Membership categorisation, category-relevant spaces, and perception-in-action: The case of disputes between cyclists and drivers

- Analyses perspicuous setting of traffic disputes available through members own recordings (via YouTube).
- Considers the organisation of non-person categorisations in particular relation to 'category-relevant' accomplishment of space.
- Proposes a revised observers' maxim sensitive to members' handling of ongoing action and constitutive elements of context.

This article is concerned with disputes between cyclists and drivers. The analysis describes members' categorisational practices that provide for the seeing of an 'incorrect' use of the road and for the production and relevancy of the context of the disputes (the traffic system). The analysis describes members' in situ and in vivo accomplishments of (spatial) rights and obligations in and through relational categorisations of road users and objects, their actions, and visually available resources, in relation to the 'proper use of the road' and the gestalt contexture of the common place traffic scene. The article revisits the suggestion of Hester and Francis that the organisation of categorisations in talk may provide technical access to the ways in which members organize the visual perception of the commonplace scene. The article closes by proposing a revised “observers' maxim” that takes in to account the highly indexical nature of observation and categorisation in and as the context in which observations are made.