The turn-by-turn unfolding of “ dialogue ” : Examining participants ’ orientations to moments of transformative engagement

A central aim of experts, of ﬁ cials, and citizens meeting in the context of policymaking is to organize their encounters in ways that enable them to learn about the other ’ s perspectives – that is, to engage in “ dialogue ” . However, what is less understood are the interactional trajectories over which these transformative engagements are pursued. Using conversation analysis and drawing on a corpus of recorded Dutch public meetings on livestock farming, we identify a template describing one way “ dialogue ” unfolds. Key to this template is organizers ’ query that retroactively invokes citizens ’ apparent trouble and invites discussion of it. Citizens respond by elaborating the issue, resulting in participants ’ displays of understanding conveying a state of transformation. We discuss the implications for dialogue theory and practice.


Introduction
The emergence of heightened polarization and complex tensions pose special challenges for democratic governments addressing controversial policy decisions.Governments have sought to address such issues by organizing public meetings to interact with citizens and increase their engagement in various public matters (e.g., Clark, 2018;Einstein et al., 2019;Nabatchi and Amsler, 2014).Public meetings offer a venue for democratic engagement by enabling discussions between citizens, officials, and (scientific) experts on societal issues and/or decision-making concerning local-level developments.Typically, groups of people with different viewpoints, interests, and access to resources and power are brought together to engage in conversation.Ideally, such meetings allow for transformative modes of engagement described in philosophy and communication studies as "dialogue".
Despite the forms of mutual engagement and understanding often envisioned for these meetings, scholars have questioned their capacity to engender such profound, transformative forms of contact (e.g., Boholm, 2008;Buttny and Cohen, 2015;Rasch, 2019).Moreover, notwithstanding the frequent calls for "dialogue" in contemporary democratic societies faced with complicated and contentious issues (Alphandary and Koczanowicz, 2018;Hung-Baesecke and Chen, 2020), questions concerning what makes such dialogue possible and recognizable as a practical achievement largely remain unaddressed.The current study addresses these challenges by broadening the conceptualization of the possibility for dialogue, focusing on how participants produce such engagements and what they treat as transformative.Using conversation analysis, we examine a research corpus of video and audio recordings of public meetings concerning the contentious issue of livestock farming in the Netherlands.Whereas "dialogic moments" have been described as a communicative situation where people with different worldviews "understand and take on the reality of an other in a powerful way" (Black, 2008, p. 109), our study remains agnostic as to whether an actual change in mental states takes place, focusing our attention on how participants themselves come to index a movement from a state of possible or incipient conflict to one of agreement, alignment, and even familiarity.As we show, examining participants' talk and other body behavior allows us to establish what "orientations to transformation" look like in practice, and to document some of the recurrent interactional trajectories by which such displays of change emerge.This approach leads us to expand the definition of "transformation" beyond what is assumed to be cognitive change to include displays in participants' visible conduct that indicate transformations from one state to another.We therefore analyze "dialogic moments" as oriented-to moments of transformative engagement, that is, in terms of one party's orientations to unearthing issues indicated or alluded to by the other party and, following the latter party's elaboration of their trouble, the orientations of both parties to some change in their state or orientation.
We first outline how "dialogue" has been approached in other fields, and how our study elaborates on these insights.We then reflect on how conversation analytic research on troubles-talk may provide a basis for the interactional examination of "dialogic moments".In our analysis of Dutch public meetings on livestock farming, we identify a template describing one recurrent sequential context in which "dialogic moments" may emerge, and the interactional trajectory in which this sequence is embedded.

Approaches to dialogue
Scholars in philosophy and communication studies have considered the forms of involvement that may lead to and enable transformative engagements.Philosopher Martin Buber's (1958Buber's ( , 1988) ) distinction between "monologue" and "dialogue" is fundamental to most scholarship on dialogue (e.g., Black, 2008;Cissna and Anderson, 2008;Stewart and Koenig Kellas, 2020).From this perspective, dialogue enables people with different worldviews to learn about each other's experiences and perspectives, potentially leading each party to a new understanding and appreciation for the other's position and set of concerns (Buber, 1958).David Bohm's (1996) approach offers perhaps the best-known practice in this tradition of dialogue."Bohmian dialogue" emphasizes participants' ability to "co-construct meaning" (Bohm, 1996) and "think together" (Isaacs, 1999) through organized group interaction.
Critics of Bohm's conception of dialogue have argued that it limits notions of dialogue to special types of communication frames that are only suitable for specific kinds of situations (Barge and Little, 2002;Black, 2008).Drawing from Buber's ontological viewpoint on dialogue, various communication scholars have argued that dialogue should instead be conceived of as ephemeral and fleetingthat is, as existing in moments, rather than as an enduring relational state or a structured interaction format (e.g., Black, 2008;Cissna andAnderson, 1998, 2008;Pearce and Pearce, 2000;Sprain and Black, 2018;Stewart and Koenig Kellas, 2020).This conception of dialogue emphasizes that approaching "discussion" and "dialogue" as diametric opposites may be an oversimplification, as it is also possible to establish "dialogic moments" in "non-dialogic" talk (e.g., debate, discussion, and other interactions in which a turn-taking system pre-allocates most speaking turns to a single person or party, etc.; cf.Black, 2008).This suggests that the moments of "hearing" and "being heard" that lead to observable transformative understandings can be pursued across types of occasions where they may not be promoted or planned for.In a similar vein, research in political science has been interested in door-to-door conversations between people with contrasting perspectives and the transformative efficacy of such meetings (e.g., Broockman and Kalla, 2016;Harrison, 2020;Harrison and Michelson, 2017).Such studies suggest that occasions that promote "listening" and "perspective-taking" can be transformative even where views may appear entrenched, for instance, concerning topics like LGBT rights or abortion.
Thus, while communication and philosophy scholars have discussed the possibility of moments of transformative engagement, and while political science scholars have addressed changes in participants' beliefs to raise the potential efficacy of these moments, what remains to be addressed are the interactional trajectories over which these transformative engagements are pursued.The current study focuses on the turn-by-turn construction of "dialogic moments", addressing situations where participants indicate that the other's contributions were transformative to them and what exactly, in the course of the interaction, preceded such displays.
Where participants are aligned or in agreement, occasions for mutual engagement may be common, but these rarely produce understandings oriented to as transformative.By contrast, where parties have settled into opposing views or a state of mutual conflict, we find the greatest need for "dialogue", and yet these very conditions make it less likely to emerge.This study focuses on such a contested situation, where citizens suggest problems that the meetings' organizers have certainly heard of before.In these circumstances, there is a variety of possible next actions for organizers: they can simply move on, set the problem aside for now, respond to it as if it were some other action, et cetera.It is in the context of such alternatives that in cases where the issue is addressed, rather than ignored, brushed aside, or opposed, that "transformative engagement" can emerge as the practice that it is for participants.Prior conversation analytic research on talk about troubles (i.e., "troublestellings", Jefferson, 1988) and recipients' alignment with this activity provide insight into the interactional underpinnings of such discussions.

