Catherine L Tam
Biographic Data
| ID | 301546 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Catherine L Tam |
| GIVEN NAMES | Catherine L |
| FAMILY NAME | Tam |
| SIGNATURE | TAM C L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Calgary |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5353-4004 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Perspectives from South Africa on GenAI in Higher Education: A Postdigital Dialogue with the Global Context
Drawn from an interdisciplinary gathering of 51 colleagues at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg in March 2025, this collective article shares multiple perspectives from South Africa on our interactions with Generative AI (GenAI) across higher education (HE). Contributors have re-created our dialogue here, in the spirit of Ubuntu and via a postdigital lens, bringing together vital local knowledge and literature to demonstr…
Navigating Omnirelevant Asymmetry: Encouraging Children to Exercise Their Deontic Rights in Videoconferencing Music Lessons
The educational community has long critiqued teacher‐centered instruction, promoting student‐centered learning. Yet, pre‐assumed teacher‐student category relevance may overlook momentary asymmetries and alternative categories in real‐time learning. Drawing on video recordings of videoconferencing music lessons involving a teacher/great aunt, young children/students, and caregivers/teaching assistants during the COVID‐19 pandemic, our data provide…
The (Re)Production, Negotiation, and Navigation of Social Asymmetries‐in‐Action: An Introduction to the Special Issue
This article reconsiders, and argues for, the contribution of ethnomethodological and conversation analytic research (EM/CA) to the understanding of social asymmetries in action. As well as highlighting the significance of the approach in describing the interactional “machinery” of supposedly “Big” social issues such as injustice, exclusion, and discrimination, it also considers some of the tensions that have been discussed by key scholars in the…
Moral Communities in a Race Status Negotiation: A Dorm Room Urination Case
In 2022, at a South African university, a white student was filmed urinating on the belongings of a black student. Although race was invoked as an a priori account for this incident, we demonstrate how race is made visible and relevant by participants in the interaction through an attempted, yet resisted, status degradation ceremony. Utilizing an ethnomethodological conversation-analytic approach, we explicate how contrasting moral communities ch…
A multimodal approach to grammatical aspect: Embedded depictions and their aspectual characteristics as interactional resources
This paper offers a multimodal approach to grammatical aspect, traditionally seen in linguistics as a verbal-morphological category. Using conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, we take as our object of study turn completions done with bodily movements and non-lexical vocalizations, focusing on the aspectual information they construct, and how this information is oriented to as relevant to the trajectory of action underway. We argue…
Look At/Check X: An Attention-And-Approval-Seeking Device
In the home, parents and children are often co-present but engaged with different tasks. When children wish to engage their parents about something they have produced/are producing and to monitor their understanding of it, they need a means of obtaining both parental attention and understanding. I examine instances of children using the look at X directive (and its variant in South African English, check X) as an attention-and-approval-seeking de…
Climate Change Totems and Discursive Hegemony Over the Arctic
The Arctic and its animals figure prominently as icons of climate change in Western imaginaries. Persuasive storytelling centred on compelling animal icons, like the polar bear, is a powerful strategy to frame environmental challenges, mobilizing collective global efforts to resist environmental degradation and species endangerment. The power of the polar bear in Western climate imagery is in part derived from the perceived “environmental sacredn…
Children’s demands for parental action
Theory and research on parent–child interaction generally make a priori assumptions of asymmetry in authority between parent and child. Rather than investigating how children exercise autonomy by resisting parental authority, I examine their methods for exercising deontic authority in interaction with their parents. Using conversation analysis and drawing on Stevanovic and Peräkylä’s distinction between deontic status and stance, I analyse video-…
The Best of Both Worlds: Connecting Remote Sensing and Arctic Communities for Safe Sea Ice Travel
Northern communities are increasingly interested in technology that provides information about the sea ice environment for travel purposes. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) remote sensing is widely used to observe sea ice independently of sunlight and cloud cover, however, access to SAR in northern communities has been limited. This study 1) defines the sea ice features that influence travel for two communities in the Western Canadian Arctic, 2) id…
