Associate Professor Galina Bolden (Rutgers University, USA) is an internationally recognised authority in Conversation Analysis. The School of Languages and Cultures recently had the great pleasure of welcoming Associate Professor Galina Bolden to The University of Queensland as part of our 2018 Distinguished Visitor Program. During her visit, Associate Professor Galina Bolden delivered a public lecture titled, Enacting culture through conversation repair.
Abstract
While it is widely accepted that culture is constituted through interaction, comparatively little is known about the specific practices through which this occurs. Drawing on data from field video recordings of everyday interactions in Russian American, and using the methodology of Conversation Analysis, the lecture will focus on sequences of interaction in which participants deal with understanding problems via conversational repair. Bolden’s lecture will present how the course of resolving ostensible understanding difficulties, conversationalists constitute and sometimes contest their identities as cultural and language experts and novices, thereby rendering visible interactional practices through which culture is constituted. In doing so, Bolden explores how displays of knowledge and expertise are deployed as interactional resources. Overall, this research aims to re-specify the concept of “intercultural communication” as something participants “talk into being” in the course of doing things together.
Presenter
Galina B. Bolden (PhD, University of California, Los Angeles) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Rutgers University and a member of the Rutgers University Conversation Analysis Laboratory. She conducts conversation analytic research on the organisation of talk-in interaction in English and Russian languages and bilingual talk in ordinary, medical and workplace contexts. Drawing on English and Russian language data, her recent work examines such topics as the organisation of repair, discourse markers in conversation, conversation analytic transcription, the organisation of reminiscing, requesting, and treatment negotiations in psychiatric settings.
