IDENTITY AND MEMBERSHIP CATEGORIZATION ANALYSIS

Membership categorization analysis (MCA) has a history as long as conversation analysis (if not longer) and provides a toolkit for observing and describing “culture-in-action”. This chapter explores that toolkit: It provides an overview of what MCA is and how it relates to identity, what MCA does, and where MCA came from. It outlines the distinction between categories, devices, predicates, and collections, and how these fit within the MCA enterprise. Drawing this together with example analyses, the chapter demonstrates how a category comes into being, how the “under-the-surface” nature of categories can be analyzed using MCA, and what can be said about identity construction from this point of view. Finally, the chapter offers various ways of getting into data using an MCA approach and suggests future directions for MCA.