The investigation of singular practices and actions is the bedrock of Conversation Analysis (CA), yet it is not the only approach that CA research can take. This chapter poses a series of analytic questions designed to guide the analyst’s attention towards a complementary mode of analysis, one which takes as its object of study not a singular practice but rather a system of practices, alternative solutions to a recurrent problem of social organization. While this approach has been employed to greatest effect in research on generic organizations of interaction, the analytic techniques are themselves generic and applicable across domains of action. Rather than select a practice or action and ask what forms it can take or what environments it can inhabit, conversation analysts can instead select a problem, an exigency of social interaction, and ask how participants solve it. Alternative practices and actions naturally cluster around the organizational problems to which they serve as possible solutions, and it is this endogenous organization that CA research aims to document. The chapter sketches out and illustrates a range of analytic techniques that conversation analysts have employed in past research and can employ again to discover and investigate organizations of practice.

This chapter describes the process of building a collection, using the example of other-initiated repairs resolved by repetition. The phenomenon under investigation is shown in the following example: 1. A: you in the bathroom?2. B: huh?3. A: you in the bathroom? The focus of the chapter is more on the way in which the collection evolved and less on the analytic process. Lessons learned from building a collection as well as the strengths of this particular collection are discussed. The chapter also discusses the importance of linking linguistic phenomena, e.g. repetition, to social practices, e.g. other-initiated repair. It argues that tightly constrained collections can allow a clear demonstration of connections between linguistic forms and interactional practices. The chapter stresses how building a collection and conducting an analysis of it can be messy. The methodical process of setting a question, collecting just the right data to answer it, and discovering the answer, is the story we usually tell in our publications. This chapter instead tries to illuminate and illustrate just how rocky the path to completion can be.

Chapter 3 explores how European institutions have (re)imagined consumption, and consumers, as part of the changing imaginaries of prosperity. It does so by exploring systematically the discursive shifts behind the European Union’s consumer policies over the past fifty years, identifying how the changing imaginaries of economy, government, law, politics and nature have produced different imaginaries of consumers and consumption. After the long arc of the dominance of neoliberal imaginaries of prosperity and consumption, we have witnessed more recently a gradual shift in the background understanding of political economy. The emergent imaginary of prosperity shares some elements with the previous ‘welfare state’ imaginaries of prosperity and consumption, such as the return of the language of ‘protection’. But it also incorporates entirely new preoccupations such as repair, longevity, maintenance, circularity, and sharing, all the while embracing a more expanded, ‘holistic’ understanding of consumer interests.

Solar radiation at the Earth’s surface contains ultraviolet (UV) radiation in the UVB (~295–315 nm) and UVA (315–400 nm) wavebands. Currently, atmospheric ozone removes shorter, more damaging UV radiation and reduces levels of UVB, but before the formation of the ozone layer, UV radiation levels would have been higher, while the recent ‘ozone hole’ increased UV radiation. UV radiation is strongly attenuated in water, but aquatic organisms can be damaged to extents that depend on the species and conditions. The targets of damage include proteins in the photosystems of photosynthesis, DNA and oxidative damage caused by the production of free radicals and reactive oxygen species. Defence against damage involves the production of new proteins, repair to the DNA and the production of antioxidants. UV stress interacts, positively and negatively, with other environmental changes such as rising temperature and CO2, ocean acidification and nutrient stress. Further research is needed to forecast responses to future environmental change.

How do children process language as they get older? Is there continuity in the functions assigned to specific structures? And what changes in their processing and their representations as they acquire more language? They appear to use bracketing (finding boundaries), reference (linking to meanings), and clustering (grouping units that belong together) as they analyze the speech stream and extract recurring units, word classes, and larger constructions. Comprehension precedes production. This allows children to monitor and repair production that doesn’t match the adult forms they have represented in memory. Children also track the frequency of types and tokens; they use types in setting up paradigms and identifying regular versus irregular forms. Amount of experience with language, (the diversity of settings) plus feedback and practice, also accounts for individual differences in the paths followed during acquisition. Ultimately, models of the process of acquisition need to incorporate all this to account for how acquisition takes place.

Conversation Analysis (CA) is a major contributing discipline to the study of language use and social action in context. Originating in the discipline of sociology, it forms the basis for the burgeoning field of interactional linguistics. This chapter offers an overview of major themes in the field. Beginning with a brief discussion of the intellectual background of the field, the chapter sketches three distinctive levels of analysis: sequential organization, practices of turn construction, and the organization of these practices as sets of resources for dealing with recurrent problems in the social organization of interaction. Sections of the chapter deal with sequence organization, preference, turn design, the fitting of talk to specific contexts and recipients (recipient design), progressivity, multimodality, and interaction in the context of specific social institutions such as medicine, legal discourse, and news conferences.

The question of how translation can do justice is not about seeking equivalence but of acknowledging that translation is, following Spivak, insufficient but necessary nonetheless. I suggest that in asking what kind of justice translation might do, the term translation is carried across (trans-latio) from its technical or formal to its ethical-political dimensions, and the term justice is shifted from the terrain of the quest for parity or alikeness (eye for an eye) to the terrain of repair, dignity, care, responsibility, a justice on terms that are yet to be ascertained. This makes translation into a critical concept in theatre and performance, where, perhaps more than in any other art form, there is a systemic concern with how humans relate to each other and to non-human others.

