J S Robles
Biographic Data
| ID | 30791 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J S Robles |
| GIVEN NAMES | J S |
| FAMILY NAME | Robles |
| SIGNATURE | ROBLES J S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Loughborough University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2360-650X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 98 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
A discursive psychological approach to moral dilemmas in discrimination and racism in everyday life
Challenges and possibilities of livestreaming in health communication: The felicitousness of interaction in breast cancer awareness live events
The multimodal and interactive affordances of livestreaming have been studied in, for example, gaming, sports, education and live-tv. We analysed livestreaming in the rarel-studied context of health campaigns, focusing on breast cancer Facebook live events in Egypt. Drawing on Goffman’s situational analysis and conversation analytic insights on turn-taking, we examined the felicitousness of the local interaction: whether audience members who part…
Morally-preferred contrasts in troubles talk complaints
The Social Construction of Mental Health Facts in Social Media Language
Social media has had a significant impact on the increasing visibility of mental health. This article draws on a digital ethnographic approach and discourse analysis of posts to the microblogging site X (formerly Twitter) to examine uses of and metacommunication about the language of mental health. The analysis traces and snapshots how mental health language is being used to construct mental health, mental illness, and related subjects as a meani…
Speaking back through repetitioning: Black Women's Resistance and Empowerment in Global University Spaces
Managing blame for racism in broadcast media
How do people negotiate blame for racism? In this article we focus on how participants manage the blameworthiness of racism—as a problem in society, and in relation to specific racist incidents—by scrutinising how sources of racism are formulated in broadcast media. This research develops our understanding of how racism is constructed in society as well as how blame functions to allocate responsibility to different parties. By examining racism as…
How quotation marks do mockery in online politicized discourse
This article analyzes online comments responding to viral sociopolitical events in different languages, across different social media platforms. We use discourse analytic methods to inspect how quotation marks are systematically deployed to intensify denigrations of opposing political identities and positions in the context of political disagreements. We show how quotation marks are used in situated online interactions to convey a skeptical, deri…
Functions of quotation in online political comments
This study explores the use of quotations in two contexts where online public discourses respond to social-political confrontations in China and the United States. We investigate the relationship between the form of marking quotations in online social media discourse and the functions that the quoted text accomplishes in the online interactive context in English and Chinese languages. In particular, we relate this to the affordances of the online…
Misunderstanding as a resource in interaction
The phenomenon of misunderstanding is a recurrent feature of everyday life – sometimes a source of frustration, sometimes a site of blame. But misunderstandings can also be seen as getting interactants out of (as well as into) trouble. For example, misunderstandings may be produced to deal with disaffiliative implications of ‘not being on the same page,’ and as such they may be deployed as a resource for avoiding trouble. This paper examines misu…
Managing moral category implications of former drug addiction
This project examines how meanings of drug addiction are negotiated through analysis of situated social actions in a telephone conversation. This paper uses interactional analysis to show how a former heroin user’s identity is constructed and moralized in the process of providing accounts through descriptions of drug addiction and its consequences. This case shows how social actions in interpersonal conversation provide insights into judgment and…
Perpetuating ableist constructions of the “real world” through complaints about new communication technologies
Complaints about the use of new communication technologies are frequent in public discourse and work within a broader assemblage of discourses that promote selective ideologies. What is it that people are doing when they produce these complaints, and how might acts of complaining promote equity in our daily lives? We analyse complaints taken from 16 hours of video recorded dialogues and argue that the complaint discourse about the relationship of…
Contact: Pushing the Boundaries of Touch-in-Interaction
Critical Theory and Linguistics
The relationship between critical theory and linguistics goes back at least as far as the 1960s. During this time, language began to be seen as a central medium through which the world – including its hierarchies and relations of power – is constructed. This entry describes the history of critical approaches to language (or linguistic approaches to critical theory), key themes and debates in this area, and future directions
The International Conference on Conversation Analysis: Loughborough University, 11-15 July 2018
Taking the moral high ground: Practices for being uncompromisingly principled
Complaints about technology as a resource for identity-work
