ABSTRACT
In multi-party interaction, participants may engage in repair sequences for and on behalf of “other(s).” Within the context of public political meetings, the professionals recurrently claim a problem of understanding by producing a partial repeat of prior speech, prompting a repair. This is used as a means not only to establish shared knowledge among the attending participants but also to sanction specific information in public. To recognizably claim a trouble on behalf of an(other) interactional party involves attributing variations in the distribution of knowledge within the participation framework. In addition to ascribing a trouble of understanding to “other(s),” the professionals make use of the repair practice in politically delicate environments and engage in justifying accounts for initiating repair when this is not warranted. This chapter demonstrates that interactional repair is used as a professional mediating practice in this setting and that the citizens treat it as doing just that, which includes – but is not restricted to – doing resisting to it.
