Browsing by Author "Smith, Paul V."
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Item Embargo Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis and the Study of Action-in-Interaction in Military Settings(Routledge, 2016) Elsey, Christopher; Mair, M.; Smith, Paul V.; Watson, P. G.In this chapter we discuss what ethnomethodology and conversation analysis can contribute to studies of the military, specifically ‘action-in-interaction’ in military settings. The chapter is methodologically focused and explores how work in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis provides an alternative way of approaching the problems posed by studying the different forms of practice that constitute ‘soldierly work’. Rather than approach these issues in the abstract, and in line with the central thrust of ethnomethodological and conversation analytic studies, we shall outline this approach through a discussion of the methods employed, and difficulties encountered, in the course of research we conducted into a specific case: a fatal ‘blue-on-blue’ or ‘friendly fire’ attack on British infantry by American aircraft during the Second Gulf War. What initially drew us to the incident was the availability of a cockpit video-tape – complete with audio of communications between the two pilots involved in the attack and the ground forward air controller who they were working with – that was leaked to the public during a controversial coroner’s inquest in 2007, some 4 years after the attack took place. Our interest in the footage was twofold. We wanted, firstly, to see what we could make of data of this kind; and, secondly, we wanted to look at what the three official inquiries into the incident (including two military boards of inquiry alongside the coroner’s inquest) had made of it, how they had used the video as a resource for analysing what had gone wrong. This methodological strategy reflects the ‘duplex’ forms of analysis that ethnomethodology and conversation analysis rest upon: in this case, an analysis of the pilot’s communicative and sense-making practices coupled with an analysis of analyses of those practices by a number of authoritative auditors, with tacking between the data and after-the-fact accounts of it. In order to bring this out, we will discuss, initially, the problems we encountered in transcribing the video and what those difficulties themselves revealed about what the pilots were doing. After that, we turn to the ways in which we established links between the video and the reports published by the official inquiries, reports which offered competing where not conflicting interpretations of what happened and why. Again, we shall suggest that this reveals something about what is involved in holding military operatives to account. Based on this, and linking own research to wider work in the field, we will conclude, finally, by returning to the question of what ethnomethodologcal and conversation analytic research adds to our understanding of action-in-interaction in military settings: namely, a focus on its specificities and the forms of organisation internal to it.Item Embargo Interpretive asymmetries, diagnostic inquiry and the reconstruction of action in an incident of friendly fire(Wiley, 2013-10-03) Mair, Michael; Elsey, Christopher; Watson, Patrick G.; Smith, Paul V.In this article, we examine a controversial friendly fire incident that took place during the early stages of the Iraq war. Our focus is on how a cockpit video of the incident was used post facto in a military inquiry to arrive at an understanding of the actions of the pilots involved. We shall concentrate specifically on a series of interpretive difficulties that highlighted the problematic status of the video as evidence and explore what their resolution might tell us about military practice, and the place of friendly fire within it more broadly.Item Embargo The Violence You Were/n’t Meant to See(Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) Mair, Michael; Elsey, Christopher; Smith, Paul V.; Watson, Patrick G.This chapter starts with a consideration of the opportunities the internet affords us to become virtual witnesses to episodes of military operations and the deaths they result in. It is organised around an analysis of two such episodes caught on video and disseminated via the internet, (1) the Wikileaks ‘collateral murder’ video, and (2) the video of the targeted assassination of Hamas’s Military Commander, Ahmed al-Jabari, by the Israeli Defence Force in 2012. Drawing on ethnomethodological studies as well as Goffman’s examination of the ‘workshop complex’ (which we will outline), we examine what these videos could be said to show through an analysis of the ways we are directed to view them by those who have made them available to us. We will suggest the question of who takes such footage public ‘first’ rather than ‘second’ is an important one as the opening establishes the terms in which a video’s status as evidence will be discussed. Having reviewed each case, and what could be said to have been done via the release of footage to the public in them, we end by sounding a note of caution around the notion that videos of either kind represent a straightforward medium of ‘truth’. What it means to ‘watch war’, as Miezskowski has pointed out (2011), is not easily resolved and, we shall argue in conclusion, we need to treat video footage as posing as many problems as it seems to resolve.Item Open Access War on video: Combat footage, vernacular video analysis and military culture from within(ZHB Luzern/University Library Lucerne, 2018-10-31) Mair, Michael; Elsey, Christopher; Smith, Paul V.; Watson, Patrick G.In this article we present an ethnomethodological study of a controversial case of ‘friendly fire’ from the Iraq War in which leaked video footage, war on video, acquired particular significance. We examine testimony given during a United States Air Force (USAF) investigation of the incident alongside transcribed excerpts from the video to make visible the methods employed by the investigators to assess the propriety of the actions of the pilots involved. With a focus on the way in which the USAF investigators pursued their own analysis of language-in-use in their discussions with the pilots about what had been captured on the video, we turn attention to the background expectancies that analytical work was grounded in. These ‘vernacular’ forms of video analysis and the expectancies which inform them constitute, we suggest, an inquiry into military culture from within that culture. As such, attending to them provides insights into that culture.Item Open Access War-making and sense-making: some technical reflections on an instance of ‘friendly fire’(Wiley, 2012-03-08) Mair, Michael; Watson, Patrick G.; Elsey, Christopher; Smith, Paul V.In this paper we analyse a ‘friendly fire’ incident from the second Gulf War and the controversy which came to envelop it during a coroner's inquest in 2007. Focusing on the cockpit video of the incident that was leaked to the media during that inquest, we examine what the military and civilian investigators were involved in reconstructing: the incident as it unfolded in real time. Our analysis is grounded in a praxeological perspective that draws on and links ethnomethodological studies of work, research into ‘normal’ accidents, disasters and risks, and recent ethnographies of the military. Based on our analysis, we suggest that the accounts offered after the event by the military and civilian inquiries should be treated less as competing descriptions than different ways of problematizing particular aspects of the military–political ‘machineries’ the pilots' actions were enmeshed within.