.) may be considered transportable from one interaction to the next (Zimmerman, 1998), these are not presumed a priori to explain how interactions are organized. That said, some identities are treated as potentially relevant over the course of an entire interactional event. Such “omnirelevant” categories, as Sacks (1992) suggested, could be treated as always potentially relevant in their operation over an episode of interaction. For example, the categories of ‘therapist’ and ‘patient’ in a therapy session, or ‘caller’ and ‘called’ in a phone call. For researchers, these situational identities may be accepted enough to characterise a subfield of research (e.g., institutional talk) as seen in the usage of transcript designations (e.g., doctor-patient interaction). We can compare these to more momentary “discourse identities” (Zimmerman, 1998), for example, current speaker and recipient(s) during a turn-at-talk, or story-teller and story-recipient during a telling.
A basic sense in which participants do identity can be seen in their practices of doing identification. For example in the context of explicit participant naming practices that occur at the start of old-fashioned telephone calls, Schegloff (2007) describes how, in pre-expansions of dispreferred sequences, pre-emptive responses are preferred, as in the following instance from his 1979 paper:
(1) [5.48] (Schegloff, 1979: 51, 2007: 90) 01 Con: Hello. 02 Joa: Connie? 03 Con: Yeah Joanie
This phone call from Joanie to Connie occurred long before the introduction of technology permitting you to see who was calling. This meant that parties at the start of the call would be practically concerned with identifying one another. Hearing Connie’s voice sample in line 1, Joanie is able to pre-empt a possible self-identification by Connie by guessing her identity (line 2). This is confirmed by Connie in line 3 (“yeah”) along with doing recognition of Joanie. This illustrates the preference for recognition (of the identity of the other person) over self-identification.
In addition to doing identification, identity has also been examined with respect to how participants refer to themselves and others—an organisation of practice known as ‘person reference’ (Enfield & Stivers, 2007; Sacks & Schegloff, 1979; Schegloff, 2006). Some research in this area has examined how person reference relates to relationships and epistemics, for example, grandparents can assess grandchildren’s behaviour rather than appearance, displaying direct and primary access to being around the children and witnessing their conduct (Raymond & Heritage, 2006). Referring to self and others in an explicit way has also been examined in research on the preference structures for doing so (Sacks & Schegloff, 1979; Lerner & Kitzinger, 2007). In the following example, taken from a phone call, we observe the preference for minimization (“use a single reference form”) and preference for recognitional reference (“use a form that your recipient would recognise”). These preference can cause trouble. Ann initially adheres to the preference for minimisation with the single word “Fords” (line 2), but this isn’t immediately recognised, leading to two extra tries (lines 3-4) elaborating the referent’s name (“Misses Holmes Ford”) and occupation (“the cellist”), which finally succeeds in eliciting recognition (line 5).
(2) [SBL 2/2/4] (Sacks & Schegloff, 1979: 19) 01 Ann: ... well I was the only one other than 02 than the uhm (0.7) mtch! Fo:rds? 03 Uh Missiz Holmes Ford? (0.8) You know uh- 04 [the the cellist? 05 Bev: [Oh yes. She’s- she’s (a)/(the) cellist.
Person reference is also central in handling the ephemeral discourse identities of speaker, recipient, and unaddressed parties. The example below from a family dinner starts with Mom producing what appears to be a naming error in the process of explicitly naming the addressee: she starts to produce “Beth”, the name of one daughter, then self-corrects to “Virginia”, the name of her other daughter.
(3) [Virginia 145] (Drew, 2018: 176) 01 Mom: Beh- oh:, Vuhginia, we’ve been through this. When you’re 02 old enough you ca:n work in the store. 03 (0.2) 04 Vir: .hh Well Beth didn’ Beth get tih work b’fore she was sixteen?= 05 Mom: =No::! I’d- (0.2) I would let her wrap presents an’ packages et 06 Christmus an:’- °times we needed somebady.° .hh >But people 07 just don’t want< (0.4) chi:ldren (0.2) waiting on[(’um). 08 Vir: [I’m not a chi:::ld!
Mom’s person references have consequences for the subsequent pronoun “we” (line 1), because that “we” includes Virginia and Mom (rather than Beth and Mom); and also bear consequences for the pronoun “you” (lines 1-2), which refers to Virginia (and not Beth).
In addition to disambiguating addressees and unaddressed parties, the example illustrates some dimensions of identity associated with categories of persons. Namely, Virginia’s age-categorisation (by Mom in lines 1-2, and by herself in line 8), along with the comparison to both Beth and non-children (line 4), draws on commonsense knowledge about how age relates to appropriateness for working at a shop. These are consistent with the way Sacks (1992) in his lectures developed identity as membership categories. As compared to person references—which generally rely on dedicated pro-terms, names, and recognitionals that do not necessarily group or categorise persons—membership categories (and the sets of categories that they’re organised into) sort people into “identity categories”. For these, the focus is more on how people do things with identity through the normative associations between particular identity categories and activities and features, such as between ‘children’ and ‘not working at a store’.
For Sacks, categorisation was something that emerged as consequential to the actions participants are doing and thus was not a fixed set of characteristics or form of identification (such as demographics) that were always attached to someone and always relevant to their conduct. The relevance of a particular identity would, rather, emerge in the interaction itself as part of the social actions underway, as in the following:
(4) ‘Aura about a druggie’ [23:11–24:36] (Robles, 2022: 531)
AND: I’m sorry, I don’t care how fucked up you are if
you’re a fuckin real junkie you’re not gonna go
ov- go to jail over some shit like that
In this example, Andy proposes the category “real junkie” as an account for not believing a story her mother told her about drug addiction, as the story suggested a level of carelessness that Andy (a former addict herself) sees as incompatible with serious addiction. In doing so she leverages her epistemic authority to know what a “real” drug addict is like and thus also challenges her sister’s prior talk, which asserted that Andy’s mother was a “druggie” on the basis of an “aura” rather than evidence or knowledge. In this case the identity of the mother and of Andy are produced as relevant in the defence of whether the mother can be categorised as a drug addict or not.
