WP195 Fieldwork rapport and the positioning of sociolinguist(ic)s

?Rapport? in fieldwork involves the temporary interactional suspension of stranger-hood and distance, and in traditional ethnography, it has positive value as a fieldwork ideal sketched in advisory rules of thumb. But in reflexive contemporary sociolinguistics, ?rapport? looks like a craft term concealing a great deal of ideological work, covering ethnocentricity in gate-keeping encounters and ?synthetic personalisation? in consumer culture. Can these two traditions be reconciled and if so, how? The paper proposes playback ? retrospective participant commentary on recordings of interaction ? as a productive reconfiguration of rapport which avoids the bad faith with which rapport is so easily identified.