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6th International Meeting on Conversation Analysis and Clinical Encounters (CACE 2017)

30 June 2017

This three-day international conference will be held at Engineers’ House in Bristol on 12-14 July.

CACE is a biennial international meeting for academics and clinicians interested in the application of conversation analytic (CA) methods to communication in medical care. The first meeting was held at the University of Exeter in 2007, organised by Dr Rebecca Barnes and Professor Nicky Britten. This year’s conference is a collaboration between the Centre for Academic Primary Care at the University of Bristol and NIHR CLAHRC West.

Days one and two of the conference will begin with plenary talks and then showcase applied CA research alongside the opportunity to participate in small group sessions working with a variety of clinical data. Clinicians and other interested parties are invited to join the conference on the third day, with a programme that is designed to be of special interest to them – to showcase how the perspective and methods of CA can contribute to our understanding of medical practice, and to improving the effectiveness of communication and in the design and evaluation of clinical trials.

Dr Rebecca Barnes, Senior Research Fellow in Applied Conversation Analysis at the University of Bristol’s Centre for Academic Primary Care and organiser of the conference, said:

“The CACE conferences have evolved a certain ‘style’; they are relatively small – numbers are capped, there are plenty of opportunities to discuss papers and to work with and explore a wide variety of original data. So there is a real emphasis on participation, interchange, sharing research ideas and findings – as much of a ‘hands on’ approach as is possible within the constraints of such a meeting."

Download a copy of the poster here.

Download a copy of the provisional full programme here.

Download a copy of the provisional final day programme here.

Plenary speakers

Changes in footing as interactional resource in calls to a breast-feeding support help line

Professor Anna Lindström (Uppsala University, Sweden)

Anna Lindström is Professor of Language and Social Interaction at Uppsala University with a long term interest in documenting talk-in-interaction in different health care contexts including home help visits to older people, health visits to new parents, child birth and doctor-patient interaction. Lindström was recently awarded a grant from Uppsala Antibiotic Centre for a conversation analytic study of antibiotic prescription in Swedish primary care.

Dignity in practice

Dr Ruth Parry (University of Nottingham, UK)

Ruth Parry qualified and worked as a physiotherapist in the UK NHS for several years before moving into research. After initially working on a randomised controlled trial of a rehabilitation intervention, she moved into conversation analytic work on healthcare interactions. She currently works with recordings of physiotherapy and of doctor patient consultations.

Her work has focused on two areas. One concerns how practitioners and patients attempt and accomplish difficult communicative tasks – such as talking about a person’s physical impairments, about future illness deterioration, and about death and dying. Her other main focus has been on how people communicate about physical activities in healthcare contexts: when people do joint physical activities how do they convey what is to be done, why it is to be done, and about the success or failure of what is done?

She is keen to make conversation analytic understandings and evidence more accessible to healthcare practitioners, educators and policy-makers. This has led her to work on systematic reviews of conversation analytic evidence, on communication training resources based on authentic recordings and conversation analytic insights, and on contributing to local and national guidance on healthcare communication.

Treatment recommendation actions, contingencies and responses

Professor Tanya Stivers (University of California Los Angeles, USA)

Tanya Stivers is Professor and Vice Chair of the Department of Sociology, UCLA. Her research attempts to uncover the underlying structures of conversation using recordings of spontaneous naturally occurring social interaction. Studying how and when people use particular interaction practices, and to what effect, helps us understand where the boundaries are in terms of culture and language.

Tanya’s primary methodology is conversation analysis, but she also combines CA with other methods. For instance she has combined CA with statistical methods for comparative work whether the interest is in race/ethnicity, SES, human development or differences in language and culture. More recently Tanya has combined CA with an ethnographic approach whilst researching pediatric genetics clinic visits.

Why it matters to talk about talk: Conversation analytic research for clinical encounters and beyond

Professor Elizabeth Stokoe (Loughborough University, UK)

Elizabeth Stokoe is Professor of Social Interaction in the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough University. She uses conversation analysis to understand how talk works – from first dates to healthcare encounters and police interrogations.

Outside the university, she runs workshops with mediators, doctors, salespeople, police and other professionals using her research-based communication training method called the “Conversation Analytic Role-play Method”. She is one of thirteen WIRED 2015 Innovation Fellows; has given TEDx and Royal Institution lectures, and her research and biography were featured on the BBC Radio 4’s The Life Scientific.

Further information

For further information, please contact cace-2017@bristol.ac.uk.

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