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.

Although the Tax Cut and Jobs Act (TCJA) did not include any environmental tax provisions, numerous tax policy discussions in the United States have considered implementing a carbon tax, giving rise to concerns about such a tax‘s potential negative effects on economic growth and the distribution of income in the US economy. This chapter examines the macroeconomic and distributional effects of implementing a representative carbon tax under several assumptions about recycling resulting tax revenues. It simulates these effects using the Diamond-Zodrow (DZ) dynamic overlapping generations computable general equilibrium (CGE) model. Earlier literature and our results confirm that: (i) the negative effects of a carbon tax are moderate on the level of future GDP and negligible on the rate of economic growth; and (ii) the regressive effects of a carbon tax can easily be offset with judicious use of the resulting revenues. Policies that use carbon tax revenues to finance uniform per-household rebates and to enact policies favorable to capital formation, such as elimination of both personal taxes on dividends and capital gains, and national debt, can have a highly progressive net impact.

Recent decades have seen large tax increases in Latin America. The conventional wisdom that Latin American tax systems generate too little revenue seems harder to sustain today than in the past. What continues to be striking about the region’s tax burdens, however, is the great disparity between them. This book sheds light on this question through a comparison of Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico. It argues that tax burden variance reflects the impact of historical episodes of redistribution that threatened private property. Where they occurred, such episodes impeded future taxation by prompting economic elites and social conservatives to organize to defend their interests, thus forging strong, enduring anti-statist blocs. These blocs hindered taxation both directly, by combatting efforts to boost revenue, and indirectly, by undermining statist actors, especially labor unions. This introductory chapter consists of five sections: the first provides an overview of Latin American tax systems, the second reviews the scholarship on tax burden determinants, the third sketches the book’s argument, the fourth explains the research design and the fifth describes subsequent chapters.

Sequence organization was the pioneering insight that gave rise to conversation analysis (CA) and it remains the primary assumption in CA studies about how discourse is structured and how speakers manage their talk. In order to study discourse in an empirically grounded way, we must demonstrate how our analysis reflects the participants’ understanding of their own talk. CA does this through the concept of “response relevance.” When a speaker talks, they make relevant some “next” response, so speakers are always responding to some prior turn and simultaneously making relevant a next turn. In this way, participants demonstrate their understandings of prior talk while responding. These demonstrations form the basis of the “next turn proof procedure,” which is how CA uses participants’ responses as demonstrations of participants’ own analyses of prior talk. In this chapter, I explain how CA’s focus on sequence and “next” turns allows for an empirical understanding of how discourse is organized. I first outline the principles of sequence organization, starting with the concept of response relevance and adjacency pairs, before explaining pre-, insert and post-expansion components. Next, I review sequence research from the past four decades, highlighting the focus on specific sequences such as pre-sequences, storytelling and the effect of institutional contexts. More recent streams in sequence research include the investigation of “lapses” or discontinuities in interaction, the attempts to describe overall sequence structures of full (typically institutional) encounters, the focus on temporality, and investigations of closing sequences. Finally, I discuss the (sometimes uncritical) use of the words “activity” and “project” in CA research, and what evidence is presented for its effect on sequence.

The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of the constitutional and legal landscape in Mexico regarding healthcare and health research systems, in order to establish the potential implications for human genome engineering. In doing so, it first explores the recent constitutional changes in relation to the protection of human rights in the country and Latin America. It establishes that a progressive interpretation of the Mexican constitution in line with the international treaties on human rights signed and ratified by Mexico could be the way forward in permitting basic and applied health research, specifically via using CRISPR/Cas to modify the human germline genome for the benefit of human health. Due to the fact that the existing legal provisions in place are so fragmented and there is a lacuna regarding specific regulation of the human genome, it is feasible to propose that by applying a human rights purposive approach in favour of the right to freedom of science and right to be benefited from scientific progress, research on human germline genome editing should be legally possible. This is also supported by the case jurisprudence that has been developed by the Latin American Court of Human Rights regarding access to assisted reproduction technologies.