In modern societies, the citizens are increasingly involved in bureaucratic processes through participatory practices (Bherer et al., 2016). This study examines such a context by focusing on participatory budgeting, where the residents of a Finnish city propose ideas for urban planning, and where these ideas are then co-developed in interaction between city experts and citizens. The data consists of one face-to-face and one video-mediated workshop, where we look at both written and oral ideas and their development during and across the workshops. We focus on the rejection of ideas by city experts and the functions these rejections play in this local democracy process. By drawing on multimodal conversation analysis, we show a) how citizens’ ideas are treated differently depending on the phase of the participatory process, b) how these differences are related to the distance between the presenter of the idea and its rejection, and c) how the rejections are used to either open or close the sequence of further idea generation. The findings reveal that idea rejection in this context is a longitudinal activity: Rejection can be done in a stepwise manner by treating citizens' ideas only as ideas-in-progress, for which there is no need to show a strong commitment in the situation. Such graduality mitigates rejection, but at the same time it can obscure the role of citizens in collective ideation.

Reference

Bherer, L., Dufour, P. & Montambeault, F. 2016. The participatory democracy turn: an introduction. Journal of Civil Society, 12(3), 225-230, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17448689.2016.1216383

Language management involves “conscious and explicit efforts by language managers to control the choices” of language in a speech community (Spolsky, 2009: 1). While international management literature has explored language management as a top-down strategy at the organizational level (Sanden, 2016), conversation analytic work on the interactional management of language choice in multilingual workplaces remains limited (but see Markaki-Lothe et al., 2014; Hazel & Svennevig, 2018). Particularly, there is a gap in the knowledge on how multilingual interaction is managed in contemporary, technologized (e.g., Meredith 2017) work environments.
This paper explores how a team of project managers at a multinational IT company, operating primarily via online platforms, manages language at the interactional level. Although the company's official language is English, the team comprises only Finnish and Swedish L1 speakers. The data includes MS Teams video meetings and Slack chats from a 5-month period, during which the team collaborated on a joint project.
Micro-analysis of the meeting interactions reveals that the participant jointly constructed as the leader and chair of the group (Van de Mieroop et al., 2020) is also oriented to as the main language manager, holding higher deontic rights (Stevanovic, 2013) to decide which language to use in which sequence. However, when she initiates a language shift, the suggestion is heavily hedged. The suggestions also need to appear at the right sequential location (at a TRP or the beginning of a sequence) to be successful. Modelling language shift seems to be a more effective strategy than just suggesting it.

Meetings are a central arena for organizational knowledge creation and the negotiation of future courses of action. They also serve as sites where participants build commitment to decisions and, by extension, shape the future of the organization itself. Still, relatively little is known about how these activities are accomplished at the very grassroots level of organizational life through social interaction. This presentation explores the processes of knowledge creation and decision-making in the context of Finnish primary health care, focusing on meetings where professionals discuss the application of national Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs) to their work.

Drawing on video-recorded meetings, this study employs a microethnographic approach informed by Conversation Analysis (CA) to examine how knowledge construction is interactionally accomplished. The analysis focuses on episodes in which participants work to make CPG items applicable to everyday clinical contexts. Particular attention is paid to the role of the chair – exploring the practices through which they advance or constrain knowledge construction and the development of locally workable clinical practices.

Our preliminary results highlight the interactional practices through which meeting chairs support collective knowledge creation while simultaneously safeguarding the professional autonomy associated with medical doctors. While the data derive from a specific professional setting, the findings aim to contribute more broadly to interactional research on management and knowledge practices in institutional contexts.

In election debates, politicians try to steer the discussion to their own advantage and to the disadvantage of their opponent. One strategy to do so are quotes by the opponent and others to construct an argument. Using work from discourse analysis on constructed dialogue, quoting and argumentation, we analyze Dutch election debates from 2021 and 2023 to answer the question: ‘how is quoting employed by politicians to turn an election debate to one’s own advantage and bring the opponent into disrepute?’
The idea of constructed dialogue refers to the use of real or imagined speech to represent dialogue that was never actually there (e.g., Tannen, 2007). It is central to many rhetorical practices, as alignment (Fleckenstein, 2022) and ethos (Truan, 2021) can be expressed. By recontextualizing an opponent’s words (Arnold-Murray, 2021), the discussion can be managed by crafting a position for the other side which was not uttered in that way yet. Therefore, we speak about ‘constructed argumentation’ in debates, as the quotes of the other party are recontextualized to appear within a particular discussion, not by their own initiative but by their opponent, in order to put pressure on them, force particular discussion points, and frame the other’s position. This practice is central to the interactional fabric of election debates in which politicians engage in so-called ‘interactional rhetoric’ (Bilmes, 1999) in which quotes of the other party are used to both include and exclude them in a discussion.
Arnold-Murray, K. (2021). Multimodally constructed dialogue in political campaign commercials. Journal of pragmatics, 173, 15-27.
Bilmes, J. (1999). Questions, answers, and the organization of talk in the 1992 vice presidential debate: Fundamental considerations. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 32(3), 213-242.
Fleckenstein, K. (2022). Well-prefaced constructed dialogue as a marker of stance in online abortion discourse. Pragmatics, 32(1), 80-103.
Tannen, D., 2007. Talking voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Truan, N. (2021). Narratives of dialogue in parliamentary discourse: Constructing the ethos of the receptive politician. Journal of language and politics, 20(4), 563-584.