Troubles-tellings in conversation analysis
Research in conversation analysis has revealed that talk about troubles (including complaints about third parties) poses significant challenges for recipients, with their responsive actions setting alternative possible trajectories, some of which may be treated as inapposite (e.g., see Drew and Walker, 2009;Jefferson, 1988;Jefferson and Lee, 1981;Lindström and Sorjonen, 2013).For example, Jefferson and Lee's (1981) analyses of mundane encounters show that speakers discussing troubles regularly resist advice from recipients (which tends to disrupt such tellings) and accept affiliative or sympathetic responses that invite continued elaboration.This pattern suggests a preference for the latter type of uptake: Even where recipients offer well-fitted advice that displays an adequate understanding of the teller's problem, the shift occasioned by this movefrom a context in which they are aligned as recipients of a telling to one where troubles-tellers are positioned as recipients of advice may be problematic or premature.Jefferson and Lee (1981) contrast the orientation toward recipiency in mundane settings with the routine provision of advice in institutional settings established to provide services or assistance.Precisely because callers turn to these institutions for assistance, call-takers tend to avoid affiliative displays in favor of advice (Ruusuvuori, 2005(Ruusuvuori, , 2007;;Ruusuvuori and Lindfors, 2009).Beach and Dixson (2001) analyze how health providers in health appraisal interviews show attentiveness to patients' reportings and conclude that "any attempts to understand matters such [as] 'empathy' or 'listening attentively' as interactional achievements must examine specific and distinctive practices" (p.39, underlining in original).Having empirically specified the "windows of opportunity" for empathic uptake and elaboration, they show that ostensibly empathic turns may in practice disattend the patient's concerns in both function and consequence.

The interactional accomplishment of "dialogic moments"
In the current study, we draw a link between sequentially specified "windows of opportunity" and "dialogic moments" which can be pursued in them, drawing attention to the essentially ephemeral and fleeting quality of such windows and participants' orientations to the potentially profound effect that transformative engagements can have.We particularly focus on the windows of opportunity that can open when citizens indicate troubles or complaints, and the ways professionals in public meetings "do openness discursively" (Sprain and Ivancic, 2017, p. 242) by inviting citizens to expand on these.As has long been established, the turn-taking system for conversation (Sacks et al., 1974) provides the procedural infrastructure through which participants' intersubjective understandings of their joint actions and sociosequential context are updated on a turn-by-turn basis, including whatever disagreements, conflict, and divergent perspectives these may entail.In this report, we are interested in situations where, following some possible conflict or trouble, organizers display a new understanding of citizens' set of issues and the interactional efforts by which they are brought to the surface.Rather than using "cognitive indicators" to assess participants' putative underlying cognitions, we focus on the displayed understandings of transformation that emerge over interactional trajectories (cf. Te Molder and Potter, 2005).We examine the methods that organizers use to display their understanding of citizens' concerns, for example, upshot formulations and descriptive explications that incorporate such concerns.In deploying practices to convey a (new) appreciation of citizens' concerns, organizers can signal a transformation in the sense that they publicly reveal a commitment to, and an understanding of, a set of concerns newly topicalized by citizens.In turn, we consider how citizens display orientations to having been heard, for example by using visible conduct such as nodding to convey acceptance or shifts in practices of person reference to indicate a change in the participant's relationship status (cf.Raymond, 2016), and the sequential consequences of these displayed orientations.Consequently, a crucial element of displayed transformative engagements is that they are not located in a single turn; rather, they involve sequences of actions by which participants show a change in either their "cognitive" or "emotional" orientation, or both.Engagements oriented-to as transformative thereby occur over the course of the entire sequence of actions identified above and can be displayed by both citizens in attendance and organizers.
In brief, this article develops a situated, interactional approach to understanding the practical accomplishment of transformative engagements.Our study addresses "dialogic moments" by examining their interactional establishment in public encounters.

