In 2010 WikiLeaks released a number of secret and classified documents that contained information pertaining to the United States government. Since then, WikiLeaks and the United States government have been engaged in a rhetorical battle over the circulation of information. Using membership categorization analysis (MCA) as an analytical technique this thesis answers the following research question: what form(s) of politics are made possible as the result of the social orders produced by both WikiLeaks’ and the United States government’s public discourse on the circulation of information? After analyzing a sample of the related discourse, it became clear that the disagreement between WikiLeaks and the United States government is much greater than different views on the distribution of, and access to, information. Rather, the major issue is that the discourses produced by representatives of both organizations constitute two similar and yet somehow opposing social orders. The social orders produced result in different forms of politics and democracy. In turn, this involves each side thinking differently about transparency, the public, the government, the law, and the media.

Conversation analytic (CA) and ethnomethodological (EM) techniques are employed in this study to explore the ways speakers within and between interactional turns build and resist gender category by resisting its activities/predicates. It aims to reveal how a sex-reassigned child’s identity is pertinent to the construction of membership categorization and the doing of resistance towards category-bound activities/predicates.  The study attempts to explain how the child tries to design her answers in a way that - both explicitly and implicitly - resist both the gender membership categorization she is being assigned to be and its ties (predicates/activities) she is being asked to accomplish. Membership categorization analysis (MCA), formulated by Sacks (1979), is employed here to show that the identity categories used in talk are tools by which participants organize and perform activities/predicates to establish their categories. The human subject that this project concentrates on is an immigrant family having a sex-reassigned child called Aidan. The data, which is analyzed, was collected during a dispute around the haircut and clothing style for the sex-reassigned child between the child and the parents. During the interaction the parents try to generate the category predicates for building up a set of activities around what might be considered ‘normal’ within a community that enables them to define and validate the child particular membership category. The main resistance strategies adopted by the child are dispreferred actions such as refusals mainly through accounting (e.g., justification and explanation) and disagreement.

Scholars in the field are of the opinion that the early simultaneous bilingual and bicultural exposure not only does not harm the bilinguals, but also strengthens their social and cultural foundations and keeps them from getting vulnerable to external environment (Deuchar and Quay 1999, 2000; Genesee 1989; Genesee, Nicoladis, and Paradis 1995; Holowka, Brosseau-Lapre ́, and Petitto 2002; Lanza 1992; Meisel 1989; Petitto et al. 2001). Also it has been demonstrated that bilingual children have differentiated systems to provide them with the ability to distinguish between their two input languages from the beginning of language acquisition (Petitto & Holowka, 2002). However, the driver of the children’s language preference patterns at home needs to be further explored. The present study is indeed an attempt to answer the question of why it is that some children regularly exposed to their heritage language from a very young age actually continue to actively use it, and other children involving in similar parental policy about bilingualism do not? It aims to examine the impacts of parental language strategies during the childhood on children language preference at home after they achieve the key competences in each of the two languages. The foci are parental attitudes towards the patterns of language choice and their influence on child language preference. Data are collected from two Iranian immigrant families; one has been experiencing additive bilingualism, while the other has been involved in the process of subtractive phenomenon. Some implications for parent-child closeness, heritage language and the risk of language contamination are touched on briefly.

This study employs conversation analysis (CA) and membership categorization analysis (MCA) in an exploration of the interactional organization of talk between doctors and the mothers (or the female guardians acting as “proxy mothers”) of HIV-positive child patients being treated at a paediatric hospital in the Western Cape, South Africa, in 2003. The analysis focuses on how the HIV paediatric consultation is co-constructed between the doctor and the mother/guardian, and how interactional choices on the part of the participants shape the course of the consultation. Specific attention is placed on how participants orient to, hear, respond to and coconstruct the category of “mother”, along with the emergent inferences of what constitutes “good mothering” in the context of pursuing the wellbeing of the HIV-positive child who - as it emerges in certain cases - has evidently been infected by the mother in the first instance. As its core focus, this study examines how orienting to “good mothering” is done - in a moment-bymoment, collaborative and co-constructed manner – in the immediate course of the doctor/mother/guardian consultation. This involves considering the interplay of shifts in orientations to “motherly responsibility” and “doctorly responsibility”, and how these shifts are collaboratively activated, negotiated and responded to, as the consultation proceeds.

This study seeks to investigate this core research topic: how identity is involved in everyday interactions between Chinese microblogging website users? By understanding identity as an element in the interaction context of discursive practices, the investigation is achieved through the analysis of naturally occurring text-based online data. Conversation Analysis (CA) and Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) are used to do the analysis. The former will focus on the interaction structure while the latter will be used to make some of the contents in the interactions relevant. This study seeks to make the “orderliness” (Sacks, 1972) and “members’ methods” (Garfinkel, 1967) under a particular context describable and analyzable. The sequential and categorical organization described in this study shows how members are oriented to identities in the in situ context when they exchange their ideas on a sensitive topic, and on a microblogging website. / text

Abstract The aim of the study was to study how partners in heterosexual relationship do gender in interaction. The study was guided by the research questions; In what ways is gender done in interaction?; What different norms become visible?; And, what interactional consequences does gender construction lead to? An ethnomethodological perspective was adopted in which the way people in everyday life creates a common understanding of the world is focused. In line with the perspective gender was assumed to be a social construction created when people interact. Eight extracts from TV-interviews with couples was transcribed and analyzed using Membership categorization analysis (MCA). The chosen analytical method focuses on interaction participant’s referral to and use of membership categories and to these associated character traits and actions. The analysis showed that gender was created through explicit as well as implicit referrals to membership categories and character traits and actions associated to these. The gender norms that was made visible was the woman’s responsibility of home and family and the mail conqueror. Doing gender resulted in several consequences; (1) the maintenance/risk of maintenance of unequal division of responsibilities within couples/family constructions, were the greatest responsibility for family and home falls on the woman; (2) that the women sometimes was positioned, many times implicitly, in inferior gender roles; (3) that gender-based alliances could be created among the interaction participants; and (4) that statements, questions and answers could contain references to gender categories in ways that they appeared to be common knowledge and could function as support to what was sad. As the analysis also showed that gender categorization was a common feature associated with participants either holding themselves or others accountable it appears to be a topic for future research.