Branding Wakatobi: Marine Development and Legitimation by Science
Marine protected areas (MPAs) serve as a potential defense against marine degradation, meeting the conflicting priorities and needs of multiple actors. Biodiversity, conservation, and ecotourism constitute a triad of sustainability tropes in tropical MPAs that intersect with and reinterpret local histories of marine interaction, subsistence, and commercial extraction. Science is implicated in this production of resource space, with the state and …
Indigenous Power Struggles in the Peruvian Amazon: A Spatio-cultural Analysis of Communication
It is well established that external national policies and internal ethnic politics contribute to indigenous power struggles that create a disharmonious indigenous voice. The purpose of this paper is to interrogate how such fissures intersect with internal, covert communication forces embedded in indigenous communities. Based on a case study of Peru’s national indigenous Amazonian organization Asociación Interétnica de Desarrollo de la Selva Peru…
Notes on a caribou hearing: Spatial marginalization through participatory democracy in western Nunavut
Key Messages Public hearings function as rituals of participatory democracy whereby indigenous actors must establish their legitimacy via Western communication ideals. Environmental communication as data, story, and behaviour in participation exercises reveal shifting cultural ways of knowing and communicating. Spatial marginalization is related to invited participation in place, the distancing effects of place characteristics, and the experience…
A Political Ecology of Sustainable Livelihoods in Coastal Sulawesi, Indonesia
This paper examines selected dimensions of ecological and socio-institutional change in two coastal communities in Sulawesi, Indonesia. The authors analyze issues that influence power, marginality and vulnerability, and the implications for livelihood sustainability. They propose a conceptual framework to identify constraints and opportunities involved in maintaining and renewing sustainable livelihoods and the commons resource systems upon which…
Look At/Check X: An Attention-And-Approval-Seeking Device
In the home, parents and children are often co-present but engaged with different tasks. When children wish to engage their parents about something they have produced/are producing and to monitor their understanding of it, they need a means of obtaining both parental attention and understanding. I examine instances of children using the look at X directive (and its variant in South African English, check X) as an attention-and-approval-seeking de…
Notes on a caribou hearing: Spatial marginalization through participatory democracy in western Nunavut
Key Messages Public hearings function as rituals of participatory democracy whereby indigenous actors must establish their legitimacy via Western communication ideals. Environmental communication as data, story, and behaviour in participation exercises reveal shifting cultural ways of knowing and communicating. Spatial marginalization is related to invited participation in place, the distancing effects of place characteristics, and the experience…
A Political Ecology of Sustainable Livelihoods in Coastal Sulawesi, Indonesia
This paper examines selected dimensions of ecological and socio-institutional change in two coastal communities in Sulawesi, Indonesia. The authors analyze issues that influence power, marginality and vulnerability, and the implications for livelihood sustainability. They propose a conceptual framework to identify constraints and opportunities involved in maintaining and renewing sustainable livelihoods and the commons resource systems upon which…
Indigenous Power Struggles in the Peruvian Amazon: A Spatio-cultural Analysis of Communication
It is well established that external national policies and internal ethnic politics contribute to indigenous power struggles that create a disharmonious indigenous voice. The purpose of this paper is to interrogate how such fissures intersect with internal, covert communication forces embedded in indigenous communities. Based on a case study of Peru’s national indigenous Amazonian organization Asociación Interétnica de Desarrollo de la Selva Peru…
Notes on a caribou hearing: Spatial marginalization through participatory democracy in western Nunavut
Key Messages Public hearings function as rituals of participatory democracy whereby indigenous actors must establish their legitimacy via Western communication ideals. Environmental communication as data, story, and behaviour in participation exercises reveal shifting cultural ways of knowing and communicating. Spatial marginalization is related to invited participation in place, the distancing effects of place characteristics, and the experience…
Branding Wakatobi: Marine Development and Legitimation by Science
Marine protected areas (MPAs) serve as a potential defense against marine degradation, meeting the conflicting priorities and needs of multiple actors. Biodiversity, conservation, and ecotourism constitute a triad of sustainability tropes in tropical MPAs that intersect with and reinterpret local histories of marine interaction, subsistence, and commercial extraction. Science is implicated in this production of resource space, with the state and …