Data and method
Our data consist of 10 recorded Dutch public meetings (approximately 17 h, recorded between 2016 and 2021) where research, policies, and social issues concerning livestock farming are discussed.Data collection and analytical procedures were approved by The Social Sciences Ethics Committee of Wageningen University and Research and the Ethical Review Committee of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.Participants of the meetings were informed of our research and were asked to participate in it prior to the meeting.
Intensive livestock farming has emerged as a source of contestation in the Netherlands.Initially, the rapid expansion of large-scale livestock farms led to conflict regarding issues such as landscape impairment, environmental pollution, and animal welfare.Following the largest worldwide outbreak of Q-fever (a disease transmitted from infected goats to humans, Kraaij-Dirkzwager et al., 2017) the potential public health risks associated with livestock farming emerged as focal concern.This view intensified as public health researchers identified other possible risks, such as pneumonia (e.g., IJzermans et al., 2018).Against this backdrop, public discussion of, and protests against further increases in the scale of farms have intensified.
Table 1 shows the different meetings we used for this study.
We used an inductive method for the analysis of language and embodied conduct in social interaction developed within conversation analysis to identify and analyze moments with dialogic potential (Sidnell and Stivers, 2013).Conversation analysts regard language as a resource for the accomplishment of recognizable social actions, such as complaining, questioning, and greeting (Levinson, 2013).Analyses are based on a detailed investigation of the turn-by-turn development of interaction to examine what kind of social actions and activities are being performed with talk.All recordings were transcribed using the Jefferson (2004) transcription system, which captures the phonetic, sequential, and prosodic characteristics of interaction (see Appendix A).For this paper, transcripts were translated to English, and identity-related information was pseudonymized.Translations are as literal as possible.In some cases, we made practical concessions to ensure the translation's readability.

Analysis
In the following, we examine occasions in which organizers of public meetings invite citizens to elaborate a trouble or problem they have indicated or alluded to but not yet raised in a focused, accusatory, or objectionable way.In doing so, organizers initiate "retro-sequences" (Schegloff, 2007), a sequence initiated "as a response to a prior speaker's action, but where that prior action did not make such a response conditionally relevant" (Lerner, 2004, p. 252).We consider how citizens elaborate the issue and engage with these troubles in ways that prompt both parties to convey/demonstrate that, or how, their understanding has been transformed, and the matter resolved.In these situations, organizers recurrently move to a new topic or next activity without objection or continued displays of concern by citizens, demonstrating a mutually oriented-to closing of the issue-at-hand.To facilitate our analysis, we provide the following schematic depiction of the range of components consequential for how organizers solicit and respond to citizens' concerns (Fig. 1): These meetings concerned a research project led by a public health institute in which farmers and neighboring residents collaboratively measure the air quality in their area.In these meetings, farmers and residents discussed the project together with officials and experts. 1 video-recorded so-called "vision meeting" (total duration: 1.5 h)

officials, farmers, agricultural advisors
This meeting was organized by a municipality to inform farmers about their future prospects in case they needed to close their farm due to new policies.
The first step in this template is "organizers' initiation of a retro-sequence", reflecting our finding that a citizen's "submerged" concern does not reveal itself before being identified as such by the organizer's retro-move, and therefore cannot be placed first.Conversely, what in retrospect is treated as a potential citizen concern does not make relevant one specific response from organizers, who can address the concern, but can also move on and ignore it.
The next two sections explicate the sequential practices and actions depicted in this template, using examples from our data to show their moment-by-moment deployment as the possibility of dialogic engagement emerges and unfolds.In the first section, we will go through steps A to B of the template, and in the second section, we will go through steps C to G of the template.We will use the same examples in each sectionthat is, we show four examples, but we will divide each of them in half.This allows us to capture the sequences of action within all four situations.

Initiation of retro-sequence & explication of trouble
We begin by examining how professionals ratify the possibility for dialogic engagement by posing queries that convey an open or sympathetic orientation to (what is treated as) a citizen's concern, critique, or problem.The relevance for doing so may emerge from (a) the citizen's display of abstract or generic concerns, (b) the potential (unilateral) resolution of the prior sequence, and/or (c) the recipient's visible preoccupation with some trouble.Moreover, the ways that citizens respond to organizers' invitations to elaborate their issues, mark elaboration as potentially risky or delicate, even when they have been directly invited to do so.
Excerpt 1 comes from an information meeting where a scientist from a public health institute presents findings from research commissioned by the local municipality.In the meeting, the scientist has just emphasized that local residents should work collaboratively with other residents and farmers in seeking solutions regarding environmental problems (omitted from transcript).In response, a local resident (Resident6 in the transcript) offers a generic complaint about the processnamely that such collaborations fail because they seek input from one group of currently impacted residents while leaving out others who may find the proposed solution objectionable (lines 1-9).The "look"-preface (line 3) seems to be used as a way of 'doing being open', displaying an honest or open discussion of a (potentially) objectionable issue.The complaint poses a possible conundrum.On the one hand, the absence of details identifying an actual instance of exclusion or injustice makes responses proposing substantive remedies or reassurances impracticable.On the other, by addressing the complaint to the municipal official, the resident may be alluding to a specific occasion or problematic solution.Notably, then, the official invites the resident to provide an example of the issue.