Using the framework of Critical Metaphor Analysis, the study examines how the topic of Rio Tinto’s lithium mining project in Western Serbia is metaphorically structured in Serbian political and media discourse, focusing on how both pro-lithium and anti-lithium advocates use metaphors to interact with each other. Based on a dataset collected from various electronic news media between June and September 2024, we aim to explore the argumentative power of the WAR metaphor and how it helps shape polarizing opinions in a highly charged discourse surrounding Rio Tinto’s lithium mining in the Jadar River Valley. Our analysis shows that both proponents and opponents of lithium mining use the WAR metaphor to frame the debate on this social issue as a struggle for the future of Serbia. By equating environmental activists and opposition politicians with the ecological Taliban, proponents of lithium mining perceive any critical opinion or activity as an attempt to hinder the country’s economic development and prosperity. Conversely, opponents of lithium mining use the same metaphor to portray Rio Tinto as an enemy and its corporate policy in Serbia as an occupation, framing their discourse as a struggle against Serbia becoming a mining colony for foreign powers. The study highlights the role of the WAR metaphor in shaping the interaction between the opposing sides and influencing the argumentation on controversial social issues.

The Rabat Plan of Action (UN, 2013) provides a framework for assessing incitement to hatred, emphasising the role of explicitness in identifying hate speech. While direct expressions of hate are more likely to warrant legal intervention, implicit messages can be equally harmful. Court practice suggests that such implicitness creates ambiguity, making it difficult to reach consensus on whether certain speech constitutes hate speech or protected opinion. This study aims to examine the discursive strategies used to disguise hate speech as legitimate opinion, based on data collected from Lithuanian digital media.
The data includes 843 Lithuanian internet comments identified as hate speech using the Cardiff AI model (Antypas & Camacho-Collados 2023). Through manual classification, the comments were further categorised into potentially unlawful hate speech, lawful hate speech, and non-hate speech. The analysis focuses on ambiguous cases that could pose challenges in legal contexts and examines key discursive strategies that blur the boundary between hate speech and protected opinion. These include intertextuality (normalising hate speech through appeals to historical or cultural continuity); framing hate speech as personal anecdotes, making it appear as subjective experience rather than a systemic attack; historical revisionism and scapegoating, which present hate as objective historical insight; and appeals to local knowledge, framing hate speech as widely accepted community beliefs to justify individual bias.
References
Antypas, D., & Camacho-Collados, J. (2023). Robust hate speech detection in social media: A cross-dataset empirical evaluation. In The 7th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH) (pp. 231–242). Association for Computational Linguistics.

This study examines coffee talk built around fortune-telling sessions, a culture-specific, informal speech event common among Turkish women, as a site of intimate discourse where imagined futures are collaboratively constructed. Beyond typical small talk, coffee talk emerges as a performative space where women co-narrate hypothetical futures, express aspirations, or voice concerns about their past, present, and upcoming life events. This study adopts a discourse-pragmatic perspective and analyses excerpts from 20 sessions of this specific speech event among Turkish-speaking young women in informal settings. Building on the previous work which depicted the sociocultural and linguistic characteristics of this talk as a distinct speech event (Eroz et al., 2025), this study reveals that the temporality and causality markers are utilised by both the fortune-tellers and the listeners to construct the imagined futures. The study also highlights the strategic use of vague category markers such as ‘şey’ (Eng. ‘thing’) and general extenders such as ‘falan’ (Eng. ‘and stuff’) in the construction of a vague and uncertain, yet a safe discourse space for the participants. The present study contributes to the growing body of research on the negotiation and navigation of agency by foregrounding the role of culturally embedded speech events in the co-construction of the discourses of imagined futures. We argue that it is essential to examine culture-specific speech events to better understand the multifaceted, dynamic, and often chaotic nature of intimate spoken discourse.