This chapter studies the codicological and textual repairs readers made to perfect perceived lacunae in Chaucer manuscripts. Its argument is that readers privileged ideas of the complete Chaucerian text inherited from print and thus looked to print to supply text that was wanting. The chapter focusses on the modifications which early modern book owners made to repair and complete manuscripts in their torn or incomplete state – achieved by filling blank space and adding replacement leaves copied from print. Readers of Chaucer encountered in the chapter include John Stow (1524/25–1605), Joseph Holland (d. 1605), the clergyman John Barkham (1571/2–1642), and the Norfolk antiquary Thomas Martin (1696/7–1771). Their activities of mending older volumes and filling in blanks reveal them as active participants in the appraisal, remaking, and repair of Chaucer’s oldest books with the intention of preserving them intact. The chapter also considers the moral freight of the adjectives that have historically been used to describe bibliographical incompleteness: ‘mutilated’, ‘wanting’, ‘defective’, and ‘imperfect’.

This chapter provides a detailed analysis of the different types and scenarios of speaker change in Southeast Asian and Caribbean conversations. The three general types of turn allocation – next speaker selection, self-selection, and current speaker continuation – and their concrete realisations in the data are examined both qualitatively and quantitatively. It can be shown that turn-taking in Southeast Asian and Caribbean English interactions is rule-governed and exhibits patterns similar to those that have been found in Inner Circle English conversations. Nevertheless, some differences between the speaker groups are found; for example, when it comes to how likely conversationalists are to yield the floor to a current speaker.

Chapter 13 proposes a monetary system to enable human survival on planet Earth.

Chapter 9 begins with a review of the contribution of talk to maintaining homeostasis through “small talk” and other forms of “grooming,” both as a response to complex social structure and in facilitating social cooperation.It discusses the role of talk in forward projection of group-level representations, and the role of forward projection of a conversation topic in sustaining and managing conversations.It discusses the role of both physical constraints and social constraints such as politeness norms and facework in shaping the structure of conversation practices.It discusses the fine structure of conversation, in which the interpretations of utterances are confirmed or revised by subsequent utterances and the macro-structure of conversation (beginnings, turn-taking, topics, and closure).

Chapter 10 focuses on representatations and warranties made by parties in IP agreements, as well as liability-allocation mechanisms such as indemnification. The chapter begins by discussing warranties of title (Loew’s v. Wolff) and general “corporate” warranties, then addresses warranties relating to performance (including malicious computer code) and remedial procedures. Disclaimers, exclusions from liabilty for consequential and indirect damages, and limitations of liability are also addressed. the chapter next discusses IP indemnification clauses, including a detailed analysis of the drafting and negotiation of such clauses (So. Cal. Gas v. Syntellect). It concludes with a discussion of insurance requirements and clauses.

In 2019, the Museum of Black Civilizations was inaugurated by President Macky Sall. The concept for this museum had been launched by President Senghor during the First World Festival of Negro Arts in 1966. More than 50 years later, the museum finally opened its doors. Its timely opening made headlines across the world as it coincided with a global debate on the restitution to the countries of origin of objects illicitly acquired under colonial rule. Funded by the Republic of China, the Museum of Black Civilizations offered itself as a recipient for the restitution of 100 objects collected on Senegal’s territory. This chapter discusses the realization both of Senghor’s concept for a museum of Black Civilizations in the twenty-first century and of a project for the recuperation of African civilization. Through an analysis of its programme and exhibitions, the chapter examines how the museum decolonizes the concept of the museum by focusing on its exhibition of Abrahamic religions, as well as on the sabre of El Hadj Oumar Tall, an object that the Restitution Report advised should be a priority for return. Analysing the museum’s politics of restitution and repair, it frames the museum’s concept of Blackness as a technique to repair the legacies of race science.

The Introduction situates the book’s themes in three different debates. First, it situates the question of Senegal’s decolonization in a debate about non-national futures as they were imagined by Negritude and Pan-African thinkers at the time of decolonization. Although these non-national futures have now become unthinkable, this book demonstrates that they are remembered as futures past in Senegal’s colonial heritage sites. Second, it situates the interpretation of Senegal’s cultural heritage in a debate about the legacy of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Negritude. Senegal’s politics of heritagization are indebted to the Negritude philosophy of Senegal’s first president, whose politics of heritage were aimed at the reclamation of African dignity and respect, promising liberation through recuperation. Hence, this book situates the reclamation of African heritage in a temporality of return and frames cultural heritage as a technique of repair. Third, it situates the reclamation of African heritage in debates about world heritage, arguing that Senghor’s archiving project and support for UNESCO’s World Heritage List constituted parallel heritage projects pointing towards the decolonization of world heritage. The book posits that decolonization as envisioned by UNESCO and Senghor is a project to repair the traumas of modernity.

This chapter traces the history of repair. Beginning with the earliest human tools, like hand axes and spears, repair techniques evolved to keep pace with technology. In industrial era, the introduction of interchangeable parts promised to make repair easier and more reliable than ever before. But over the course of the twentieth century, manufacturers realized that product durability often wasn’t in their economic self interest. So they found ways to induce consumption and discourage repair. As early as the 1920s, firms were exploring the strategies that would eventually become known as “planned obsolescence.” By the 1950s, those techniques were cornerstones of the consumer economy.