Resident6
Ik vind die laatste wel interessant en dan vooral welke richting-richting I think that last one is interesting and then especially which direction-direction 2.
met de betrokkenen die d'r last van hebben?with the stakeholders who experience nuisance from it? 5.
veroorzaakt, (.) die niet betrokken worden bij et bespreken van het who do not get included in the discussion of the 7.
((nods in the direction of municipality official)) 10.
Municipality / Heb je daar een voorbee:ld?van?Do you have an example:? of that?
Evidently, the official's query (line 10) probes the possibility that the resident's complaint reflects a partially submerged concern by inviting the resident to raise it for possible discussion.
The moments that follow the official's query suggest that it invites a potentially fraught trajectory for its recipients.The resident's suggestion that another resident should respond (line 11), his request to turn off the camera (line 14), and the laughter he invites (and receives) across both utterances, surface a shared appreciation for the delicate nature of the response invited by the organizer.We can further note that the resident's deflections and delays across these utterances also position him as reluctantly putting the issue forward, thereby avoiding any appearance that he is eager to confront the official.Having prepared a context for his response in these waysand achieved some initial public alignment via the shared laughterthe resident then pivots to responding (line 16) using a joke-to-serious "no" (Schegloff, 2001).[jeje-je woont samen en je probeert knelpunten op te lossen he `?[ ¼youyou-you live together and you try to solve bottlenecks right?¼ 18.
[dus ik-ik denk ook he `? de kern met de-met de doorgaande weg, ¼so I-I-think too right?the core of the village with the-with the main road, 19.
hebben In his response, the resident frames his detailing of a past decision as raising an "in principle" concern (line 16) related to his "curiosity" (line 33) about the municipality's methods for identifying stakeholders.In this way, he avoids a direct challenge or complaint regarding the municipality's decisions in the case, even as he uses their perceived failings to adequately address his concern and invite a substantive response to them.In brief, this example showed the first steps (A-B) of our template (Fig. 1) describing one way in which moments oriented to by participants as transformative engagement, may unfold.One of the official representatives targets a problem that has been alluded to but not raised explicitly by the resident.Her retro-query is designed to convey an open orientation to the resident's concerns, resulting in the resident's subsequent explication of the trouble.
Excerpt 2A follows a similar pattern, in that an organizer treats a resident's turn as indicating some problem by showing an attempt to expose the trouble.In this case, however, the organizer's query is preceded by a possible disagreement between the organizer and resident.This case comes from a meeting organized by a public health institute concerning a research project in which farmers and neighboring residents collaboratively measured the local air quality.At the meeting, the organizers used findings from a questionnaire filled out by these participants to prompt discussion.Prior to the transcript, the facilitator tentatively suggested that solutions to the community members' shared problems may lie in seeking mutual understanding.One resident begins to disagree with this (lines 1, 5).After a further intervention by the organizer (line 6), the resident defends her position.She alludes to a problem by noting a significant change in her position and beliefs over the past years (lines 8-9).The facilitator seeks to surface the trouble by inviting the resident to state the reason for this change (line 10).
Excerpt 2A Citizen science project 2 The facilitator's "and"-prefaced query invites an affiliative expansion of the resident's prior turn (Deppermann and Spranz-Fogasy, 2011), thereby asking the resident to go 'on record' with her concern.Nevertheless, as in the last case (see lines 11-12 below), the resident treats the query as inviting a delicate or sensitive elaboration, using methods designed to continue a "stepwise unpacking" of the issue (Heinemann and Traverso, 2009;Lerner, 2013).Rather than responding directly, the resident continues to refer to these events allusively, leaving it up to her recipients to make sense of her turn.She thereby treats "what is happening around her" as a delicate matter, but simultaneously as something everyone will know.Indeed, as we show below (Excerpt 7A), the facilitator evidently knows what the resident is referring to, thereby treating it as a known-in-common context for the discussion (i.e., it is treated as something that would have changed any person's mind).
In the previous examples, when residents hint at certain problems they are experiencing, the organizer invites them to go 'on record' by explicating the source or nature of their problem.In Excerpt 3 we can observe a related pattern.Following an expert's response to a resident's formulation of his concerns, the resident's ambivalent invitation to move on poses a similar choice: On the one hand, organizers can take it at face value and move on, or they can explore the basis for the resident's reluctant acquiescence and re-open the sequence by seeking to understand.As in our prior cases, the institutional actor poses a query, seeking to explore the concern.
This fragment comes from an information meeting on the proposed expansion of a goat farm and the risks related to living in the vicinity of livestock farms.Several years ago, a Q-fever epidemic occurred in the area, a disease transmitted from goats to human beings.Before the start of the fragment, one scientist on the panel mentioned that Q-fever does not only occur in goats, but also in, for instance, cows and rats, information which participants of the meeting also have on paper.A resident then voices his concern regarding the possibility of a new Q-fever outbreak (lines 1-8).Another scientist replies to this to reassure the resident.She designs her turn using extreme case formulations (Pomerantz, 1986)dthat it "really" concerns a disease which "only very occasionally" occurred among farmers (lines 10-11)dwhich downplay the threat and treat the resident's worries as misplaced.This becomes a way of saying that even if it can occur in other animals, Q-fever had never caused any major problems.The resident, however, does not show himself to be reassured.He initiates his turn with a disaligning "yes but" (Steensig and Asmub, 2005), indicating to the facilitator they should continue (lines 12-15).This move, including the murmuring, conveys 'dissatisfaction' and 'not being heard', but also urges the issue being addressed.The scientist treats the resident's turn as reluctant acquiescence (line 16), leaving open whether or how to resolve the problem.This is when the facilitator moves back and reveals that he wants to surface the resident's concerns and deal with it (lines 18-19): Resident4 wat eh-dit antwoord heeft mij meer veront[rust (.) als ik voor die tijd was.
What uh-this answer has made me more [worried (.) than I was before.

