Immigrants are often categorized as ‘others’ by a country’s majority population members. In the extreme, racist harassment is directed towards persons categorized as ‘different’ due to their skin or hair color, clothing or spoken language. Othering categorizations also occur in more subtle ways, for example through seemingly benign questions of ‘where are you really from’, or assumptions about a person’s language skills and other capabilities based on their presumed background. These membership categorizations, regardless of their intentions, reproduce societal power structures and inequalities between groups of people.

Ethnicity-based categorization also complicates the sharing of these othering experiences. On one hand, ethnicity-based categories may become relevant and necessary to make the antagonist’s actions conflicting with the category-bound moral expectations understandable to the story recipient. On the other hand, using said categories in storytelling interaction can inadvertently reproduce existing power asymmetries.

In this presentation I analyze nine audio-recorded focus group conversations with immigrants (n=23) and Finnish majority population members (n=5) using Membership Categorization Analysis and Conversation Analysis. I examine how ethnicity-based categorization is used as a resource in storytelling interaction regarding problematic social encounters.

The results show how ethnicity-based categorization in storytelling interaction serves to 1) establish moral expectations and obligations between and within different groups; 2) highlight the problematic nature of the antagonist’s actions; and 3) normalize the antagonist’s troublesome behavior. Understanding the functions and implicit expectations of ethnicity-based categorization is crucial for questioning and dismantling the unjust power imbalances and exclusionary daily encounters it perpetuates.

Climate activism is driven by the urgent need for political action to prevent irreversible ecological collapse. As a last resort, civil disobedience has become a pivotal method to pressure decision-makers, navigating the interplay between immediate disruption and long-term socio-political claims. Activists employ urgent actions, such as blockades, to force engagement with broader systemic issues, often receiving warnings from the police to cease their actions. In parallel, the activists themselves issue analogous warnings to society, urging a broader societal reckoning with ecological collapse, systemic injustice, and the legitimacy of current democratic systems.

From a social deontic perspective, a distinction is made between proximal rights—actions that shape the present interaction—and distal rights, which address future actions or institutional outcomes. Civil disobedience exemplifies the intersection of these levels, as activists disrupt the present site (proximal claims) while invoking broader socio-political reforms (distal claims). In this presentation, we draw on video ethnographic data from climate activist actions to analyze how activists' disruptive actions leverage police warnings and confrontations to give form to distal claims. This confrontation is central to the logic of civil disobedience, as it reframes the activists' actions within a larger moral and political struggle.

Our analysis explores how disruptive actions, police responses, and selective acquiescence within this deontic order reflect the activists' moral imperative. Ultimately, civil disobedience projects a future in which the activists' claims either prevail or society faces irreversible harm.

A precise and convincing strategic narrative motivates different societal groups to change attitudes and behavior. Strategic narratives should also be developed to encourage people to take action needed to achieve climate neutrality by 2050 according to EU goals. However, this is a challenging task given the complexity of the wanted change and the diversity of actors and standpoints. What narrative models are used, and where are the main challenges and problems in creating a strategic narrative for the climate agenda in Latvia? This paper is based on the research conducted from 2021 to 2023, applying narrative analysis to 1739 text units from political, social, business, and media communication and 39 interviews with policymakers, media, enterprises, and civil society. We aimed to critically examine Latvia’s efforts to create and communicate a coherent domestic narrative supporting its transition to climate neutrality. While focusing on the European Green Deal, Latvia’s strategic narrative represents a technocratic approach, avoiding broader debates on climate change and its specific impacts on Latvia. This is why it fails to inspire action beyond compliance with regulatory requirements. Our study emphasizes the importance of understanding narrative development and reception to create a compelling communication for climate neutrality.

Hate speech in Finnish social media has been shown to involve specific intersubjective strategies to construct a knowledgeable and authoritative stance. (Lehmuskoski 2021; see also Englebretson 2007; Heritage 2012; Stivers, Mondada, & Steensig 2011). Lehmuskoski (2021) introduced the concept of epistemic invitations to characterize participants’ strategic efforts to align other interlocutors with their own perspective and to facilitate the continuation of interaction from a mutually recognized, shared position.
One mode of epistemic invitations discovered involves the use of turn-initial constructions where the clitic particle -hAn expresses stance. In conversation, the Finnish clitic -hAn has been shown to function as a marker of shared or presupposed knowledge (Hakulinen, 2001; Niemi, 2015). By integrating conversation analysis and computational methods, we analyze how -hAn clitic combines with other elements to form constructions and how it relates to epistemic invitations through its use in various sequential configurations (e.g. position in sequence, co-occurrence with other particles). Previous research on epistemic invitations has been qualitative, relying on small datasets with an emphasis on prototypical examples (Lehmuskoski 2021). Our aim is to establish whether -hAn independently triggers an epistemic invitation or is the interactional dynamic constructed jointly with other elements.
We will develop a predictive model to detect sequential configurations of linguistic patterns associated with epistemic invitations. Our dataset consists of all threads scraped from the Finnish Reddit from 6/2019 to 6/2020. This study yields further insight into how Finnish speakers manage epistemic stance-taking and affiliation in online discussions.

References
Englebretson, R. (2007). Stancetaking in discourse: subjectivity, evaluation, interaction. John Benjamins Pub.
Hakulinen, A. 2001 [1976]. Liitepartikkelin -han/-hän syntaksia ja pragmatiikkaa. Teoksessa Laitinen, L., Nuolijärvi, p., Sorjonen, M-L. ja Vilkuna, M. (toim.): Lukemisto. Kirjoituksia kolmelta vuosikymmeneltä, p. 44–90. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura.
Heritage, J. (2012). Epistemics in action. Action formation and territories of knowledge. – Research on Language & Social Interaction 45, p. 1–29.
Lehmuskoski, L. (2021). Episteeminen pääsy tietäväksi asettumisen resurssina kirjoitetussa keskustelussa. Helsingin yliopisto.
Niemi, J. (2015). Myönnyttelyn käytänteitä: erimielisyys ja yhteisymmärryksen rakentaminen vuorovaikutuksessa. Helsingin yliopisto.
Stivers T, Mondada L, Steensig J. (2011). Knowledge, morality and affiliation in social interaction. In: Stivers, T., Mondada, L., Steensig, J., (eds.): The Morality of Knowledge in Conversation. Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics. Cambridge University Press, p. 3-24.

Platform work is a current global research topic. It is also changing work and the economy, which is why it has also emerged in the public debate. This research takes part in the ongoing research debate by identifying the discourses on platform work in Germany and Finland. More specifically, this article analyses the opinion articles on platform work in prominent newspapers to reveal a.) different voices taking part in the discussion, b.) different ideologies underpinning the used words in these voices, and c.) presence of different voices and ideologies. In addition, a comparison between German and Finnish data is conducted to reveal the different discourses in these media. The research questions are:
1. What voices and ideologies are represented in the opinion articles on platform work?
2. What means of dialogicality are used?
3. Do voices and ideologies differ in these newspapers in Germany and in Finland?
This study presents a theoretical framework based on Bakhtin’s concepts of heteroglossia (diversity of voices), polyphony (diversity of ideology) and dialogicality (relatedness of voices and ideologies) and on the central concepts of critical discourse studies (CDS). The study is based on a qualitative analysis of a sample of 22 opinion articles handling platform work as a main topic. These 22 articles include four different text genres: expert articles, reader’s opinions, editorials and essays. The data has been collected from two newspapers, Die Süddeutsche Zeitung in Germany and Helsingin Sanomat in Finland, within timeframe 2020-2024. The analysis of the data is in process.