Panelista. The policing of emotion by institutional participants in the courtroom

CARRANZA, ISOLDA E.

Winterthur

Congreso; 17th International Pragmatics Conference; 2021

IPra International Pragmatics Association & Zurich University of Applied Sciences

Within a research program centered on discursive practices in institutions, this presentation builds on an interest in the emergence of public emotion displays and talk about emotion in power-charged speech events. In addition to incorporating insights about the interactional management of emotion (Peräkylä & Sorjonen 2012) and about the relevance of participation frameworks in structuring it (Goodwin 2007), this study also draws from linguistic anthropological research on how the expression of emotion may be subjected to the workings of power and legitimation (McElhinny 2010; Wilce 2014; Lutz 2019). A prolonged multi-site ethnography of judicial settings provides a substantial corpus of audio-recorded and video-recorded criminal trials. This allows for the observation of a variety of situational roles and all the stages of the courtroom procedures. On the basis of comparative analysis of instances of participants? orientation to the absence and the presence of a certain emotion, this study shows that judges and attorneys evaluate witnesses? behavior either implicitly or through explicit metacommunicative commentary. This contextualized exploration of how emotion and emotion displays are interpreted reveals aspects of institutional culture, a concern with the connection between emotion and cultural values, and the existence of specific expectations related to categories of social actors. The findings also show that the emotional life of the individual is the object of regimentation beyond the face to face institutional encounter. It is concluded that research on participants? orientation to interactively regulate emotions and through them, interpersonal relations has the potential to complement established views of the role of institutions in social control.