2.
en weer niet ri-alleen richting geiten maar als-er staatand again not ri-only in the direction of goats but if-here it says-3.
d'r werd net ook al gezegd over koeienziekte (dat) was, e::ha moment ago cow's disease was also referred to (that) was, u::h-4.
ja dan zit ik tochyeah then I'm still-5.
da's[eh-ik lees hier dat ook via [ratten en dat soort[eh that's¼uh-I read here that it also via [rats and that kind of¼uh 6.
[THE RECORDER FAILED TO RECORD FOR APPROXIMATELY 3 SECONDS] 7.
does not take away (.) my worries.
( ["ik wor alleen nog maar meer verontrust" he `?[ ¼"I'm worried even more" right?¼ The facilitator repairs his initial content question into a formulation (Steensig and Larsen, 2008), providing the nature of the concern indicated by the resident.His turn incorporates specific elements of the prior speaker's turn and invites him to elaborate on his concerns.
In the continuation of the conversation, we see how the facilitator's query results in the resident unpacking his trouble.
ziektes >denk ik< maar hier gaat het me over Q-koorts diseases >I think< but here I'm concerned about Q-fever 22.
en wij zijn nu vanochtend bij mekaar gekomen naar aanleiding van eh .hHand we have come together this morning because of uh .hH23.
de uitbreiding van e:h van [geiten, the expansion of u:h of [goats,

24.
maar ik lees hier ook dat bij andere dieren ook voorkomt ja? but I also read here that in other animals it also occurs yes? 25.
( ) het is ook overdraagbaar bij [varkens heb ik in de vragen gelezen, ( ) it's also transmittable through pigs I have read in the questions, 29.
en al [kan er (.) tot nu toe nooit een uitbraak geweest zijn? and even though up to now there [cannot have been an outbreak?31.
.hH bij de geiten was het ook bekend voor tweeduizendzeuven,[ .hHconcerning the goats it was also known before two thousand and seven,¼ 32.
[en in tweeduizendzeuven is [toch een hele grote uitbraak ¼and in two thousand and seven there still was a really large outbreak 33.bij de mensen geweest within people¼ 34.
dus het kan bij die andere ook (.) [gebeuren ¼so it can happen with those others as well The resident's negative formulation in line 20 ("I hadn't ever known") indicates the "complainability" of the matter (cf.Schegloff, 2005), and the next part of his turn conveys his worries about the issue.He reports that while the meeting was organized to discuss the potential expansion of a goat farm in their hometown, apparently the issue of Q-fever is not an issue exclusively linked to goats (lines 22-24).Next, he explicates the nature of his concerns: the possibility of another Q-fever outbreak, but through some animal other than goats (lines 30-34).The facilitator's turn thus is effective in bringing the resident's view to the table.Nevertheless, while being invited to surface his issues, the perturbations in his disclosure (pauses, restarts, "uh's"; lines 22-23, 25-27, 29) display the difficulty or sensitivity of the issue (Stokoe, 2010).
Another practice by which professionals can ask for an expansion on some indication of trouble is providing a gist of the problem indicated, which then makes relevant some response by the troubles-talk speaker.This is seen in the excerpt below, which comes from a meeting on a citizen science project.Here, a farmer introduces a personal issue about the opposing interests he and his neighbors may have.The farmer's turn is produced with frequent in-turn hesitations (lines 2-9), by which he displays reluctance to present his problem.His turn is formulated as an if-then structure (lines 1-6): If his wishes and those of his neighbor are diametrically opposed, then he already knows for certain he can never reach what he wants.The farmer thereby displays an emotional stance, conveying a level of frustration.By prefacing his turn with "so" (line 7, 9), the farmer articulates the upshot of his prior talk and therefore as a possibly final unit in his utterance (Raymond, 2004).However, he concludes his turn with a trail-off if, and does not complete his turn, which characterizes his turn as delicate or problematic (Chevalier, 2009;Stokoe, 2010).Consequently, his turn has specific features of 'unresolved concerns', which the facilitator picks up on by inviting an expansion on the issue (line 10).The facilitator reformulates and reuses recognizable items from the farmer's turn.From the farmer's talk the facilitator derives a notion the farmer did not use himself: "dialogue".He thus introduces a new term, which puts the farmer's concerns in a new light.The facilitator thereby not only displays having heard the farmer's concerns, but also presents some candidate understanding of this concern.

