The South African School of EMCA

 The South African School of EMCA

From Post-Apartheid Interactional Orders to Institutional and Multilingual Practice

Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

Doing Modernity

Introduction: Post-Apartheid Contexts as Analytic Crucible

Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EM/CA) emerged in mid-twentieth-century sociology as a rigorous program for describing how social order is produced and sustained in everyday interaction. In its classical formulations — rooted in Garfinkel's ethnomethodology and Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson's conversation analysis — it pursues the empirical description of methods: the practical procedures by which interlocutors make sense of and accomplish social life in situ.

In South Africa, this analytic project has taken on distinctive contours. If Nordic EM/CA schools are often narrated around institutionally anchored workplaces and welfare state discourse, and Southeast Asian EM/CA around methodological transplantation into multilingual and educational settings, the South African formation rests on a confluence of post-apartheid societal accountability, language diversity, institutional asymmetry, and methodological innovation under constraint. Rather than adhering to a single founding moment, it has crystallized through networks of practice: research groups, recurring analytic workshops, and local problematics that foreground race, language, and institutional conduct as empirical terrains.

The result is not merely the adoption of EM/CA, but EM/CA as an instrument for public life inquiry — situations where the stakes of talk are immediately observable in the sequence of action itself. South Africa presents what may be the most demanding laboratory on earth for the study of interaction: eleven spoken official languages (plus South African Sign Language, recognized in 2023), a constitution barely three decades old, and a society still working out, in real time and in ordinary talk, what it means to live together across profound historical divides.

This article situates the South African EM/CA school within the historical, intellectual, and institutional ecologies that make it distinct. It offers a thematic map of its innovations, identifies key figures and institutional nodes, and situates the upcoming IIEMCA27 conference at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg — 6 to 9 July 2027 — as both culmination and accelerant of this emergent formation.

Genealogy: Convergence Rather Than Origin

Unlike some regional schools with clearly traceable founding cohorts and lineage statements, South African EM/CA grows through convergence. Early conversation analytic work in the region often appeared within broader sociolinguistic and qualitative traditions — without explicitly foregrounding an EM/CA identity. Over time, CA-informed projects on clinical communication, education, and public talk proliferated, but it was through organized groups, workshops, and collaborative analytic sessions that a school-like coherence began to form.

A critical intellectual vector was the training of South African scholars at international centers of EM/CA. Kevin A. Whitehead, now Associate Professor of Sociology and Linguistics at UC Santa Barbara and Visiting Associate Professor at Wits, completed his doctoral training at UC Santa Barbara under Don Zimmerman and Gene Lerner — central figures of the Santa Barbara School. His return to South Africa with EM/CA's full methodological toolkit, and his immediate application of it to the problem that his society most urgently posed — the interactional organization of race — constitutes one founding gesture of the tradition. His 2011 article in the South African Review of Sociology served as a methodological manifesto, demonstrating how conversation analysis could illuminate the ways racial categories become interactionally consequential through participants' own methods, not through imposed coding schemes.

But the tradition exceeds any single scholar. What has given it institutional coherence is the emergence of organized analytic practice communities — above all the InterAct Research Group at Wits, but also collaborative networks spanning psychology, linguistics, speech pathology, and sociology across South African universities. These communities do what EM/CA communities everywhere do to reproduce themselves: they hold data sessions, train students through doing rather than merely reading, and develop shared analytic sensibilities grounded in local empirical problems.

The InterAct Research Group: A Hub of Analytic Practice

A central institutional hub for South African EM/CA is the InterAct Research Group at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, housed in the Humanities Graduate Centre. Founded by Catherine L. Tam and Daniella Rafaely, InterAct functions as a practical site for analytic apprenticeship: it hosts data sessions, research presentations, and collaborative projects where students and faculty alike engage in embodied EM/CA practice rather than merely reading texts.

Such recurring analytic occasions are the seeds of institutional culture in EM/CA — where people learn what counts as a defensible analytic claim through doing, not just through theory. InterAct works with recordings and transcriptions of naturally occurring interaction in local languages and contexts, an explicit commitment that pushes EM/CA beyond lingua franca conditions and toward the multilingual communicative ecologies that characterize contemporary South African society.

