Interculturality as an interactional achievement: Doubting others’ nationality and accounting for the doubt

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article examines the notion of interculturality in face-to-face, multilingual, ordinary interactions. The focus is on how participants perform constituent actions by reference to members’ normative expectations to a specific membership category. Employing ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, this article elucidates interculturality is an interactional achievement in interaction. More specifically, I describe interactional practices for doubting others’ nationality and accounting for doubts accomplished by particular interactional practices in a specific interactional position. Analyzing these interactional contingencies produced by participants demonstrates that members’ practices to make interculturality relevant in a temporal unfolding of the activity and shows how they reflexively use interculturality as a resource for constituent actions. This study contributes to the existing literature on the interactional construction of international and intercultural communication, and on the situated, sequential, and embodied organization of interculturality.