Excerpt
The farmer modifies and elaborates on the facilitator's turn and produces a story in response, thereby explicating what his issue is: Farmer als-als't echt e:h:-als't echt e:hm: e:h e:h if-if it really u:h-if it really u:hm: u:h u:h 14.
draagvlak he? dat k-dat hebben we ook eh-dat-dat levert ook support right? that k-we also have that uh-that-that also results in 16.
maar als we dat kortbij ook niet meer hebben?but if we don't have that close to us either?18.
then-then it does become really [dangerous.
The perturbations in the initial part of the farmer's disclosure (line 13) reveal the difficulty or sensitivity of the matter (Stokoe, 2010).By prefacing his turn with "look" (line 14), the farmer indicates to redirect his turn away from (merely) a typeconforming "yes"/"no" response (Raymond, 2003) and towards some alternative (Sidnell, 2007).The "look"-preface seems to be used as a way of 'doing being frank'as in a direct, honest, or open discussion of an objectionable matter.Whereas the facilitator asked him to confirm that "dialogue" is not a starting point for the farmer, the farmer indicates that in general, farmers already have a lack of support from people "far away" (lines 14-15), but that it would become really dangerous when they also lose support closer to home (lines 17-18).He thereby conveys that broader societal skepticism might be acceptable, but his primary concern is with a loss of support from their local community.
In summary, the cases in this section have shown the ways in which organizers' retro-queries target residents' and farmers' apparent indication of, or allusion to specific concerns, critiques, or problems.The queries are designed to initiate further discussion of the issue where the indication or allusion did not make this specifically relevant in the first place.These queries thereby create an environment where orientations to transformations can relevantly occur, as we will show in the next section.

Acknowledgement and alignment & displays of transformation in state or orientation
This section demonstrates the final steps in the template we have sketched (steps C-G).The examples show how the explication of the trouble (Section 5.1) results in forms of acknowledgement and alignment conveying 'transformation' in both the citizen indicating the trouble and the organizer inviting discussion of the trouble.Such displays allow parties to achieve a more stable closure to the problematic sequence or topic (cf.Schegloff, 2007) and in that way open up moving to a next one without any unresolved matters that may otherwise haunt the encounter.In this respect, practices for sequence closure offer the resources by which participants can show whether their issues have been addressed in satisfactory ways (cf.Raymond and Zimmerman, 2016).These claims will be demonstrated by providing the continuation of the excerpts discussed in the previous section (a few lines are repeated in the excerpts).
Excerpt 5 shows the aftermath of Excerpt 1.After the resident has explicated his complaint, his points are acknowledged and validated by the municipality's alderman.The alderman displays an understanding of the resident's problem and indicates that he shares the same view as the resident.He does this by claiming that the problem is an ongoing concern for the council (lines 40-65).It is on the basis of this understanding and this claim from the alderman that the resident can leave the problem with him.Ultimately, the resident reveals that the issue has been addressed satisfactorily by interactionally marking a movement in the relationship between him and the alderman (line 69).The alderman's first reaction "That's a fair point" (line 40) validates the resident's concern and suggests that this is an issue the alderman also cares about.He then goes one step further by showing he cares about the issue.The alderman informs the resident about a budget meeting next week where the council will discuss the issue (line 41).In his turn, a similar story as the one the resident described is stated in that he emphasizes the importance of involving stakeholders in a timely manner (lines 51-54).Consequently, he produces a "second story", which is a practice known to be powerful in displaying understanding (Arminen, 2004).Importantly, the alderman recruits other council members present in the meeting (line 68).Thus, the official shows that he now understands what the resident's problem is and demonstrates that he shares an orientation to its significance by revealing and explicating some aspects of the council's procedures sensitive to the resident's concerns.
Throughout the alderman's turn, the resident, through his nodding and backchannels, shows that he is satisfied with how his issue is being addressed.Additional evidence for the resident's satisfaction with the alderman's response is seen in the overt other-correction done in "You're allowed to say 'you'" (line 69).With this, the resident invites the alderman to use the Dutch pronoun je 'you', which is less formal and more familiar, where previously he had been addressing the resident as jou 'you', which is more formal and polite.By proposing a (grammatically) more intimate and equal relationship, the resident indexes a movement from a state of possible or incipient conflict to one of agreement, alignment, and even familiarity, which the alderman aligns with by smiling (line 70).By continuing her presentation (line 72), the researcher displays an understanding that this could be a place where they could amicably close the issue, which is acknowledged by another resident in attendance who poses a question (lines 73-76).The resident indeed reveals that the issue does not require any further expansion or pursuit by not contributing any further to the discussion.Thus, the resident shows a change in his orientation by no longer displaying a preoccupation with the government (not) taking up his issue.
Organizers can also make visible that the contributions of residents or farmers in attendance were consequential for them by formulating an upshot of the prior talk.See for instance the continuation of Excerpt 4 below.Here, the facilitator, after having heard the farmer's concerns, reveals that, and how, he understands these concerns by formulating the farmer's prior turns ( line ja. Yes.
en je bent met zo'n kleine groep[ and you're with such a small group¼ 26.
We can see how, by virtue of the facilitator's display of understanding, the farmer moves from his initially displayed unresolved issues (see Excerpt 4), to emphatically confirming the farmer's turns (lines 21-27).In demonstrating that his concerns have been heard, he opens up the possibility for moving to a next topic or sequence.And indeed, the facilitator treats the matter as resolved for now by concluding the current topic (line 28), which the farmer ratifies (line 29).
Excerpt 7 shows the continuation of Excerpt 2. Despite the rather abstractly formulated complaint of the resident (lines 11-12), the facilitator endeavors to demonstrate his understanding of what the resident was referring to (line 13).As in the prior example, the facilitator formulates an upshot of the resident's talk (lines 13-20) and displays that he has a new understanding of the resident's problems by virtue of her contributions.Resident [He? (.) maar[e:h (.) de boerenluchten overstijgen.

