Talking About Troubles in Conversation

Gail Jefferson (1938-2008) was, with Harvey Sacks and Emanuel Schegloff, one of the co-founders of Conversation Analysis. Through her early collaborative with Sacks, she developed the transcription system that underpins our paradigm. Her research into the basic mechanisms and patterns of conversation, and into the contingencies of interaction, is of enduring importance in our understanding of how people interact with one another.About the editors: Paul Drew, John Heritage, Gene Lerner and Anita Pomerantz are among the world's leading conversation analysts. Their research spans ordinary social interaction as well as interactions in legal, medical, social welfare and other such institutionally specialized interactions - their publications are amongst the most cited in the field. They each worked closely with Gail Jefferson, and have worked on this project closely, in order to bring her work to the attention of new generations of CA researchers and teachers.

• Introduction Talking About Troubles; an Introduction. Paul Drew, John Heritage, Gene Lerner & Anita Pomerantz ; Chapter 1 On the Sequential Organization of Troubles-Talk in Ordinary Conversation. ; Chapter 2 On 'Trouble-Premonitory' Response to Inquiry. ; Chapter 3 The Rejection of Advice: Managing the Problematic Convergence of a 'Troubles-Telling' and a 'Service Encounter'. ; Chapter 4 On The Interactional Unpackaging of a 'gloss'. ; Chapter 5 On the Organization of Laughter in Talk About Troubles. ; Chapter 6 On Stepwise Transition From Talk About a Trouble to Inappropriately Next-Positioned Matters.

The collection provides a rare opportunity for the reader to reflect on a set of CA papers built around a single theme and arising from a single research project. In this way, it provides a useful addition to the literature. And the collection provides a manual for those who may like to adopt Jeffersons approach in the exploration and description of other large-scale conversational sequences.