AW: seeking references on being ignored

[Jack Sidnell]

I wonder if the issues that come up in asking about "being ignored"
are not so unlike those that arise when we ask about being
"interrupted". We are dealing here with vernacular terms that we
ordinarily use as members of our society to explain action and
interaction. That is, these terms are part of a vocabulary of
explanation. There are problems involved in using such vernacular
terms to guide us in a search for things out there, in the world.
There is a debate in the literature here. One position at least holds
that such things as "interruptions" and "being ignored" are not in
fact out there in the world waiting to be discovered - rather they
are the products of interpretive work by people in particular
situations. The question then is when "overlap" is understood and
treated as "interruption." (Incidentally, insome cases people need
not even speak in overlap for it to be treated as interruption.)

In the conversation analytic literature an attempt is made to resolve
such methodological problems in the following way. If one were
interested in such a thing as "being ignored" one might start to look
for cases in which someone's talk is disattended (you can have a
search procedure for this - when an addressed recipient does not
respond to talk). Such disattention might be understood, and treated
in subsequent conduct, as "being ignored" in some cases and treated
quite differently in other cases. One could then ask how people find
that they are "being ignored," how they deal with this as an
interactional problem etc. One might also be in a position to ask
whether there are resources for "doing ignoring" - that is
disattending the talk such a way that others can see one is ignoring
some other participant. I guess I'm sounding a caution here - don't
suppose that "being ignored" is, in some straightforward way, out
there and that one can simply collect instances of it. "Being
ignored" is rather a finding of participants in particular
encounters. We need to understand how they arrive at that finding. In
this sense the question is rather like those that arise in a
consideration of "interruption".

Jenny Mandlebaum has a paper in ROLSI on being disattended - I'm
afraid I don't have the reference easily at hand however.



>I remember this issue coming up at a conference, and one of the problems was
>that the men were older, more senior, so that gender and rank were confounded.
>So here we are again, is it power or gender.
>
>Also cultural differences. One can't assume the same things happen
>everywhere, as
>we found with gender differences in child interaction in Kyratzis'
>ROLSI issue in 2001.
>
>That means we have to do research in all the places were there might be
>a difference for instance in which gender is listened to about what topics.
>What happens to male secretaries and male nurses in professional talk with
>female colleagues?
>
>Is appropriating a female contribution without attribution like the
>well-known phenomenon
>in citations that the rich get richer, i.e. people accrue fame by
>citing the most famous,
>even if the idea originated somewhere else?
>
>Susan Ervin-Tripp