ABSTRACT
The introductory chapter sets forth the theoretical and methodological preliminaries for the examination of social practices for establishing shared knowledge in public political meetings through particular uses of interactional repair. The data on which the study is based comprise video recordings of all public meetings offered to citizens engaging in a participatory democracy project in urbanism, spanning over several years. The chapter situates the study within the conceptual and analytic framework of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis and discusses issues of institutionality, political meetings and public speech as embodied and situated interactional achievements. This chapter reviews the theoretical underpinnings of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis and prior research on institutional interactions and political meetings on the basis of sequential, multimodal analysis of empirical data. The chapter also discusses some methodological concerns related to collecting, transcribing and analyzing naturally occurring social interaction.
