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This paper addresses the claim that research which makes relativist epistemological assumptions is incompatible with the moral and political commitments of feminism. This claim is treated as resting on four related but distinct arguments, that relativist feminist researchers: (a) have no basis for choosing between different accounts; (b) have no way to encompass real, material, worldly phenomena; (c) are unable to express commitment to a political position or set of values; (d) are less persuasive to colleagues and to the wider community because of the contingent and self-referential nature of relativist claims. The principal aim of this paper is to highlight a range of limitations with these anti- relativist arguments and thereby support the case for a coherent relativist feminist psychology. The paper concludes with some indication of the virtues and strengths of such an approach.

Conceptual foundations of conversation analysis -- Designing and conducting conversation analysis -- Transcribing for conversation analysis -- Turn-taking, sequence organization and epistemics -- Narrative, repair, preference organization, and person reference -- Writing the manuscript -- Methodological integrity -- Summary and conclusions.

In this article we explore how teachers can draw upon the language of stress to perform strategically important and often politically sensitive social acts. Our aim will be to show that the description of teaching problems as a matter of 'stress' has important social and political implications for teachers. To do this we draw upon interviews with Scottish secondary school teachers; these interviews have been subjected to close textual analysis, informed by some of the basic principles of discursive psychology. The analysis shows teachers flexibly employing stress as a way of managing their own accountability, and of making sense of their institutional roles and relationships. To conclude, we suggest that employing stress as an individualized category not only suppresses its flexibility, but also encourages both teachers and their employers to offer token measures to manage it at a psychological level, rather than engaging in proper debate about the state of the profession.

This paper examines the situated use of expressions of gratitude and demonstrates how their precise timing matters for coordinating actions and managing relationships in social interaction. Focusing on activities that involve object passing, we introduce the concept of the gratitude opportunity space, a standard time for expressing gratitude. We explicate three discernable phases within the gratitude opportunity space for simple recruitment sequences involving an object pass (pre-delivery, on-delivery, and post-delivery positions) and explore how the gratitude opportunity space is dynamically recalibrated according to the activity underway in other activities that involve object passes (i.e., remote offers of objects and gift giving). Data are American and British English.

Essays in the The Prettier Doll focus on the same local controversy: in 2001,a third-grade girl in Colorado submitted an experiment to the school science fair. She asked 30 adults and 30 fifth-graders which of two Barbie dolls was prettier. One doll was black, the other white, and each wore a different colored dress. All of the adults picked the Barbie in the purple dress, while nearly all of the fifth graders picked the white Barbie. When the student's experiment was banned an uproar resulted that spread to the national media. School board meetings and other public exchanges highlighted the potent intersection of local and national social concerns: education, censorship, science, racism, and tensions in foundation values such as liberty, democracy, and free speech. For the authors of these essays, the exchanges that arose from "Barbiegate" illustrate vividly the role of rhetoric at the grassroots level, fundamental to civic judgment in a democratic state and at the core of "ordinary democracy.".