Climate Change Totems and Discursive Hegemony Over the Arctic
The Arctic and its animals figure prominently as icons of climate change in Western imaginaries. Persuasive storytelling centred on compelling animal icons, like the polar bear, is a powerful strategy to frame environmental challenges, mobilizing collective global efforts to resist environmental degradation and species endangerment. The power of the polar bear in Western climate imagery is in part derived from the perceived “environmental sacredn…
Children’s demands for parental action
Theory and research on parent–child interaction generally make a priori assumptions of asymmetry in authority between parent and child. Rather than investigating how children exercise autonomy by resisting parental authority, I examine their methods for exercising deontic authority in interaction with their parents. Using conversation analysis and drawing on Stevanovic and Peräkylä’s distinction between deontic status and stance, I analyse video-…
The Best of Both Worlds: Connecting Remote Sensing and Arctic Communities for Safe Sea Ice Travel
Northern communities are increasingly interested in technology that provides information about the sea ice environment for travel purposes. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) remote sensing is widely used to observe sea ice independently of sunlight and cloud cover, however, access to SAR in northern communities has been limited. This study 1) defines the sea ice features that influence travel for two communities in the Western Canadian Arctic, 2) id…
Look At/Check X: An Attention-And-Approval-Seeking Device
In the home, parents and children are often co-present but engaged with different tasks. When children wish to engage their parents about something they have produced/are producing and to monitor their understanding of it, they need a means of obtaining both parental attention and understanding. I examine instances of children using the look at X directive (and its variant in South African English, check X) as an attention-and-approval-seeking de…
A multimodal approach to grammatical aspect: Embedded depictions and their aspectual characteristics as interactional resources
This paper offers a multimodal approach to grammatical aspect, traditionally seen in linguistics as a verbal-morphological category. Using conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, we take as our object of study turn completions done with bodily movements and non-lexical vocalizations, focusing on the aspectual information they construct, and how this information is oriented to as relevant to the trajectory of action underway. We argue…
Perspectives from South Africa on GenAI in Higher Education: A Postdigital Dialogue with the Global Context
Drawn from an interdisciplinary gathering of 51 colleagues at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg in March 2025, this collective article shares multiple perspectives from South Africa on our interactions with Generative AI (GenAI) across higher education (HE). Contributors have re-created our dialogue here, in the spirit of Ubuntu and via a postdigital lens, bringing together vital local knowledge and literature to demonstr…
Navigating Omnirelevant Asymmetry: Encouraging Children to Exercise Their Deontic Rights in Videoconferencing Music Lessons
The educational community has long critiqued teacher‐centered instruction, promoting student‐centered learning. Yet, pre‐assumed teacher‐student category relevance may overlook momentary asymmetries and alternative categories in real‐time learning. Drawing on video recordings of videoconferencing music lessons involving a teacher/great aunt, young children/students, and caregivers/teaching assistants during the COVID‐19 pandemic, our data provide…
The (Re)Production, Negotiation, and Navigation of Social Asymmetries‐in‐Action: An Introduction to the Special Issue
This article reconsiders, and argues for, the contribution of ethnomethodological and conversation analytic research (EM/CA) to the understanding of social asymmetries in action. As well as highlighting the significance of the approach in describing the interactional “machinery” of supposedly “Big” social issues such as injustice, exclusion, and discrimination, it also considers some of the tensions that have been discussed by key scholars in the…
Moral Communities in a Race Status Negotiation: A Dorm Room Urination Case
In 2022, at a South African university, a white student was filmed urinating on the belongings of a black student. Although race was invoked as an a priori account for this incident, we demonstrate how race is made visible and relevant by participants in the interaction through an attempted, yet resisted, status degradation ceremony. Utilizing an ethnomethodological conversation-analytic approach, we explicate how contrasting moral communities ch…
Political science (7 works) · Geography (6 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (5 works) · Politics (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Ecology (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Psychology (4 works) · Social Psychology (4 works) · Arctic and Russian Policy Studies (3 works)