About ISCA
The
International Society for Conversation Analysis (ISCA) is an independent
faculty-and-student-based professional association in higher education,
designed to serve the needs of scholars of language and social interaction
across a variety of disciplines and applications. Founded in 2010, the Society seeks to provide its members
with resources to advance the field by circulating findings, creating better
courses, strengthening research, and creating a collective voice for the
development and application of professional findings.
A major
aim of ISCA is to encourage and enhance interdisciplinary research into the
structure and dynamics of social interaction through the creation of a
multi-disciplinary community of scholars. From its beginning, the organization
has been committed to the notion that broad advances in the understanding of
social interaction require disciplinary, interdisciplinary and
transdisciplinary approaches to research and learning.
ISCA is committed to achieving
these goals by
- promoting conversation analysis as
an approach to the study of social interaction on a global level
- cooperating with national and
regional societies studying language and social interaction
- inviting and supporting the
institutionalization of conversation analysis as a recognized academic field at
universities, research and teaching institutions on all levels
- building and archiving data
corpora
- creating a context in which
members can network about academic and related positions and research
opportunities
- organizing regular general
conferences (every two to four years)
- organizing and supporting summer
schools and specialized meetings on conversation analysis and the broader study
of social interaction
- supporting student and faculty
training in conversation analysis
ISCA Board: 2014-2018
President:
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Doug Maynard (University of Wisconsin, Madison)
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Vice President:
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Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen (University of Helsinki)
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Information Officer:
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Galina Bolden (Rutgers University)
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Secretary:
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Marja-Leena Sorjonen (University of Helsinki)
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Financial Officer:
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Tanya Stivers (University of California, Los Angeles)
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Local Organizing Chair (ICCA-18):
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Paul Drew (Loughborough University)
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Past President:
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John Heritage (University of California, Los Angeles)
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The History and Development of
ISCA
Objective
The field
of conversation analysis was founded in the 1960s by sociologists working at
the University of California, Los Angeles. It was characterized by slow and incremental development
during the 1970s when the earliest conferences occurred, hosted at Boston
University by the International Institute for Ethnomethodology and Conversation
Analysis under the leadership of Professor George Psathas. These conferences, while not
interdisciplinary, were certainly attended by representatives of many disciplines,
including anthropology, communication studies, ethology, linguistics and
applied linguistics, psychology and sociology. Gratifying as this variety was,
it also reflected the fact that the analysis of conversational interaction
abuts all these disciplinary fields but was not recognized as central to any of
them. ISCA was inaugurated to help counterbalance the centrifugal tendencies of
the various disciplines on the conceptualization of interaction, and to provide
a non-disciplinary forum for the representation of its core notions.
History
The
impetus for the creation of ISCA came from faculty members at the University of
California, Los Angeles, led by John Heritage and Tanya Stivers. The context
was a sequence of international conferences on conversation analysis held
quadrenially from 2002 to 2010.
The first of these, held in Copenhagen in 2002 and organized by Mie Femø
Nielsen, programmed approximately 160 papers and was attended by upwards of 300
scholars.
The subsequent conference, held in Helsinki in 2006 and organized by
Marja-Leena Sorjonen and Auli Hakulinen, had twice as many papers, and a third
conference, organized in Mannheim by Arnulf Deppermann, programmed still more
presentations and was attended by some 600 scholars. By this
point it was apparent that the successes of earlier conferences were not a
'flash in the pan' and that a large and coherent group of scholars with a
variety of research interests on the topics of conversation analysis needed an
organization to provide a context for the development of their common field.
ISCA was born from this recognition, and over 300 members participated in the
constitution of the Society and the first elections for Board members at the
conclusion of the Mannheim meetings.
Under the auspices of the relatively new ISCA, the International Conference on Conversation Analysis (ICCA-14) was held in Los Angeles, California. ICCA-14 continued to reflect a vibrant community, with over 600 submissions representing 40 countries. The organizers, under the leadership of Tanya Stivers, were able to program 400 of these submissions. Pre-conference workshops numbered 20, with 7-25 participants in each. The main ICCA-14 program occurred across four days with 13 panels of papers being presented in 9 concurrent sessions. A particularly encouraging feature was that students were involved in almost 40% of submissions; 137 papers were solely student-authored. Graduate student members of the organizing committee arranged three special events for their peers: a professional development session, a "meet the professor" lunch, and a student mixer.
There is more to look forward to! Elections were held in August 2014, and a new ISCA board is now in place (see above). As ISCA continues to prosper, ICCA-18 will be held at Loughborough University, in Loughborough England in summer of 2018.
ISCA's Organization
ISCA is
incorporated as a public benefit corporation in the state of California. As a non-profit
organization, it is exempted from taxes under Section 501(c)(3) of the US
tax code. This allows donors to claim the costs of supporting ISCA
against taxes.