This conversation analytic study investigates how couples manage conflicting knowledge claims when one of the persons has dementia. The data are video-recordings of 16 couples talking with a third party. The analysis focuses on the negotiation of epistemic rights, more precisely how partners initiate repair and correct claims made by the PWD on matters belonging to the latter’s epistemic domain. We identified three main practices for correcting the PWD: correcting the statement, thereby claiming epistemic authority for oneself and denying it (...) to the PWD, inviting the PWD to self-correct, thereby attributing some epistemic authority to the PWD, and disagreeing and providing reasons for one’s alternative claim, establishing a more symmetric epistemic gradient. The PWDs responses to the corrections displayed different degrees of acceptance, ranging from self-denigration to resistance and insistence. (shrink)

When people argue they routinely challenge the opinions, views, and attitudes of one another, they seek to cast the other as the aggressor or party at fault, and otherwise exert social control. This article illustrates how members work to hamper challenges, evade control or avoid being negatively characterized by systematically blocking access to a turn in the third position and stopping their opponent’s agenda. Examining 100 hours of public disputes in varieties of English, I use membership categorization analysis and conversation (...) analysis to unpack resistance as part of the structural organization of disputes. I identify two methods of resisting an agenda: passively, whereby a responsive turn stalls the progressivity of the interaction, and actively, whereby a responsive turn disaligns to outrightly suspend the progressivity of the interaction. I discuss how resistance sequentially unfolds across sequential positions, and as an interactional phenomenon which solves the trouble of a challenge. Overall, this article contributes to social interaction research on resistance, public disputes and how social order is constituted in and through talk-in-interaction. (shrink)

Previous literature on advice-resistance in medicine and welfare has tended to focus on patients’ or callers’ inexplicit resistance. But clients also raise explicit objections, which put up a firmer barrier against the advisor’s efforts. In a novel look at resistance, we show that one important distinction among objections is their epistemic domain: whether the client’s objection is in their own world, or in the world of the practitioner. We show that the practitioner may try to manoeuvre the objection onto grounds (...) where their own expertise will win the day, in five ways: conceding the objection’s validity as a preface to moving on; proposing a ‘work-around’ that effectively repeats the original advice; selecting an aspect of it that could be remediated; correcting the client’s understanding of the challenges of the advice; and stressing the urgency of the original course of action. We discuss the distinction between objections to solicited and unsolicited advice, and the role of objections in revealing, and affirming, a service-user’s personal life-world contingencies. (shrink)