A foundational principle of ethnomethodological and conversation-analytic (EM/CA) research is that if people's interactions with one another are to be studied, they must be recorded as faithfully and as fully as possible. In practice, this principle throws up ethical challenges at every stage of a typical EM/CA study: negotiating access to the scene; recruiting stakeholders and participants; soliciting their informed consent and attending to their expectations; recording interactions; anonymizing data; publishing findings; and curating, storing, and sharing data. The contributors to this special collection of Research on Language and Social Interaction articles identify and analyze the problems at each stage, and give an account of how these challenges may be met.

Repetition has often been argued to be a semiotic device that iconically signifies 'more content', such as intensity and plurality. However, through multimodal interaction analysis of materials in English, Estonian, and Swedish, this paper demonstrates how self-repetition is used to coordinate actions across participants and temporally organize the ongoing activity. The data are taken from infant mealtimes, pilates classes, dance training, boardgames, rock climbing, and opera rehearsals. Repetition of both lexical and non-lexical tokens can prolong, postpone, and generally organize segments of action as well as co-create rhythms and moves in a moment-by-moment reflexive relationship with other (non-vocalizing) participants. A crucial feature of repetitions is that they can be flexibly extended to fit the other's public performance, its launching, continuation, and projectable completion. We argue that the iconicity of repetition emerges through its indexical relationship to other bodies, as a real-time jointly achieved phenomenon.

 Verbs of perception are known for their prolific use in various non-literal functions that are usually argued to have developed from their abstract denotational semantics (e.g., San Roque et al. 2018). In this study we document the interactional practices involving the Estonian 2nd person verb form näed ’you see’ to demonstrate that its usage as a pragmatic particle is anchored in face-to-face situations where the speaker guides a co-present other’s visual attention to a specific contextual aspect. Through multimodal analysis we show how näed is uttered in close coordination with the participants’ body orientations, gestures, and gazes to point to visually available proof for one’s current arguments, rendering it an evidential meaning even in its most “literal” uses of seeing when a co-participant is invited to consider the visual evidence. We argue that the spatially anchored uses constitute a natural habitat of verbs of seeing, as visual perception is a mutually calibrated interactional accomplishment. Related syntactic constructions emerge in real time where näed is either preceded or followed by full-clause specifications of what is to be seen, eventually rendering it as a turn-initial or turn-final particle. This contrasts with the argument that all perception verbs necessarily start out as syntactic elements in full clauses to then develop other uses.   

This chapter looks at how people vocally display bodily strain. While strain sounds can be a “leakage” of an individual bodily effort, they can also be performed without tension beyond what is necessary for their production, and acted upon by co-present others. The study re-specifies the pioneering but impressionistic account of response cries by Goffman (1978) through analyzing the minute mutual temporalities of vocal and bodily strain in the recordings of naturally occurring strain grunts during physical work and body instruction. The chapter argues that strain grunts are regularly produced alongside bodily effort, with variable phonetic characteristics, with outbreaths reflecting tension release, and at moments when the success of the effort is at risk. This leads to local (re)configuration of embodied participation in the task at hand and the emergence of strain displays as having been informative.

What happens to submissions to a journal which publishes close, technically sophisticated analyses of interaction? What do its editors look for? why might it fail when others succeed? Those are questions that will interest readers of this volume, and that we shall try to answer as editors of a journal that publishes conversation-analytic and ethnomethodological (CA and EM) work. Research on Language and Social Interaction (ROLSI) is, of course, not the only journal to publish (broadly) CA and EM articles; however, it is one of the few that publishes nothing else. Our closest sister journals are Social Interaction: Video-based Studies of Human Sociality, Research on Children and Social Interaction, and Interactional Linguistics – a wonderful set of outlets which have grown up to serve the increasing appetite for EM/CA work. Our thoughts about submissions, as editors of ROLSI, probably match in many respects what our colleagues on those journals would say – all editors, of any journal, have similar managerial (and to some degree, intellectual) jobs to do. Experienced authors (some of whom have editorial experience themselves, and many of whom have been our reviewers) will recognize much of what we say, but nevertheless, it’s worth setting out our practices to throw some light into the odd murky corner, and to encourage authors – especially, new authors – to take the plunge and submit a paper. We’ll start at the unhappy first base – the immediate return with an apologetic ‘not for us’ – and work up to the submission’s triumphant revision and acceptance.

In this case study we investigate the role of transnational networks and language brokering in labour migration within the European Union. By describing the working days of Estonians hired by a city maintenance company in Sweden, we demonstrate how language skills and network ties of a manager enable work migration in the local context. Most of the recruited workers belong to the managers circle of family and friends. The manager is thus both capitalising on his social relationships and reinforcing a social support network in the receiving country for the individuals involved. The article promotes our understanding of the interface between migration, multilingualism, and language brokering in the understudied blue-collar workplaces and dissects the social and economic values of linguistic resources in work migration across the Baltic Sea. The data consist of ethnographic observations of daily work routines, video recordings of interaction, and interviews.