Nekvapil2003

Nekvapil2003
BibType	ARTICLE
Key	Nekvapil2003
Author(s)	Jirí Nekvapil, Ivan Leudar
Title	O českých masmédiích z etnometodologické perspektivy: romská identita v dialogických sítích
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Tag(s)	EMCA, Identity, Mass media, Media, Ethnicity, Racism
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Year	2003
Language	Czech
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Journal	Slovo a slovesnost
Volume	64
Number	3
Pages	161-192
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Howpublished
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Abstract

This paper had three aims. One was to extend our work on how media in the Czech Republic represented Romanies in early nineties. Our previous work addressed this issue in the settings of TV debates. We had found that the category ‘Romany’ was contested, but the ‘predicates’ bound to it by many Czech participants were negations of what they found positive about themselves. Here we investigated the category of Romany in debates about the migration law proposed by the office of General Procurator in 1993, [192]which took place in various media of communication. Working in a broadly ethnomethodological framework, our task was to determine what methods and resources participants used to present the law as sensible, adequate or flawed and racist. We found that the arguments were based on the assumption that criminal activities are bound to the category of Romany, and that Romanies are a source of social disorder. This default assumption was, however, contested by the Romanies and some Czechs. These presentations were, however, not simply representations – they were used as justifications of past actions towards Romanies and tied to proposed future ones. We were also interested in whether ‘membership categorization analysis’ can be sensibly extended to objects other than persons without altering its tools substantially. With respect to the proposed migration law, we found that the participants ascribed to it a number of ‘predicates’, depending on whether they were opponents or partisans of the proposal. The proposal was characterised as ‘racist’, but also as a ‘valuable initiative’ or a ‘bold gesture’. Like membership categories of pertaining to persons, the proposed law was grouped with other abstract objects in ‘collections’, such as ‘legislative acts displaying state racism’.

Our second aim was to provide a conversation analytic alternative to cognitive accounts of how media influence public opinion. Our argument was that it is unlikely that they do so by molding private psychological attitudes, but rather by providing argumentative resources in the form of texts. So our strategy was to show how such texts are used in everyday conversations. We found that partly irrespective of the original intent in the text, the text was used in a locally occasioned manner to further the purposes of participants.

Our third aim was to elaborate the concept of a ‘dialogical network’ which we have formulated elsewhere. Dialogical networks are communications which typically occur in mass media and one of their characteristics is that contributions of individual participants are distributed in time and space. Their second central property is that an individual’s contribution can be multiplicated (e.g. what is said in a TV studio may be reproduced in several newspapers). We found that the distributed and multiplicative character of dialogical networks makes possible two sequential phenomena as far as ‘adjacency pairs’ are concerned: (i) several actors often react to the first part of a sequence, and (ii) the second part in a sequence is often a reaction to several tokens of the first part. Dialogical networks are forms of communication which allow participants to communicate without ever meeting face to face, and even without acknowledging each other as communicative partners.

Notes

Czech media from ethnomethodological perspective: On Roma identity in dialogical networks