Sacks, categories, language, and gender

In this chapter, we chart our journey from reading Harvey Sacks’s work on conversation analysis and membership categories to applying it in research on gender and language. We tell our interconnected story as three generations of PhD supervisors and students working in discursive psychology. Discursive psychology’s core aim, aligned to conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, is the respecification of psychology’s topics (e.g., cognition, attitudes, memory, prejudice, identity) as members’ orientations; as members’, rather than analysts’, topics. This chapter will describe how we were inspired by Sacks to interrogate identity through the sequential analysis of membership categories. We show how researchers can ‘capture’ gender as it is made relevant for the doing of some action in sequences of conversation, and how we might ‘scale up’ from a single case to working with larger datasets.