26.
Resident Hehe Hehe The facilitator demonstrates an understanding of how the resident's views have been changed, and what the likely source of that change was.The resident elaborates on the issue by identifying herself as "a farmer's daughter" (line 21), which entitles her to know what farming smells like.However, she suggests that the farming smell has become unbearable (line 25).Having categorized herself as someone familiar with the smell of country air, she positions herself as not merely complaining and thus "working against the indexical category of dispositional moaner" (Edwards, 2005, p. 24).She thereby conveys that she is not 'just' a sensitive person, and that she generally understands farming, but that the situation has become so extreme that even she cannot take it anymore.
The facilitator summarizes the resident's prior contribution and offers an interpretation of the persistence of the problem (line 27).In doing so, the facilitator conveys that the resident's utterances have prompted him to see the severity of the issue as it is perceived by the resident.
Facilitator Dus d'r moet heel wat gebeuren zeg maar om-So a lot needs to happen so to say to-28.
Resident Ik denk dat d'r heel wat is gebeurd voordat dat bij mij I think that a lot has happened before that has reached 29.
de [grens heeft bereikt ja. the limit for me yes.
Facilitator E:hm ja we ronden wel af hoor.U:hm yeah we are going to wrap up PRT.

42.
Facilitator Ja bij jou is't nog negen uur dus dan >kunne< we-Yes for you it's still nine o'clock so then we >can-< 43.
((laughter in the room)) We see how the participants exit from the sequence with increasingly general assessments (Raymond and Heritage, 2006) and matched reciprocal agreements.After the resident assesses the situation as "very sad" and "a shame" (lines 32-33), the facilitator claims to understand her situation (lines 34-36), which then is responded to with another token of agreement by the resident (line 37).The subsequent idiomatic expression of another resident (line 38) displays affiliation with the displayed emotional concerns by the prior speaker (cf.Drew and Holt, 1988), which is followed by the resident's high-pitched agreement token (line 39).The parties thus come into alignment regarding why continued negotiation over the current situation (see also Excerpt 2) is not a plausible way forward.The facilitator uses this sequential environment of reciprocal agreements as the place to initiate closure of the event, displaying an understanding that this could be a place where they could harmoniously depart.His move does not result in the resident's objection or continued displays of concern, by which she shows the issue can be properly closed.Further evidence that this engagement has been transformative can be found in the facilitator's joke, which conveys that he has pushed back closing the issue (line 42).Now that the parties have treated the matter as 'appropriately' closed, the facilitator moves on.
Another way that institutional actors can demonstrate that citizens' explications of troubles have led them to a different understanding, is by inviting the experts present in the meeting to address these troubles.In reformulating the matter, actors will unavoidably reveal the adequacy of their understanding of the citizen's perspective.In transferring the concern to others, they demonstrate the ways they make the surfaced concern consequential, by inviting experts to address it.See Excerpt 8 below, which follows Excerpt 3.After the resident has elucidated his concerns, the facilitator translates these with a clear orientation to the experts having to deal with them (lines 35-45).The facilitator reformulates the resident's concerns as a question for the scientific panel.This demonstrates not only his understanding of the citizen's concern, but also an understanding of how that concern might be suitably addressed by the scientists.By framing the issue as "an important question" (line 37), he treats the resident's doubt and concerns as legitimate.Moreover, in mentioning that there "still are concerns" (line 45), the facilitator suggests that some other response from the experts is due, and specifically one which addresses the resident's concerns.By continuously nodding (line 83, 85, 87, 118, 124, 127) when a scientist and an environmental health physician answer this question, the resident is aligning to the experts' answer-in-progress, and positions himself as the person who has the rights to indicate whether this constitutes an answer to the question.Before, the resident showed apparent dissatisfaction at not being listened to, whereas now, his nodding conveys he is being listened to.Thus, insofar as before it was his embodied display of preoccupation with the trouble (see Excerpt 3), his embodied acceptance through nodding is the contrasting alternative.This shows a change in orientation on the resident's part, as he shows to have let go of his preoccupation with the issue.Moreover, when another resident in attendance introduces a new topic (line 128), the resident reveals to align with the closing of the raised issue by not pursuing an alternative outcome or expanding the issue.

