pretty chuffed about this!

I always check my emails first thing in the morning over coffee. This morning I found this and felt pretty happy.

Anyone interested?

This morning I received notification of this conference

I've had a hankering to attend one of these meetings for a couple of years now. The first call is for symposium proposals. Any EM/CA/MCA researchers interested in being part of a symposium on application of the methodology/ies to the examination of young children's social worlds?

On a related note, I've just been reading a paper by Carly Butler and Ann Weatherall. It has this lovely concluding statement:

"What matters in the playground is being able to recognize a game and its associated categories , knowing how to become a member of a device and category, and understanding the rules and regulations of category membership such as relevance and consistency. These skills involve the systematic deployment of cultural understanding and the moment-by-moment production of a shared cultural order. Children's culture can be understood in terms of these methods and practices with which they coordimate their talk and action (Goodwin, 1990). Children's talk in interaction is a prime site for further examination of the situated production of children's everyday lives.: (Butler & Weatherall, 2006, p. 466)

Working out “how come they said that thing and what they could be doing with it” (Sacks, 1995,p. 312)

Off to a good start to the day by taking in some Sacks. For some reason, I found the following both explanatory and comforting (smile):
"the rate at which you solve problems is not at all given by the fact that you had some problem you wanted to solve. So, for example, I had the sense a year ago that 'therapist/patient' is an omni-relevant device here. I didn't know how to show that this was so, or even how to find that this was so. There were bits of data that looked like it, but until, as it happened, I was working on these things without any intention of dealing with the issue of omni-relevance, not much was happening. It was when I was working on the priority character of those insertable sequences, and asked, ' how is that priority invoked, and what allows this one or that one to do it?' that it became apparent that it was material which was very much related to the phenomenon of omni-relevance. Now that happens in many cases. It means that you often have to wait for some data to strike you, or to occur in some sequence for you to be able to solve some ongoing problem. Or you may have solutions sitting around to problems that you haven't been able to pose." (Sacks, 1995, p. 316)