ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the opening sequences of video- and audio-recorded academic counseling encounters to see how the institutional identities of the student client and the counselor are made operative and consequential through the participants' interactions with each other. It shows that identity is an ever-changing collaborative construction by the participants on situated occasions through the medium of language. As a distinctive line of development deriving from H. Garfinkel's ethnomethodology, conversation analysis takes as a fundamental issue the problem of identity and membership: showing that the categories proposed for analysis are oriented to by participants themselves in and through talk. The nature and function of the opening sequences in the face-to-face institutional academic counseling interactions can be better understood in light of research on openings in casual conversations. The chapter reports some interactional methods whereby the student clients and their academic counselors construct themselves and one another in roles specific to the academic counseling setting.
