CASLC Talk: 17 March 2022 Kevin Whitehead & Geoff Raymond on "Cross-Cutting Preferences in Interactional Trajectories Toward Violence"

CASLC - 17 Mar 22
Type	Seminar or talk
Categories (tags)	Uncategorized
Dates	2022/03/17 - 2022/03/17
Link	https://bit.ly/3sq3EYn
Address
Geolocation
Abstract due	2022/03/17
Submission deadline
Final version due
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Tweet	Join us on 17 Mar 22 from 4pm-5.30pm (UK time) for a CASLC talk by Professors Whitehead, Raymond, and Bowman on Interactional Trajectories Toward Violence.
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CASLC Talk: 17 March 2022 Kevin Whitehead, Geoff Raymond, and Brett Bowman on "Cross-Cutting Preferences in Interactional Trajectories Toward Violence":

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Details:

• Date: Thursday 17th March 2022
• Time: 4.00pm-5.30pm (UK time)
• Place: Zoom. If you’re on the CASLC or CASLC-guest mailing list, you will receive a zoom link via google calendar. If you’re not on our mailing list, you can register for the talk by visiting https://bit.ly/3sq3EYn

If you’re unable to use the online registration form, please contact: merran.toerien@york.ac.uk.

Abstract

Scholarship on the contours of violent conduct has taken on renewed urgency in light of recent social commentary documenting the increasing prominence of threats and uses of violence across a range of political, institutional, and other social conflicts (see, e.g., Homans 2021; Osnos 2020; Palmer and Zick 2021). While contemporary scholarship in this area has converged in focusing on, “Not violent individuals, but violent situations ...” (Collins 2008:1-2), researchers have offered seemingly contradictory accounts for the situated production of violent conduct. Collins (2008, 2009, 2012, 2013, 2019) proposes that violence is difficult to carry out by describing psychological and situational barriers against its enactment, and argues that violence “run right against the conventional morality of normal situations” (Collins 2008:4). In contrast, Fiske and Rai (2015) draw on an approach rooted in moral psychology to contend that most violence is “morally motivated to regulate social relationships” (Fiske and Rai 2015:301) and thus that moral injunctions propel participants toward acting violently. To address these apparent contradictions, we use a conversation analytic approach to identify the situated reasoning and actions through which participants in video recorded conflicts manage, moment-by-moment, the potentially variable morality of violent conduct. Specifically, we document two normative preferences that have “cross-cutting” implications for the realization (or not) of violence once one or more parties have projected its possible use. As we show, participants orient to a difference between the moral legitimacy of producing violent actions that are, or claim to be, responsive to another’s violent action and thus defensive, as compared with initiating violence. In addition, however, we find that participants orient to a second, cross-cutting preference that privileges progress toward the realization of physical violence once it has been projected: Once at least one party has threatened or invited it, progress toward violence is treated as expected and movement away from it is treated as an accountable alternative. As our analysis shows, much of what is readily observable in (potentially) violent encounters (including what previous scholars have observed) can be understood in terms of participants simultaneously managing these countervailing preferences, and the practices they deploy in the course of struggling to do so. In this way, our analysis both elucidates some systematic features of the interactional and moral organization of (potentially) violent conflicts and extends conversation analytic findings regarding preference organization.

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