Discussion and conclusions
Public meetings on contested issues promise to fulfill an important democratic goal by offering people with different points of view and unequal access to resources the opportunity to have a "dialogue" about the issues, where each side might hear and learn from the other's perspective.
We revealed one dialogic trajectory, leaving open there might be others, which functioned as a potential start of moments oriented to by participants as somehow transformative for them.Our analysis thereby demonstrated that "dialogue" may have an interactional logic of its own, as exemplified by and laid out in the proposed template (see Fig. 1).
Our findings have some resemblance to Lerner's (2013) work, which revealed the ways interlocutors may collaborate in producing the description of sensitive matters.Lerner demonstrated how speakers may, for instance, "doing searching for a word", thereby providing an occasion for recipients to complete the turn, and thus "for the social possibility of the collaborative realization of delicate formulations" (Lerner, 2013, p. 106).In the situations we have focused on, citizens gesture toward some problem, but do not elaborate on it any further.In this way, they are oriented to the delicate nature of bringing forward the issue in public.Whereas organizers of meetings may invoke a variety of moves to shape the interaction (cf.Vasilyeva, 2018), we have focused on those very instances where they indicate a "stance of openness" (Sprain and Ivancic, 2017).In these cases, they encourage an explication of what is treated as the submerged trouble and convey that they are willing to hear more about it by posing a query which invites expansion on the issue.However, this requires the troubles-talk speaker to then go on record even more explicitly.It thus takes some 'bravery' on the part of the organizers to invite explication of the concern, and some 'bravery' on the part of the citizen voicing that concern and be honest and true about it.We therefore argue that the progressivity of these sequences is evidence for the interactional emergence of trust between institutional actors and citizens, in that they both reveal attempts to expose a delicate issue.
The contingent nature of organizers' query is worth highlighting here.In the examined situations, it is not the case that citizens' concerns and complaints mandate a response from the organizers or set in motion a topic for discussion.Professionals could have moved on in other cases.We argue that this specifically characterizes professionals' actions as "dialogic": By pointing backwards and posing a query which addresses the indication of trouble as its source (Schegloff, 2007), professionals dialogically engage with the concern and display their analyses of what aspects of that concern are worth exploring (cf.Spranz-Fogasy et al., 2020).The 'sailing against the interactional current' that this retro-query does, seems to represent an essential move in turning the sequence into what participants orient to as dialogue.On the part of the concerned citizens, the ways they produce their turns display the delicacy of bringing their issue forward, which suggests that there is not so much an issue of outright conflict but of trouble still malleable.If someone is straightforwardly rejecting someone or something, it no longer is an addressable concern.It shows a kind of settled position that the person has, which is immovable, or immutable, at least within a dialogic exchange.
Along these lines, this study further contributes to our understanding of "meetings as a collaborative achievement" (Vasilyeva, 2018, p. 435).That is, a crucial element of these dialogic situations is that both organizers and citizens (inter) actively build citizens' trouble as addressable.The examples we focused on reveal that there are concerns, that could harden into something more, but organizers treat these as addressable at a point where these have not been hardened (yet), and they can be moved.Through this, organizers also convey that citizens' problems are worth addressing publicly, as more than incidental or one-off, transforming a local resident's or farmer's talk from (merely) a citizen's concern into a legitimate and ratified societal concern.
Within ethnomethodology, scholars have been skeptical of any perspective that treats the minds of participants as having a more consequential or obdurate reality than what they accountably do in interaction with others.Ethnomethodologists have thereby treated questions such as "how can one know there are other minds" and "how do we know the content of other minds" as practical problems for participants to interaction.In the current study, we see people trying to deal with these practical problems within the course of these public meetings.We have shown how the meeting organizers in these situations take up what has been said and demonstrate that it has been consequential for what they do or say next, thereby displaying a renewed understanding of citizens' issues that initially remained 'under the radar'.On the part of citizens that displayed consequentiality in the subsequent trajectory of the meeting visibly results in some form of amelioration of whatever trouble or concern was being displayed.Citizens thereby orient to their concern being registered and heard by the civic organization, and as leading to a transformation in their engagement.A stable closure to the topic or sequence is demonstrably achieved when parties display understanding and alignment and allow the parties to move to a next one (see Schegloff and Sacks, 1973), without any unresolved matters lingering or casting a shadow over their move to a next sequence (see Van Burgsteden and Te Molder, 2021 for similar situations in which such closure is not achieved).In this sense, another theoretical contribution of our study is that it describes a form of sequence closure for public meetings, and some of the interactional procedures by which contentious sequences get resolved in these meetings.
Dialogue scholars have already shifted attention from the view of "dialogue" as merely occurring within structured and organized interactions (e.g., in the form of stakeholder participation or civic deliberation), to the ephemeral nature of dialogue (see e.g., Black, 2008;Cissna and Anderson, 2008).However, by emphasizing the 'profound' or 'deep' meaning of dialogue, dialogue theory still diverts attention away from its 'mundane' appearance, that is, dialogue as it appears in all sorts of human encounters, spontaneously, not anticipated, as it were.Dialogue as a more quotidian way of engagement suggests its applicability to many more situations or venues than those organized as (supposedly creating) dialogue.This view on dialogue does not want to replace other ways in which dialogue is said to occur, such as through facilitated dialogue or civic deliberation groups.On the contrary, highlighting its mundane character indicates the potential of dialogue in a range of occasions.We propose that these trajectories oriented to by participants themselves as moments of "hearing" and "being heard" (in our case starting with a retro-sequence), are essential to dialogue.That is, by mutually closing the issue, participants indicate they can move on to a next topic or sequence, thereby ratifying the other's moves as having dealt with their issues in satisfactory ways.This suggests that "being heard" may already be sufficient in some cases.Of course, participants could go further by exploring collaborative solutions to indicated problems, but displays of "being heard" are likely to be the required foundation upon which such other aims can be achieved.
In this exploratory study we have merely scratched the surface, and it would be interesting to zoom in on other practices that professionals employ to map the practices that might enhance dialogue.As we focused on a specific environment in which stakes are high and the issue discussed is prominent on policy agendas, the question arises whether the specific practices described here are produced in similar ways in other (institutional) contexts.A limitation of this study is that we closely looked at these specific practices but not at the effects of these practices in the longer term.For example, we have not established whether the interactional practices discussed in this study can be associated with the longer-term generation of what participants would report as new ideas or improved forms of engagement (cf. Bohm, 1996;Isaacs, 1999).But the 'ordinary' nature of dialogue and its relative ubiquity, in the sense that many utterances can provide the steppingstone for what participants treat as the start of a 'good conversation', also holds promise for an increasingly divided society.

Table 1
Overview of recorded meetings.
en op welk gebied ga je mensen betrekken die (.) er nog geen and at what area are you going to involve people who (.) do not 36.lastvanhebben maar d'r nog last van gaan krijge?experience nuisance yet but who are going to experience nuisance? 19).