This article examines how people complain about technology. Using discourse analysis, we inspect sixteen hours of video-recorded focus-group interviews and focused one-on-one discussions where technology was topicalized. We investigate these conversations paying attention to (i) features of language and its situated delivery, including emphasis, word choice, metaphor, and categorizations; and (ii) how these accomplish social actions. We show how …
Building Up by Tearing Down
This article analyzes mockery sequences among a group of friends to examine how this discursive practice mobilizes categories to manage stances toward differences and to construct group norms and boundaries. Using discourse analysis, I inspect how nonseriously tearing down or jocularly teasing/mocking participants within a peer group manages the practical problem of in-group difference by reaffirming shared stances and norms around masculinity. T…
Manipulation in Board Game Interactions: Being a Sporting Player
Deception and manipulation are expected in strategic gameplay, but how do players negotiate what counts as acceptable kinds of manipulation? We compare three examples from a corpus of 30 hours of competitive board game play, using conversation analysis to examine how players orient to the reasonableness of manipulations. We show that contingencies of timing of the attribution and receipt of the manipulation are as morally concerned as manipulatio…
Doing being an ordinary technology and social media user
The challenge of cultural difference: Interpretation, comparison, and critique
To say that intercultural communication – maybe more than ever – is one of the great challenges of our time is probably an understatement. While culture has both enriched and confounded us since ti
Let’s have the men clean up: Interpersonally communicated stereotypes as a resource for resisting gender-role prescribed activities
This article examines a productive use of communicating gender stereotypes in interpersonal conversation: to resist activities traditionally prescribed according to gender. The analyses video-taped naturally occurring US household interactions and present three techniques participants may deploy to contest gender expectations: mobilizing categories, motivating alignment and reframing action. We show how gender is an accountable category in relati…
Providing Epistemic Support for Assessments Through Mobile-Supported Sharing Activities
This paper examines how participants in face-to-face conversation employ mobile phones as a resource for social action. We focus on what we call mobile-supported sharing activities , in which participants use a mobile phone to share text or images with others by voicing text aloud from their mobile or providing others with visual access to the device's display screen. Drawing from naturalistic video recordings, we focus on how mobile-supported sh…
How Should I Respond to Them ? An Emergent Categorization of Responses to Interpersonally Communicated Stereotypes
Political correctness defines stereotypes as inappropriate to communicate. However, responses that interpersonally communicated stereotypes receive in conversation may collaboratively produce a different meaning about the appropriateness of stereotype use. The current research reports two studies that explore responses to interpersonally communicated stereotypes and the role these responses play in the perpetuation of stereotypes. This project co…
Extreme Case (Re)formulation as a Practice for Making Hearably Racist Talk Repairable
This article investigates the interactional organization of racism through participant production and uptake of explicit racial membership categories across a corpus of 50+ hours of audio-/video-recorded interaction in three U.S. states. The discourse analysis examines one participant method for addressing "hearably racist" talk: echoing extreme versions of the problematic utterance to provide opportunities for repair work on inferable associatio…
Interactional formats and institutional context: A practical and exploitable distinction in interviews
This paper applies practically oriented discourse analysis to focus \ngroup interviews using conversation analytic principles to show how interactional \nqualities demonstrably different to analysts are also treated as such by \nparticipants. \nWe take a grounded practical theory perspective to claim that the \nempirical and practical distinction is an exploitable resource for participants, \nwith important implications for the goals of research …
Extreme Case (Re)formulation as a Practice for Making Hearably Racist Talk Repairable
This article investigates the interactional organization of racism through participant production and uptake of explicit racial membership categories across a corpus of 50+ hours of audio-/video-recorded interaction in three U.S. states. The discourse analysis examines one participant method for addressing "hearably racist" talk: echoing extreme versions of the problematic utterance to provide opportunities for repair work on inferable associatio…
It’s like mmm: Enactments with it’s like
This article explores the distribution and use of a relatively new grammatical format in English, it’s like + enactment. We propose that it’s like utterances are used to enact thoughts, feelings and attitudes which are internal and affect-laden assessments of a prior utterance or event, produced as assessments that anyone in the same situation might have had. As such they tend to occur within stories, typically during the closing of a story. The …
Questions, questioning, and institutional practices: An Introduction
This article introduces the special issue on questions, questioning, and institutional practices. We begin by considering how questioning as a discursive practice is a central vehicle for constructing social worlds and reflecting existing ones. Then we describe the different ways questions and question(ing) have been defined, typologized, and critiqued, in general and within seven institutions including policing, the courts, medicine, therapy, re…
