This article examines the ways in which academics (faculty and graduate students) go about claiming an nteractionally appropriate face during intellectual discussion. In particular, it examines discussion situations to see how participants enacted the institutional and intellectual identities that prior interviews had suggested were salient. Discourse analysis of the discussions suggests that different intellectual identities were established through some identifiably distinct ways by which speakers framed the work they presented. Institutional identity (rank) was enacted through three primary activities: talk and silence patterns, question types, and responses to noncomprehension. Implications of this work for other areas of inquiry are highlighted.
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