This article presents a multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) of collective remembering of the American War in Vietnam, also known as the Vietnam War, as embodied in forty-nine photographs taken during the war and published in the digital edition of The New York Times on the Vietnam War’s forty-second anniversary commemoration. Collective memory and commemoration are understood as political and discursive practices that make up a site of contestation (Milani & Richardson 2022). This research attempts to unveil The New York Times’ semiotic control in presenting and recontextualizing a historical narrative of the Vietnam War to sustain a necropolitical architecture in the making of collective memory. Three major themes emerging from the data—dehumanized death, gendered death, and paternalized death—are discussed in the context of what we call necropolitical discourse of collective remembering of the Vietnam War. (Necropolitical discourse, Vietnam War, CMDA, collective remembering, lieu de dispute)

This study examines Taiwanese netizens’ metapragmatic debates on tonal variation in Taiwan Mandarin, focusing on the pronunciation of 企業 qìyè ‘company/enterprise’ by two government officials during a nationally broadcast press conference. It investigates how the non-standard variant qǐyè, a relic feature historically present in Taiwan, becomes enregistered as a linguistic emblem of imported Chinese influence through the processes of clasping and semiotic differentiation. The study highlights the ideological stakes in linguistic boundary-making and explores how tonal variation functions as a site for negotiating national identity. It further connects this linguistic debate to broader ideological projects such as democratization, Taiwanization, and shifting Taiwan-China relations. By integrating variationist and metapragmatic approaches, this study contributes to discussions on the indexical field and the role of explicit metapragmatic commentary in shaping linguistic change. (Indexicality, language ideology, tonal variation, enregisterment, language policing, metapragmatics, Taiwan)

The proliferation of smartphone cameras and other portable recording devices has enabled the rise of so-called ‘copwatching’, people filming police-citizen encounters with the primary aim of increasing police accountability. Interactions between copwatchers and police officers generally take place under conditions of mutual mistrust and regularly lead to heated arguments over the recording activity and its precise modalities. Using conversation analysis, this article examines video recordings of encounters between police and copwatchers, focusing on how disalignment concerning the recording activity regularly manifests between them already during the opening phases of their interactions. We describe the interactional work that goes into organizing the pre-beginning and opening phases of these encounters and take stock of actions that recurrently engender disagreement and contention between law enforcement officers and videographers. Data come from recordings made by copwatchers and police officers’ body-worn cameras during public police operations in the US and the UK. (Conversation analysis, openings, police, copwatching, video recording, disalignment, disagreement)

Using institutional conversation analysis, this article develops an account of the organisation of other-language recalibration repair in broadcast news interviews in Rwanda. Initial observation shows that the structure of other-language recalibration repair is significantly reduced compared to that of repair in everyday conversation. The study argues that this difference is due to the interactional use of the repair practice. To develop this argument, the article draws on the well-documented fact that, in institutional talk, repair can be deployed to serve relevant institutional goals. Analysis of the data not only confirms that, in broadcast news interviews in Rwanda, other-language recalibration is used as a device for relating to the overhearing audience, but it also reveals that this interactional use is consequential to the shape of the repair practice. Notably, analysis reveals that the structure of the repair practice is even more reduced than it was initially thought to be. (News interviews, other-language recalibration, repair, overhearing audience, structural organisation)*

William Labov carried out literacy research throughout his career from the 1960s to 2010s. This developed in tandem with his linguistic documentation of African American Vernacular English. Both began in 1965, when Labov received funding for a three-year fieldwork project on Black youths’ language and schooling in Harlem, New York. Literacy was an important political issue in the 1960s, with substantial funding to raise basic education levels, as part of socioeconomic development agendas. In the US, this coincided with civil rights movements, shifting race relations, and a period of social unrest. In this article, Labov’s first phase of literacy research is traced through this historical moment, from the late 1960s to early 1970s. Also charted is the development of one deficit theory Labov contested during this period—cultural deprivation theory. Three parts are described: foundational conferences in 1964, research and reports from 1965–1968, and centers of contestation from 1969–1972. (Sociolinguistics, ethnography, literacy, reading, cultural deprivation theory)*

This article addresses classical issues in conversation analysis related to the overall structural organization of social interaction, achieved through opening and closing sequences. While the integrity and autonomy of social interaction are most often oriented to by participants in single interactions, the study of some institutional interactions shows that forms of porosity between encounters do exist, in which one encounter impinges on another. This is the case of encounters-in-a-series, in which a new encounter is opened as the previous is not yet closed. The article examines interactions in which participants orient to the preservation of the integrity of successive encounters, contrasted with cases in which the initiation of the opening of a new encounter happens during or before the closing of the previous, and discusses how and when this is treated as normatively delicate or not, within the participants’ local endogenous analysis of the overall structural organization of the interaction. (Social interaction, conversation analysis, multimodality, overall structural organization, opening, closing, encounters-in-a-series, porosity)