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Institute for Medical Humanities
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Intersectional Conversation Analysis, Physical Activity and the Medical Humanities

13 August 2026
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Photograph showing a group of seven people with name tages standing and smiling in front of a poster titled “Intersectional Conversation Analysis & Physical Activity” on the wall behind them.

Reflections on an IMH supported interdisciplinary workshop on Intersectional Conversation Analysis.

Supported by Pathways Funding from the Institute for Medical Humanities, Dr Virginia Calabria and Dr Kate Marks convened a one‑day interdisciplinary workshop exploring Intersectional Conversation Analysis (ICA) as an emerging methodological framework for physical activity (PA) and the medical humanities. The event brought together an expert group of scholars working across conversation analysis, intersectionality, embodiment, movement, disability studies, and sport/exercise sciences, creating a rare space for deep methodological dialogue.

The workshop built on a co‑authored paper currently under review, in which Dr Virginia Calabria and Dr Kate Marks propose ICA as a way to examine how power, identity, embodiment, agency, and epistemic positioning are dynamically produced in everyday and institutional interactions. Rather than treating CA and intersectionality as two methods to be simply combined, the day invited participants to interrogate how these perspectives might work alongside one another - and what becomes visible when they do. Moreover, they explored the idea of ICA as a framework to create a shared language to look at all types of data where identity oppressions and barriers to engaging with PA emerge, e.g., disabled people in the care system. 

Collaboration is a radical act.
Donna Haraway

Photograph of a table covered with colour-coded sticky notes arranged in clusters, representing brainstorming session. Notes in orange, green, and yellow contain handwritten text, in black-ink pencil, discussing topics such as data analysis, research methods, and key findings.

Participants and expertise 

A group of invited scholars whose work spans intersectionality, movement, and CA were invited to join their expertise in conversation around a table:

  • Dr Annette Stride (Leeds Beckett University) - Physical Activity, intersectionality, and marginalisation.
  • Prof Hayley Fitzgerald (Leeds Beckett University) - critical disability studies and intersectionality in sport.
  • Prof Robin Smith (Cardiff University) - conversation analysis, membership categorisation, and embodied interaction.
  • Dr Laura Lindegaard (Aalborg University) - movement, multimodality, and CA.

Their contributions were complemented by Prof Brett Smith (Durham University), whose work on disability and narrative helped consider ICA’s relevance to health, social care, and physical activity.

Creative facilitation was led by Mary Robson, Senior Creative Facilitator at the Institute for Medical Humanities, whose approach shaped the day’s collaborative, imaginative, and generative atmosphere. Participants were asked to bring an object representing their research, which served as a prompt for conversation, reflection, and grounding throughout the day. The afternoon’s analytic work started with a walk and talk session where prompts were given to think about the boundaries of ICA. 

The future is necessarily interdisciplinary.
Helga Nowotny

Photograph of a group meeting in a conference room with six people gathered around a table covered in papers and sticky notes, engaged in discussion. A facilitator stands in the middle. The room features a large TV screen, windows, a white table with post-it notes on for a collaborative brainstorming session.

Key insights 

Across the day, there were several key insights: 

  • ICA enables us to analyse intersectionality as something people do in real time, rather than as static categories people have.
  • CA’s sequential, embodied, and emic orientation provides tools for tracing how power, identity, and difference are enacted moment‑by‑moment.
  • Intersectionality brings a necessary structural and historical lens, ensuring CA remains attentive to broader systems of inequality.
  • The methodological challenges and opportunities lie in finding the “space in between” the two traditions and developing a shared language that allows scholars to work together on data.
  • Creative facilitation pushed the group beyond familiar disciplinary habits, creating structured spaces for small‑ and large‑group dialogue where participants could explore ideas freely and work toward shared conceptual ground.

Outcomes and future directions

The workshop concluded with a collective commitment to:

  • Establishing a small ICA network for ongoing collaboration
  • Holding future collaborative data sessions to continue exploring the methodological “in‑between” 
  • Developing shared terminology that allows intersectionality scholars and CA researchers to engage with data in mutually intelligible and analytically rigorous ways. 

This workshop marks an important step in developing ICA as a methodological contribution to the sport, exercise and PA field and to the medical humanities — grounded in naturalistic interaction, attentive to structural inequality, power and social justice and committed to interdisciplinary dialogue, nurturing the “in-between” liminal space where innovation grows.

It took place on 30 July 2026 at Green Lane Sport & Exercise Sciences, Durham University.

There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.
Octavia E. Butler

Photograph showing a group of seven people with name tages standing and smiling in front of a poster titled “Intersectional Conversation Analysis & Physical Activity” on the wall behind them.

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