Moving in and out of framings: activity contexts in talks with young unemployed people within a training project

This paper is concerned with talk activities in and through which parties simulate another talk activity. Data are drawn from a social and vocational training project for young unemployed people involving talk activities of multiple ambiguous kinds. In particular, we analyze simulated job interviews in which the young people are supposed to learn how to behave in real job interviews, but the parties seem to orient to several other goals simultaneously. Participants do not sustain a unified definition of what is going on and activities involve complexities and hybridities on several planes. This allows us to probe issues having to do with concepts like context, frame, activity type, and genre. In terms of theory, we challenge some approaches to context as developed within Conversation Analysis.