The current state-of-the-art on CA approaches to identity do not always involve explicit commentary on “identity.” However, identity is very much alive in CA research across numerous settings (e.g., Corbitt, 2024; Tennent & Weatherall, 2021; Waring & Tadic, 2024).
Furthermore, some aspects of identity are visible in the way CA is asking some of the same questions but in new, updated ways. Key identities such as race and gender, which saw engagement from discourse and conversation analysts in the 80s and 90s (e.g., Rapley, 1998; Stokoe, 1998), have gained renewed attention in response to current events (Robles & Shrikant, 2021). Identities related to “atypical” communication have grown sufficiently to develop its own lively area (Wilkinson, 2019). Specific local identities have been explored, such as negotiating anonymity as the “one who called the police” in emergency calls about domestic violence (Tennent & Weatherall, 2024) and managing stigmatised behaviours in psychiatric assessments (Peräkylä, 2024). This suggests that CA is not uninterested in identity, but has an ongoing engagement with it in a unique way that has important insights to offer and challenges to make to other areas of research.
Additional Related Entries:
- Category-bound activity
- Complaint
- Compliment
- Context
- Deontics
- Epistemics
- Membership Categorization Device
- Participation
- Participation Framework
- Professional Vision
Cited References:
Antaki, C., & Widdicombe, S. (Eds.). (1998). Identities in talk. SAGE Publications Ltd.
Benwell, B., & Stokoe, E. (2016). Ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approaches to identity. In The Routledge handbook of language and identity (pp. 66-82). Routledge.
Corbitt, A. (2024). Playing with identities: Negotiating coauthorship and role-playing interactions across game and metagame talk. Linguistics and Education, 80, 101293.
Drew, P. (2018). Epistemics in social interaction. Discourse Studies, 20(1), 163-187.
Enfield, N. J., & Stivers, T. (Eds.). (2007). Person reference in interaction: Linguistic, cultural and social perspectives. Cambridge University Press.
Fitzgerald, R., Housley, W., & Butler, C. W. (2009). Omnirelevance and interactional context. Australian Journal of Communication, 36(3), 45.
Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,: Prentice-Hall.
Lerner, G. H., & Kitzinger, C. (2007). Introduction: person-reference in conversation analytic research. Discourse Studies, 9(4), 427-432.
Lynch, M. (2000). Against Reflexivity as an academic virtue and source of privileged knowledge. Theory Culture & Society 17, 26-54.
Peräkylä, A. (2024). Bad behaviours, spoiled identities: Face in personality disorders. In New Perspectives on Goffman in Language and Interaction. Taylor & Francis.
Rapley, M. (1998). ‘Just an ordinary Australian’: Self‐categorization and the discursive construction of facticity in ‘new racist’political rhetoric. British Journal of Social Psychology, 37(3), 325-344.
Raymond, G., & Heritage, J. (2006). The epistemics of social relations: Owning grandchildren. Language in Society, 35(5), 677-705.
Robles, J. S. (2022). Managing moral category implications of former drug addiction. Discourse & Society, 33(4), 519-538.
Robles, J. S., & Shrikant, N. (2021). Interactional approaches to discrimination and racism in everyday life. In The Routledge international handbook of discrimination, prejudice and stereotyping (pp. 273-286). Routledge.
Sacks, H. (1992). Lectures on conversation (vols I & II). Blackwell.
Sacks, H., & Schegloff, E. A. (1979). Two preferences in the organization of reference to persons in conversation and their interaction. Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology. New York.
Schegloff, E. A. (2007). Sequence organization in interaction: A primer in conversation analysis (Vol. 1). Cambridge University Press.
Stokoe, E. H. (1998). Talking about gender: The conversational construction of gender categories in academic discourse. Discourse & Society, 9 \(2), 217-240.
Tennent, E., & Weatherall, A. (2021). Feminist conversation analysis: examining violence against women. In The Routledge Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality (pp. 258-271). Routledge.
Tennent, E., & Weatherall, A. (2025). Identity categories and the dilemma of calling police about family violence. British Journal of Social Psychology, 64(1), e12839.
Waring, H. Z., & Tadic, N. (Eds.). (2024). Critical conversation analysis: Inequality and injustice in talk-in-interaction. Channel View Publications.
Wilkinson, R. (2019). Atypical interaction: Conversation analysis and communicative impairments. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 52(3), 281-299.
Additional References:
Edwards, D. (2008). The relevant thing about her: Social identity categories in use. In Identities in talk (pp. 16-33). Sage Publications Ltd.
Pomerantz, A., & Mandelbaum, J. (2004). Conversation analytic approaches to the relevance and uses of relationship categories in interaction. In K. L. Fitch & R. E. Sanders (Eds.), Handbook of language and social interaction (pp. 149-171). Psychology Press.
Weatherall, A. (2007). Feminist psychology, conversation analysis and empirical research: An illustration using identity categories. Gender & Language, 1(2).
Whitehead, K. A., Stokoe, E., & Raymond, G. (2024). Categories in social interaction. Taylor & Francis.