Catherine Tam, a Lecturer in the Faculty of Humanities Teaching and Learning Unit at Wits, has published on social asymmetries in interaction and serves as head of the IIEMCA27 organizing committee. Daniella Rafaely, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Wits, has developed detailed conversation analytic and discursive psychological analyses of moral accountability in public and media contexts. Together they have built InterAct into the organizational spine of South African EM/CA — a community of practice that is now, through IIEMCA27, shaping the global field rather than merely participating in it.

Jennifer Watermeyer, Professor of Speech Pathology and Audiology at Wits, brings a healthcare communication focus to the InterAct constellation, serving as scientific subcommittee lead for IIEMCA27. Her work on clinical interaction in multilingual South African healthcare settings exemplifies the applied dimension of the tradition: rigorous sequential analysis in the service of understanding how inequality, language asymmetry, and institutional role are managed in encounters where the stakes are high.

Another important figure is Claire Penn, who was a long-time mentor and collaborator of Jennifer until her death in 2018. When Kevin Whitehead first arrived at Wits he was pleasantly surprised to find that Claire and Jennifer were using CA, and had large amounts of video data from health-related settings that they made available to him and his students. Most significantly, it was largely due to Claire’s work that Kevin got access to the set of emergency calls  analyzed for the chapter in the Critical Conversation Analysis volume cited below - the availability of these calls helped Kevin recruit Catherine and Daniella to do CA for their MAs, both of which were based on that data set. 

Signature Themes: The 'South African Problems'

The intellectual character of South African EM/CA is shaped by its problematic contexts — the social issues that demand rigorous description without reductive theorization. Several themes recur with distinctive intensity.

Race, Membership Categorization, and Accountability

The earliest and most distinctive strand of conversation analytic work in South Africa examines race as a membership categorization device instantiated in talk-in-interaction. Whitehead's body of work demonstrates how CA can elucidate when and how participants treat race as relevant even without it being a pre-specified topic — through generalizing practices, racial self-categorization in complaint sequences, and the management of 'possibly racist' actions within sequences of disaffiliation.

Working primarily with recordings from South African radio call-in programs — a rich corpus where racial categories become both explicitly and implicitly relevant — Whitehead built collections of race-relevant instances demonstrating that racial categories function as both resources for and constraints on action. His 2012 article in Ethnic and Racial Studies on racial categories in post-apartheid South Africa, his 2015 paper on everyday antiracism in South African radio talk (which won the EMCA Best Paper Award from the American Sociological Association), and his 2020 Social Psychology Quarterly article on implicit whiteness in crime complaints represent the full arc of this program.

The broader significance of this strand is twofold. First, it emphasizes that accountability to culturally and historically laden categories — race in post-apartheid South Africa — is discernible in sequence and action, not merely in attitudinal surveys or macro theories. Second, it shows that EM/CA's classical orientation to members' methods is especially powerful when social categories have public moral weight, as they do in societies with legacies of systemic inequality. In 2025, Whitehead's collaboration with Elizabeth Stokoe and Geoffrey Raymond produced Categories in Social Interaction (Routledge), a book-length framework integrating conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis — a theoretical achievement with its empirical roots in South African fieldwork.

Moral Talk and Public Controversy

Building on the above, a second focus in South African EM/CA interrogates how speakers manage moral accountability in public and media contexts. Rafaely, Catherine Tam and colleagues have developed detailed conversation analytic and discursive psychological analyses of how accusations — including accusations of racism — are constructed, resisted, and projected as reasonable within sequences of talk. These investigations align with a South African sociopolitical environment where talk about morality, fairness, and equity is not confined to academic theory but surfaces persistently in everyday public discourse.

Institutional Asymmetry: Healthcare and Multilingual Practice

South African society is marked by institutional asymmetries — in healthcare access, administrative structures, and language rights — that expose interactional vulnerabilities. Conversation analytic research in institutional settings, including health communication, has highlighted how participants manage risk talk, consent, repair, and authority under conditions of linguistic diversity and resource scarcity. Wits' interdisciplinary projects often center on how multilingual patients and professionals navigate interactional contingencies where normative turn-taking and epistemic access are unevenly distributed.

