This article addresses a vital concern in current society by showing what participants themselves may treat as ways to transcend their differences. Actors’ shared understanding has been of longstanding interest across the social sciences. Conversation analysis treats the procedural infrastructure of interaction as the basis for participants to manage intersubjectivity. The field of dialogue studies has made occasions in which people transform their relationship by discussing their differences, central to their research project, and called them “dialogic moments.” This study draws (...) on CA to investigate “dialogic moments,” but now through the eyes of participants themselves. Using single-case analysis, we argue that such moments require participants to go against normative orientations in talk promoting social solidarity and progressivity, by soliciting differences to understand and transcend them. This “going against the interactional tide” may explain both why dialogue is difficult to achieve and why it is appreciated by participants as dialogue. (shrink)

When people argue they routinely challenge the opinions, views, and attitudes of one another, they seek to cast the other as the aggressor or party at fault, and otherwise exert social control. This article illustrates how members work to hamper challenges, evade control or avoid being negatively characterized by systematically blocking access to a turn in the third position and stopping their opponent’s agenda. Examining 100 hours of public disputes in varieties of English, I use membership categorization analysis and conversation (...) analysis to unpack resistance as part of the structural organization of disputes. I identify two methods of resisting an agenda: passively, whereby a responsive turn stalls the progressivity of the interaction, and actively, whereby a responsive turn disaligns to outrightly suspend the progressivity of the interaction. I discuss how resistance sequentially unfolds across sequential positions, and as an interactional phenomenon which solves the trouble of a challenge. Overall, this article contributes to social interaction research on resistance, public disputes and how social order is constituted in and through talk-in-interaction. (shrink)