Cinnabar and Alabaster

why this focus: "unlike ethnomethodology or conversation analysis, the participant in conversation is the center of analysis within Goffman's (1959, 1969, 1981, 1982, 1986) analytic. the participant can radically transform the contexts of interaction through her or his involvement" in the interaction, significantly through making use of or contradicting in order to change "cultural frames"--"primary frameworks are schemata of interpretation that people employ to ascribe meaning to a situation" & "by framing an event, participants characterize the event as well as their performance in it" (41) (watching students do this w/each other shows LGR how they percieve situations & their place(s) within them, & how they move to change those positions). & adding "Garfinkle's theories of microlevel social arrangements with the theories of social construction that now dominate basic writing...helps to clarify how students' language choices at a microlevel operate to question as well as sustain social relationships" (43).

also very useful: Richard Buttny's terminology & his correlation of "the oral phenomena of accounts with the various sophisticated rhetorical tasks that are part of persuasive, academic writing"; "much like written discourse, to be convincing, an account has to distinguish and take into consideration the possible reality constraints of the particular speech situation. this encompasses both a rhetorical understanding of the severity of the situation at hand and the audience's background knowledge, beliefs about the situation, and values" (45).

what she did: made transcripts of students' conversations w/in peer groups & included in the published study excerpts "periodically interrupted by cursory analyses of the ways in which...politeness strategies, calling to account, folk logics, framing, and constructing of roles, audience, and agency, and social, political, and cultural context...might be thought to work within the particular exchange documented" (71).

is the turn here from what seems useful/valuable to exactly what i want most not to do clear enough as-is, or do i have to explain?

include all necessary disclaimers: "one cannot help but be impacted by one's member knowledge.... i may certainly have been predisposed to certain hearings"; "i tried insofar as i was able to set aside many constructive analytic interpretations, focusing instead of trying to discover phenomena, i would wager that all researchers' analyticl interpretations, no matter how careful, involve some form of constructions" (74)