Crisis Talk

Based on extensive analysis of real-time, authentic crisis encounters collected in the UK and US, Crisis Talk: Negotiating with Individuals in Crisis sheds light on the relatively hidden world of communication between people in crisis and the professionals whose job it is to help them.

The crisis situations explored in this book involve police hostage and crisis negotiators and emergency dispatchers interacting with individuals in crisis who threaten suicide or self-harm. The practitioners face various communicative challenges in these encounters, including managing strong emotions, resistance, hostility, and unresponsiveness. Using conversation analysis, Crisis Talk presents evidence on how practitioners deal with the interactional challenge of negotiating with people in crisis and how what they say shapes outcomes. Each chapter includes recommendations based on the detailed analysis of numerous cases of actual negotiation.

Crisis Talk shows readers how every turn taken by negotiators can exacerbate or solve the communicative challenges created by crisis situations, making it a unique and invaluable text for academics in psychology, sociology, linguistic sciences, and related fields, as well as for practitioners engaging in crisis negotiation training or fieldwork.

Author Biography

Rein Ove Sikveland is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Academic and Professional Communication at NTNU, Norway. His expertise is in conversation analysis and phonetics. Rein researches the linguistic and interactional practices that underpin practitioners’ management of conversations in education, health services and crisis negotiations.

Heidi Kevoe-Feldman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northeastern University, USA. She uses conversation analysis to examine communication patterns and problems that arise in institutional settings. Recent research projects include working with emergency medical dispatch call centres with a focus on identifying various barriers (e.g. physical, psychological, and communication) that interfere with helping callers in a time of crisis.

Elizabeth Stokoe is Professor of Social Interaction in the Discourse and Rhetoric Group at Loughborough University, UK. Her current research interests are in conversation analysis, membership categorization, and social interaction in various ordinary and institutional settings, including neighbour mediation, police interrogation, role-play, and simulated interaction.