South Africa's twelve official languages — the eleven spoken languages plus South African Sign Language — make code-switching not an occasional practice but a routine feature of daily interaction for most South Africans. The township lingua francas — Tsotsitaal, Iscamtho, kasi-taal — represent particularly rich sites for interaction analysis: hybrid, fluid varieties that index urban identity and solidarity across ethnic lines, and whose sequential organization in talk has yet to receive full systematic EM/CA attention. This remains one of the most pressing frontiers for the tradition.

Education, Professional Learning, and Workplace Interaction

EM/CA's adoption in educational research and professional skill development further reflects the school's adaptability. Studies in education probe how interactional competencies are taught, monitored, and contested in classroom and professional learning environments. In the South African context — where linguistic repertoires are commonly heterogeneous and institutional roles carry histories of inequality — these studies foreground competent performance not as a static trait but as a sequence of accountable actions observable in talk.

Key Figures: A Constellation of Practice

South African EM/CA is not reducible to a single institute or individual, but certain figures have anchored its visibility and diffusion.

Kevin A. Whitehead (UC Santa Barbara / Wits) is the most internationally prominent figure, with a prolific output on race, social categories, and interaction. His Santa Barbara training connects the South African tradition directly to the lineage of Schegloff, Zimmerman, and Lerner. His appointment as keynote speaker at IIEMCA27 — on his own institution's home turf — is a recognition that his work has become central to the global field, not merely to its South African iteration.

Catherine L. Tam (Wits) is the organizational architect of the tradition in its current form — founder of InterAct, head of the IIEMCA27 organizing committee, and a researcher whose published work on social asymmetries in interaction provides the theoretical frame within which much of InterAct's collaborative work operates.

Daniella Rafaely (Wits, Psychology) brings discursive psychology into dialogue with conversation analysis in analyses of moral accountability, public talk, and controversy — extending the South African tradition beyond strict EM/CA into the broader terrain of critical discourse and interaction.

Jennifer Watermeyer (Wits, Speech Pathology and Audiology) anchors the healthcare and clinical communication dimension of the tradition, examining how multilingual patients and professionals navigate interaction in resource-constrained South African institutional settings.

Beyond Wits, the broader constellation includes scholars across psychology, communication, and linguistics departments at South African universities, many of whom use conversation analysis as one methodological resource among others — common in Global South scholarly contexts where the pressure to address urgent social problems can make interdisciplinary combinations both intellectually necessary and politically responsible.

IIEMCA27: A Field Event in Johannesburg

The upcoming 27th International Conference of the International Institute for Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis — IIEMCA27 — will be held at Wits University, Johannesburg, from 6 to 9 July 2027. This is the first time in the conference's history that it will be held on African soil.

The conference theme is 'New Horizons: Exploring the Transformative Possibilities of EMCA.' The organizing committee has identified four key areas for exploration: human-machine interaction, critical EMCA approaches, previously unexamined interactional contexts, and underexamined languages. This framing is itself a statement about the South African tradition's self-understanding: it positions EMCA not as a finished methodology transplanted to new settings, but as a living analytical framework capable of transformation through encounter with new empirical terrains.

The keynote speakers reflect the same commitment to range and transformation. Kevin A. Whitehead brings the South African tradition's foundational contribution on race and social categories. Jacki O'Neill, founding Lab Director of Microsoft Research Africa in Nairobi, represents EMCA's extension into AI, technology design, and the future of work in African contexts — bringing an ethnomethodological perspective to the question of how culturally and linguistically sensitive AI tools can be built for African languages and environments. Robin James Smith, Professor of Sociology at Cardiff University and Visiting Professor at Wits, contributes expertise in embodied interaction, space, and mobility — including street outreach with rough sleepers, a theme that will resonate with scholars concerned with marginalized populations. Ana Cristina Ostermann, from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, brings a Global South perspective on institutional interaction in healthcare settings and has played a foundational role in developing EMCA in Latin America — a parallel tradition whose presence at Johannesburg signals the emergence of a genuinely South-South EM/CA dialogue.

The conference is hosted by InterAct, whose members form the local organizing committee. Catherine Tam serves as head of the organizing committee; Jennifer Watermeyer leads the scientific subcommittee; Nora-Lee Wales leads marketing; Daniella Rafaely leads funding. This is not incidental. The hosting of the global field's flagship conference by the community that built South African EM/CA from the ground up is an act of institutional maturation: the tradition is no longer traveling to the field's centers but reshaping those centers by bringing them home.

