ABSTRACT
When Michael Billig came to Loughborough University in 1985, as a candidate for the vacant chair in Social Sciences, I knew little about rhetoric, nor about ideology and social psychology, nor indeed about Billig. I was primarily a developmental psychologist interested in language, in particular the analysis of recordings of talk in social situations, and had most recently been analysing audio-recorded ‘social remembering’ in conversation (Edwards and Middleton 1986), and video-recorded classroom education (Edwards and Mercer 1987). I was interested in how ‘cognitive’ states such as memory and knowledge might be explored as matters of language and social construction. It was an exciting prospect, therefore, to meet a potential new professor in the department whose recent work was on the social workings of language, even if the candidate seemed strangely coy about it.
