This short paper gives a summary of a keynote address presented at the Australasian Institute for Ethnomethodology and Conversational Analysis (AIEMCA) conference held in Brisbane

about legal practice in the studies of work tradition, reminded the audience about different positions in ethnomethodology/conversation analysis (abbreviated in this paper as ethno/CA), and looked at some data. The main argument was that a communicative act is understood by participants as part of a wider context than the turns at talk that immediately preceed and follow the communicative act, even if this cannot be demonstrated in the conversation. To give an example, the language used, even the content of the argument, does not make this paper controversial. The controversial nature of the paper arises from how it is read, and from how we understand and produce the ethnographic context of ethno/CA, or communication studies, as academic fields