Future Directions: Corpora, Languages, and Reflexive Practice

Several avenues suggest themselves as priorities for scholarly investment in the coming years.

Multilingual corpus development is the most pressing empirical frontier. South Africa's linguistic diversity encourages EM/CA to build corpora that reflect code-switching, translation practices, and multimodal resources as intrinsic to interactional order rather than exceptions to it. The Nguni languages (Zulu, Xhosa, Swati, Ndebele), the Sotho-Tswana group (Sesotho, Setswana, Sepedi), and the hybrid township varieties have received almost no sustained conversation analytic attention. This is a gap that the South African tradition is uniquely positioned to close.

Decolonial reflexivity represents a second frontier. Scholars within the tradition are increasingly attuned to the methodological politics of their enterprise — how analytic categories themselves carry epistemic histories, and how the field's canonical corpus (predominantly English-language North American interaction) has shaped assumptions about what is universal and what is locally specific. South African EM/CA is well positioned to interrogate these histories without relaxing the analytic discipline that makes its claims empirically defensible.

Cross-continental collaborations with African and non-African EM/CA communities will enrich comparative perspectives while highlighting context-specific resource mobilizations in interaction. The presence of Ana Cristina Ostermann at IIEMCA27 prefigures exactly this kind of South-South dialogue. The question of whether and how EMCA's core findings about turn-taking, sequence organization, and preference apply in African interactional contexts — and what must be revised, extended, or fundamentally rethought — is one of the most productive theoretical questions the field can now pursue.

Conclusion: A Tradition Still Becoming

The South African school of EM/CA is not a relic of genealogy or a parochial variant of a global tradition. It is an active, problem-driven formation that draws its strength from situated puzzles, institutional exigencies, and analytic practice networks. Through the InterAct Research Group at Wits, focused investigations into race, moral accountability, and institutional interaction, and the imminent IIEMCA27 event in Johannesburg, South African EM/CA situates itself as both locally grounded and globally consequential — a genuine school of interactional inquiry with a distinct voice and agenda.

At the same time, the tradition is still becoming. It lacks the institutional density of the Nordic or Japanese traditions — no dedicated research institutes bearing the EM/CA name, no annual national gatherings, no graduate programs explicitly organized around ethnomethodological training. What it has is a body of methodologically rigorous, empirically grounded, and socially consequential scholarship; an organized analytic practice community in InterAct; and a set of research questions — race in interaction, multilingual talk, institutional inequality — that are both locally urgent and globally significant.

The students being trained at Wits and elsewhere will determine whether South African EM/CA remains a brilliant but concentrated scholarly achievement or becomes the foundation of a genuinely expansive indigenous research community. IIEMCA27 will be one measure of that. The land of twelve official languages, of ubuntu and amandla, of talk that does the daily work of navigating a society still assembling itself — this is precisely the kind of setting where ethnomethodology and conversation analysis find their fullest purpose and their most exacting test.

Key Resources and Links

IIEMCA27 Conference (6–9 July 2027, Wits University, Johannesburg): www.iiemca27.org

InterAct Research Group at Wits: www.wits.ac.za/hgc/interact-research-group/

International Institute for Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis: iiemca.com

Kevin A. Whitehead — UC Santa Barbara Sociology: www.soc.ucsb.edu/people/kevin-whitehead

South African Review of Sociology — primary South African sociological journal publishing EM/CA-relevant work

Whitehead, Stokoe & Raymond, Categories in Social Interaction (Routledge, 2025)

Waring & Tadic (Eds.), Critical Conversation Analysis (Multilingual Matters, 2024) — includes chapter on emergency calls in South Africa by Catherine Tam, Kevin Whitehead and Geoffrey Raymond

Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. is an independent scholar and certified substance abuse counselor based in Santa Barbara, California. He studied ethnomethodology and conversation analysis at UC Santa Barbara under Don H. Zimmerman, Thomas P. Wilson, and Harvey Molotch. He is the author of Doing Modernity, a research manuscript platform documenting the Santa Barbara School of ethnomethodology and advancing Critical Interactionism as a theoretical framework.