Participants’ positioning work in Q&A sessions: “Doing being collegial”

Reddington, Elizabeth; Clemente, Ignasi; Waring, Hansun Zhang; Yu, Di

doi:10.1075/pbns.323.09red

Part of

Questioning and Answering Practices across Contexts and Cultures
Edited by Cornelia Ilie
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 323] 2021
► pp. 257–284

“Doing being collegial”

Participants’ positioning work in Q&A sessions

Elizabeth Reddington | Teachers College, Columbia University

Ignasi Clemente | Hunter College, CUNY

Hansun Zhang Waring | Teachers College, Columbia University

Di Yu | Teachers College, Columbia University

This chapter applies conversation analysis to investigate questioning and responding practices in the understudied context of post-presentation question-and-answer (Q&A) sessions. Participants include speakers who represent a U.S. philanthropic foundation and audiences interested in health issues. Examining a corpus of question-answer sequences from four video-recorded Q&A sessions, we find that participants routinely use their multi-unit questioning and responding turns to minimize asymmetry, positioning themselves and their interlocutors as peers with shared concerns. By documenting how presenters and audience members “do collegiality” through questioning and responding practices, the study contributes to research on question-answer sequences in institutional settings, revealing a complex interactional context in which participants work to blur the line between “expert” and “layperson” identities.

Keywords: Q&A sessions, conversation analysis, collegiality, identity, positioning, institutional interaction, philanthropy communication

Article outline

1.Introduction
2.Background
3.Data and method
4.Analysis and findings
- 4.1Question types
- 4.2Response types
- 4.3Practices for “doing collegiality” in audience member questioning turns
  - 4.3.1Prefacing questions with affiliative statements
  - 4.3.2Revealing the thinking behind questions
  - 4.3.3Formulating questions to offer suggestions
- 4.4“Doing collegiality” in presenter responding turns
  - 4.4.1Prefacing responses with affiliative statements
  - 4.4.2Revealing the thinking behind responses
5.Discussion and implications
Acknowledgements
Notes
References
Appendix

Published online: 26 July 2021

https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.323.09red

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