Providing Epistemic Support for Assessments Through Mobile-Supported Sharing Activities
This paper examines how participants in face-to-face conversation employ mobile phones as a resource for social action. We focus on what we call mobile-supported sharing activities , in which participants use a mobile phone to share text or images with others by voicing text aloud from their mobile or providing others with visual access to the device's display screen. Drawing from naturalistic video recordings, we focus on how mobile-supported sh…
Taking the moral high ground: Practices for being uncompromisingly principled
Building Up by Tearing Down
This article analyzes mockery sequences among a group of friends to examine how this discursive practice mobilizes categories to manage stances toward differences and to construct group norms and boundaries. Using discourse analysis, I inspect how nonseriously tearing down or jocularly teasing/mocking participants within a peer group manages the practical problem of in-group difference by reaffirming shared stances and norms around masculinity. T…
Manipulation in Board Game Interactions: Being a Sporting Player
Deception and manipulation are expected in strategic gameplay, but how do players negotiate what counts as acceptable kinds of manipulation? We compare three examples from a corpus of 30 hours of competitive board game play, using conversation analysis to examine how players orient to the reasonableness of manipulations. We show that contingencies of timing of the attribution and receipt of the manipulation are as morally concerned as manipulatio…
Doing being an ordinary technology and social media user
Let’s have the men clean up: Interpersonally communicated stereotypes as a resource for resisting gender-role prescribed activities
This article examines a productive use of communicating gender stereotypes in interpersonal conversation: to resist activities traditionally prescribed according to gender. The analyses video-taped naturally occurring US household interactions and present three techniques participants may deploy to contest gender expectations: mobilizing categories, motivating alignment and reframing action. We show how gender is an accountable category in relati…
Challenges of Interviewers' Institutional Positionings: Taking Account of Interview Content and the Interaction
Interviewing is a much used methodological tool in communication and other social sciences. For discourse analysts, interviewing is often judged to be both overused and poorly used; to understand communicative life, researchers should be observing interaction rather than asking people to report their stories, experiences, or beliefs. As discourse scholars we agree with many of the criticisms fellow discourse scholars have made, but we disagree th…
Functions of quotation in online political comments
This study explores the use of quotations in two contexts where online public discourses respond to social-political confrontations in China and the United States. We investigate the relationship between the form of marking quotations in online social media discourse and the functions that the quoted text accomplishes in the online interactive context in English and Chinese languages. In particular, we relate this to the affordances of the online…
Troubles with assessments in gifting occasions
This article analyzes gift-exchange occasions as both a sequentially organized activity and as a ritual practice imbued with social and cultural meaning. Specifically, the article focuses on the role of assessments in gifting sequences, the distribution of assessments across participants, and some of the possible troubles which can arise in doing assessments of gifts based on discourse analysis of 44 gifting situations in one family’s 30 home vid…
Managing blame for racism in broadcast media
How do people negotiate blame for racism? In this article we focus on how participants manage the blameworthiness of racism—as a problem in society, and in relation to specific racist incidents—by scrutinising how sources of racism are formulated in broadcast media. This research develops our understanding of how racism is constructed in society as well as how blame functions to allocate responsibility to different parties. By examining racism as…
Complaints about technology as a resource for identity-work
This article examines how people complain about technology. Using discourse analysis, we inspect sixteen hours of video-recorded focus-group interviews and focused one-on-one discussions where technology was topicalized. We investigate these conversations paying attention to (i) features of language and its situated delivery, including emphasis, word choice, metaphor, and categorizations; and (ii) how these accomplish social actions. We show how …
Managing moral category implications of former drug addiction
This project examines how meanings of drug addiction are negotiated through analysis of situated social actions in a telephone conversation. This paper uses interactional analysis to show how a former heroin user’s identity is constructed and moralized in the process of providing accounts through descriptions of drug addiction and its consequences. This case shows how social actions in interpersonal conversation provide insights into judgment and…
Contact: Pushing the Boundaries of Touch-in-Interaction
Critical Discourse Analysis and (U.S.) Communication Scholarship Recovering Old Connections, Envisioning New Ones
Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is committed to showing how talk and texts serve the interests of those with power in a society. From its initially European linguistic roots, CDA has become an influential international, interdisciplinary tradition. This chapter sketches CDA’s background including its theoretical roots and key scholars. Six areas in current research are illustrated, along with a sampling of CDA work around the world. The focal c…
Questions, questioning, and institutional practices: An Introduction
This article introduces the special issue on questions, questioning, and institutional practices. We begin by considering how questioning as a discursive practice is a central vehicle for constructing social worlds and reflecting existing ones. Then we describe the different ways questions and question(ing) have been defined, typologized, and critiqued, in general and within seven institutions including policing, the courts, medicine, therapy, re…
Challenges of Interviewers' Institutional Positionings: Taking Account of Interview Content and the Interaction
Interviewing is a much used methodological tool in communication and other social sciences. For discourse analysts, interviewing is often judged to be both overused and poorly used; to understand communicative life, researchers should be observing interaction rather than asking people to report their stories, experiences, or beliefs. As discourse scholars we agree with many of the criticisms fellow discourse scholars have made, but we disagree th…
It’s like mmm: Enactments with it’s like
This article explores the distribution and use of a relatively new grammatical format in English, it’s like + enactment. We propose that it’s like utterances are used to enact thoughts, feelings and attitudes which are internal and affect-laden assessments of a prior utterance or event, produced as assessments that anyone in the same situation might have had. As such they tend to occur within stories, typically during the closing of a story. The …
Critical Discourse Analysis and (U.S.) Communication Scholarship Recovering Old Connections, Envisioning New Ones
Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is committed to showing how talk and texts serve the interests of those with power in a society. From its initially European linguistic roots, CDA has become an influential international, interdisciplinary tradition. This chapter sketches CDA’s background including its theoretical roots and key scholars. Six areas in current research are illustrated, along with a sampling of CDA work around the world. The focal c…
Troubles with assessments in gifting occasions
This article analyzes gift-exchange occasions as both a sequentially organized activity and as a ritual practice imbued with social and cultural meaning. Specifically, the article focuses on the role of assessments in gifting sequences, the distribution of assessments across participants, and some of the possible troubles which can arise in doing assessments of gifts based on discourse analysis of 44 gifting situations in one family’s 30 home vid…
Interactional formats and institutional context: A practical and exploitable distinction in interviews
This paper applies practically oriented discourse analysis to focus \ngroup interviews using conversation analytic principles to show how interactional \nqualities demonstrably different to analysts are also treated as such by \nparticipants. \nWe take a grounded practical theory perspective to claim that the \nempirical and practical distinction is an exploitable resource for participants, \nwith important implications for the goals of research …
How Should I Respond to Them ? An Emergent Categorization of Responses to Interpersonally Communicated Stereotypes
Political correctness defines stereotypes as inappropriate to communicate. However, responses that interpersonally communicated stereotypes receive in conversation may collaboratively produce a different meaning about the appropriateness of stereotype use. The current research reports two studies that explore responses to interpersonally communicated stereotypes and the role these responses play in the perpetuation of stereotypes. This project co…
Extreme Case (Re)formulation as a Practice for Making Hearably Racist Talk Repairable
This article investigates the interactional organization of racism through participant production and uptake of explicit racial membership categories across a corpus of 50+ hours of audio-/video-recorded interaction in three U.S. states. The discourse analysis examines one participant method for addressing "hearably racist" talk: echoing extreme versions of the problematic utterance to provide opportunities for repair work on inferable associatio…
Providing Epistemic Support for Assessments Through Mobile-Supported Sharing Activities
This paper examines how participants in face-to-face conversation employ mobile phones as a resource for social action. We focus on what we call mobile-supported sharing activities , in which participants use a mobile phone to share text or images with others by voicing text aloud from their mobile or providing others with visual access to the device's display screen. Drawing from naturalistic video recordings, we focus on how mobile-supported sh…
The challenge of cultural difference: Interpretation, comparison, and critique
To say that intercultural communication – maybe more than ever – is one of the great challenges of our time is probably an understatement. While culture has both enriched and confounded us since ti
Let’s have the men clean up: Interpersonally communicated stereotypes as a resource for resisting gender-role prescribed activities
This article examines a productive use of communicating gender stereotypes in interpersonal conversation: to resist activities traditionally prescribed according to gender. The analyses video-taped naturally occurring US household interactions and present three techniques participants may deploy to contest gender expectations: mobilizing categories, motivating alignment and reframing action. We show how gender is an accountable category in relati…
