Cross-cutting preferences in interactional trajectories toward violence

• In Event: 2134 - The Nature and Import of Participation in Social Interaction

Abstract

Most research on violence focuses on “upstream” risk factors associated with perpetration and victimhood, and “downstream” impacts on victims (Bowman, Stevens, Eagle, and Matzopoulos 2015). While this research has produced important findings regarding the correlates and outcomes associated with violence, researchers have recently called for analyses of the immediate situational factors and processes that characterize violent encounters e.g., (Collins 2008). This paper combines the close attention to violent situations advocated by Collins with Fiske and Rai’s (2014) call to reconsider the moral underpinnings of violence, while also adopting a thoroughly interactional focus that contrasts with these authors’ emphasis on psychological factors and processes. Using a conversation analytic approach to examine video recordings of conflicts, we consider two cross-cutting preferences that shape the realization (or not) of violence once one or more parties has projected its possible use. First, as has been observed regarding other courses of action conducted via talk and other body behavior (e.g., Lerner and Raymond frth; Schegloff 2007; Stivers and Robinson 2006), participants orient to a preference for progressivity toward violence once it has been projected, with the non-realization of this outcome treated as accountable. Second, participants orient to a preference for “going second” (producing violent actions that are, or claim to be, responsive to another’s violent action) over “going first” (initiating violent actions). This analysis demonstrates that ubiquitous features of (potentially) violent encounters that have previously been dismissed as mere “bluster” (Collins 2008:10), and thus distinct from violence itself, are treated and deployed by participants as orderly practices for managing these cross-cutting preferences. In explicating these countervailing constraints, we identify a set of moral and interactional mechanisms through which interactional trajectories toward violent outcomes may operate independently of both psychological and “upstream” or macro-structural risk factors that have been treated as central to whether violence occurs.

Authors

• Geoffrey Raymond, University of California-Santa Barbara

• Kevin A. Whitehead, University of California-Santa Barbara

• Brett Bowman, University of the Witwatersrand