The ROLSI Award for Outstanding Research by an Early-Career Researcher
Call for Applications

The journal Research on Language and Social Interaction (ROLSI) is pleased to announce an award for early career researchers, to be competed for by those presenting a paper at the ICCA conference in Edmonton, Canada, June 2026.

The prize will be awarded based on submissions of a single-authored written research paper representing a single-authored presentation accepted for the conference and will be open to those who have been awarded their doctorate no earlier than five years from June 28, 2026.

The submissions should be in English, no longer than 5000 words (including everything), and be in a style and format consistent with those of the journal.

The award of a prize will be at the sole discretion of the editors of the journal, and will be announced before the end of the conference.

The winner of the award will be granted a personal subscription to the journal.

How to apply:

Please send your written submission to: the Editors, at rolsi.journal@gmail.com, under the heading “ICCA Early Career Prize.” The paper itself should be anonymous, but you should include a covering letter detailing your name, email address, current affiliation (if any), and the following details of your PhD: title, date, awarding institution, and examiners, examining committee, or equivalent body.

Deadline:

The submission must be received no later than 17:00 (UK time) May 30th, 2026.

Questions and Contact:

All questions related to the award shall be directed to the ROLSI Editors at rolsi.journal@gmail.com. ICCA organizers cannot answer questions related to this award.

Other award recipients

Schegloff Student Paper Award

Marit Nygård Halvorsen
Paper title: Keeping the Door Open After “No”: Post-Expansions in Routine Violence Enquiries in Antenatal Care

Marit Nygård Halvorsen is a PhD candidate at the Centre for the Study of Professions, Oslo Metropolitan University. Using Conversation Analysis, her research examines how midwives and pregnant women talk about violence in antenatal care consultations. Halvorsen has previously studied laughter in therapy interaction, and she is broadly interested in institutional talk, sequence organization, and delicate talk. Her PhD research contributes to a larger project (ViP) which includes a sub-project in midwifery education using CARM. In spring 2025, she was a visiting researcher at the University of Oxford, hosted by Rebecca Barnes at the Nuffield Department of Primary Health Care.

ICCA Student Paper Award

Ada Campagna
Paper title: “Not a Big Deal”: Parental Downplaying in Pediatric Neurology Visits

Ada Campagna is a PhD candidate in sociology at UCLA and holds an MA in Bioethics from Duke University. Her research focuses on improving patient–doctor communication, with prior work on shared decision-making, cost-of-care conversations, and parental perceptions of treatment recommendations in the NICU. More recently, she has drawn on conversation analysis to examine how parents influence treatment recommendations by framing medically relevant information as either a problem or a non-problem. Looking ahead, her work investigates ICU family meetings, aiming to identify communication practices that enable clinicians to advance care objectives while ensuring families feel heard and supported.

Best Dissertation Award

Mojenn Schubert (University of Mannheim) Dissertation title: “Temporality – Direction – Articulator: On formal variation in pointing gestures and how it enables an interaction-sensitive modulation of gesture”

Best CA Article Award

Kevin Whitehead (UCSB), Geoffrey Raymond (UCSB), and Brett Bowman (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg) 

Paper: “Cross-cutting preferences in interactional trajectories towards violence,” American Journal of Sociology

Best Book Award

Giovanni Rossi (UCLA) System of Social Action: The Case of Requesting in Italian (Oxford University Press, 2025)

Lifetime Achievement Award

Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, University of Helsinki (Emerita)

Christian Heath, King’s College London

Aug Nishizaka, Chiba University, Japan