Doing being an ordinary technology and social media user
The International Conference on Conversation Analysis: Loughborough University, 11-15 July 2018
Taking the moral high ground: Practices for being uncompromisingly principled
Complaints about technology as a resource for identity-work
This article examines how people complain about technology. Using discourse analysis, we inspect sixteen hours of video-recorded focus-group interviews and focused one-on-one discussions where technology was topicalized. We investigate these conversations paying attention to (i) features of language and its situated delivery, including emphasis, word choice, metaphor, and categorizations; and (ii) how these accomplish social actions. We show how …
Building Up by Tearing Down
This article analyzes mockery sequences among a group of friends to examine how this discursive practice mobilizes categories to manage stances toward differences and to construct group norms and boundaries. Using discourse analysis, I inspect how nonseriously tearing down or jocularly teasing/mocking participants within a peer group manages the practical problem of in-group difference by reaffirming shared stances and norms around masculinity. T…
Manipulation in Board Game Interactions: Being a Sporting Player
Deception and manipulation are expected in strategic gameplay, but how do players negotiate what counts as acceptable kinds of manipulation? We compare three examples from a corpus of 30 hours of competitive board game play, using conversation analysis to examine how players orient to the reasonableness of manipulations. We show that contingencies of timing of the attribution and receipt of the manipulation are as morally concerned as manipulatio…
Critical Theory and Linguistics
The relationship between critical theory and linguistics goes back at least as far as the 1960s. During this time, language began to be seen as a central medium through which the world – including its hierarchies and relations of power – is constructed. This entry describes the history of critical approaches to language (or linguistic approaches to critical theory), key themes and debates in this area, and future directions
Perpetuating ableist constructions of the “real world” through complaints about new communication technologies
Complaints about the use of new communication technologies are frequent in public discourse and work within a broader assemblage of discourses that promote selective ideologies. What is it that people are doing when they produce these complaints, and how might acts of complaining promote equity in our daily lives? We analyse complaints taken from 16 hours of video recorded dialogues and argue that the complaint discourse about the relationship of…
Contact: Pushing the Boundaries of Touch-in-Interaction
Misunderstanding as a resource in interaction
The phenomenon of misunderstanding is a recurrent feature of everyday life – sometimes a source of frustration, sometimes a site of blame. But misunderstandings can also be seen as getting interactants out of (as well as into) trouble. For example, misunderstandings may be produced to deal with disaffiliative implications of ‘not being on the same page,’ and as such they may be deployed as a resource for avoiding trouble. This paper examines misu…
Managing moral category implications of former drug addiction
This project examines how meanings of drug addiction are negotiated through analysis of situated social actions in a telephone conversation. This paper uses interactional analysis to show how a former heroin user’s identity is constructed and moralized in the process of providing accounts through descriptions of drug addiction and its consequences. This case shows how social actions in interpersonal conversation provide insights into judgment and…
Functions of quotation in online political comments
This study explores the use of quotations in two contexts where online public discourses respond to social-political confrontations in China and the United States. We investigate the relationship between the form of marking quotations in online social media discourse and the functions that the quoted text accomplishes in the online interactive context in English and Chinese languages. In particular, we relate this to the affordances of the online…
Managing blame for racism in broadcast media
How do people negotiate blame for racism? In this article we focus on how participants manage the blameworthiness of racism—as a problem in society, and in relation to specific racist incidents—by scrutinising how sources of racism are formulated in broadcast media. This research develops our understanding of how racism is constructed in society as well as how blame functions to allocate responsibility to different parties. By examining racism as…
How quotation marks do mockery in online politicized discourse
This article analyzes online comments responding to viral sociopolitical events in different languages, across different social media platforms. We use discourse analytic methods to inspect how quotation marks are systematically deployed to intensify denigrations of opposing political identities and positions in the context of political disagreements. We show how quotation marks are used in situated online interactions to convey a skeptical, deri…
Sociology (25 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (23 works) · Psychology (21 works) · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies (19 works) · Computer Science (17 works) · Political science (15 works) · Conversation (14 works) · Linguistics (14 works) · Social Psychology (14 works) · Conversation analysis (13 works)