Pornografi och dess verkningar är ett ämne som varit mer eller mindre aktuellt ända sedan 1960-talet. I huvudsak har två sidor identifierats historiskt: de som är helt emot porrens existens och de som anser att det är upp till individen om den vill konsumera porr eller inte. På senare tid har även röster hörts som försöker nyansera bilden och skapa en diskussion kring ämnet snarare än debatt. Föremålet för den här uppsatsen är en radiointervju med en kvinnlig hardcoreporrskådis. Intervjun sändes i oktober 2018 i programmet Fråga vad du vill i Sveriges Radio P3. Syftet är att undersöka hur porrskådisens identitet konstrueras under intervjun och vilka föreställningar om porrskådisar och porrbranschen som kommer till uttryck under samtalet. En viktig utgångspunkt är att identitet är föränderligt och något vi både bär med oss och skapar i interaktion. Andra viktiga utgångspunkter är hur vi människor använder kategorier för att benämna och identifiera oss, samt radikalfeminismens inställning till pornografi och påverkan på debatten. Central metod för analysen är Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) som fokuserar på vilka kategorier som görs gällande i en samtalssituation och hur deltagarna förhandlar kring dessa. Resultaten visar att identitetsarbetet troligen påverkas av diskursen som i sin tur styrs av vilka frågor som ställs under intervjun. Det mest framträdande är dock hur samhällets föreställningar om porrskådisar kommer till uttryck och hur dessa styr diskursen. Eftersom intervjuns syfte är att ta reda på hur det är att arbeta som hardcoreporrskådis så formas frågorna utefter den premissen – alltså vad frågeställarna kopplar ihop med pornografi och porrskådisar. Detta i sin tur påverkar vilka sidor av porrskådisen som blir relevanta i just det här samtalet.

Syftet med denna undersökning är att utifrån ett språkperspektiv undersöka hur bronies identitet konstrueras i relation till andra grupper i några artiklar om dem. Teoretiska perspektiv som underbygger studien är att normbrytare synliggör normer och att maskulinitetsnormer kan kopplas till de hegemoniska maskulina ideal som män positioneras kring. För att uppnå syftet studeras åtta tidningsartiklar med analysmetoden membership categorization analysis (MCA). Resultatet blev att bronies identitet konstruerades i relation till grupperna vuxna och unga män, nördar, föräldrar, näthatare, bögar och tjejer. Bronies relateras till dessa kategorier med att ibland tillhöra dem, men ibland med att inte tillhöra dem. I relation till manligt och kvinnligt får bronies en alternativ positionering någonstans däremellan. Bronies identitet konstrueras på många sätt genom andras föreställningar om dem. / The aim for this research is to examine how bronies identity is constructed in relation to other groups in eight selected newspaper articles. The articles were analyzed from a language perspective with the method membership categorization analysis (MCA). The result was that bronies identity is constructed in relation to groups of adult /young men, nerds, parents, gays, hater on the internet, and girls. Bronies are depicted in these categories sometimes as belonging to them, but sometimes as not belonging. In relation to male and female, bronies are positioned in an alternative position somewhere in between. Bronies identity is constructed in many ways by others perceptions of them.

This thesis explores the social construction of birth by analyzing the interaction between the participants present in the delivery room. The data is drawn from 79 video recordings of birth. Six are unedited research recordings and the remaining 73 were edited for pedagogical, documentary and entertaining purposes. The theoretical and analytical perspective is Conversation Analysis. With this microanalytic method, a detailed insight is given to the interaction in the delivery room which should be of linguistic, anthropologic and midwifery interest. The thesis demonstrates how different situations are shaped during labor and the first 15 minutes after birth. It reveals how the identities child, girl, boy, mother, father, woman and man are constructed and negotiated in the unfolding interaction between the participants. In this sense, the thesis uncovers the construction of family roles in the delivery room during a delicate interaction between the private persons and the institutional representatives. The latter are charged with the complex task of safeguarding the physical wellbeing of mother and child while also promoting the development of parental identities. The thesis highlights the existence of a social birth work; the institutional interactants make use of a range of linguistic resources to demarcate the progression from second stage labor to birth and to position the newborn as an endeared social creature. Birth is an important liminal situation and is therefore forcefully spoken forth, and, as the thesis shows, enhanced with more or less ritual utterances and actions. Birth is also a matter of bodies, the body in labor, the supporting body of the partner and the appearance of the body of the newborn. The thesis gives insight into how these bodies are managed and stylized in interaction. Further the thesis makes visible the midwife’s use of interactional resources to instill strength into the body of the woman in labor. The results are discussed in light of the socio-cultural circumstances for hospital birth in Sweden.

This thesis examines how a jury on an artistic education adopts next year's students to a BA program at an art school. My intention is to explore how we established artists who are involved in education as professors, teachers (or students) in art education affects who will be released to the exclusive educational path as an art school represents our work in the admissions jury. My ambition is to create an awareness of what it might mean for the reproduction of the artist.