This article explores how candidates discuss cultural topics that overlap with their sociocultural background during the Cambridge undergraduate admissions interviews, an academic gatekeeping encounter. On the one hand, discussion of this kind can be a source of epistemic authority for these candidates. On the other hand, such an affordance does…

Drawing on Judith Butler's theory of performativity and positioning approaches, this paper examines how asylum seekers actively assert agency in navigating and (re)constructing their subjectivities and identities within research interviews. The analysis explores the power dynamics inherent in the interview setting and broader public discourse,…

Speakers may resort to different inferences and expectations in intercultural encounters. These expectations are influenced by speakers' socialization processes in speech communities and networks, as well as by the local interactional demands and power dynamics in the communicative situation. While interactional sociolinguistic studies have…

This paper offers a historiographic and ethnographic analysis of how reflexivity, as a communicative practice and valued personality trait, has been understood, regulated, legitimised and used to control Chinese workers from the planned-economy era to the present. Using a Shanghai-based multinational company as a case study, I document how and…

This article concerns knowledge negotiations as an aspect of interactional power in three-way interaction between Arabic-speaking women, Swedish-speaking midwives and interpreters in Swedish antenatal care. The notion of epistemic stance is used to investigate how all three participants negotiate knowledge, and how this affects the ongoing…

In São Tomé and Príncipe, the language shift toward Portuguese is resulting in the endangerment of the native creoles of the island. These languages have been considered of low value in Santomean society since the mid-twentieth century. But when Santomeans are members of a diaspora, their perceptions of these languages, especially Forro, change in…