CA Day: Conversation, community & cake

CA Day 15th December 2025

Celebrating its 18th year, CA (Conversation Analysis) Day was––as ever––a celebration of the global appeal of conversation analytic research. With a full programme of talks, including keynotes by Chase Wesley Raymond and Deborah Chinn, and the ever popular CAkeOff competition – delegates were certainly provided with plenty of sustenance for the body and mind.

Morning presentations

After a warm welcome from Saul Albert, the presentation programme began with Gilian Noord, Alison Pilnick, Elizabeth Stokoe and Tony Avery presenting their research on silence in GP telephone consultations. This was followed by a presentation by Virginia Calabria, Joe Webb and Brett Smith on their research about shared decision making between people with learning disabilities and social workers.

Before the first break Chase Wesley Raymond presented the first keynote, engaging the audience with a talk on institutional ‘lingualism’ as interactional practice and what bilingualism looks like in certain settings. The programme continued with Alexa Hepburn and Jonathan Potter looking at the institutional aspect of family mealtimes, before Natàlia Server Benetó presented data exploring the three-partedness of lists in Spanish and Catalan.

Afternoon presentations

The afternoon presentations began with Luyang Zhou presenting their research on how children contribute to interaction in paediatric consultations in China. Ole Pütz followed with a presentation exploring whether AI chatbots could understand a third-position repair. 

After a short break, delegates heard from Sanaa Hyder about their research on story telling in consultations between GPs and ethnic minority patients. This was followed by Marco Pino, presenting for Kathryn Jordin with Emma Richardson and Laura Jenkins, who shared findings from their research on how children and adults mobilise gender categories to make sense of and organise play.

The day closed with the final keynote talk from Deborah Chinn, who shared her own research of how CA can explore how people with intellectual disabilities are positioned as ‘incompetent’.

CA Day will return in December 2026, for more details please check the Discourse and Rhetoric Group (DARG) website: https://darg.lboro.ac.uk/ca-days/