Is disagreement in academic conversation a sign of knowledge superiority?

There is ample research on ‘disagreement’ in conversation analysis (CA) in diverse contexts and cultures. However, the literature on sources of disagreement is scarce. Moreover, little is known about how it is enacted in academic classroom discourse. This CA study examines participants’ orientations and interactional practices underlying disagreement in the context of academic discussions in the classroom. Drawing on the analysis of twelve multiparty academic discussions by students of social sciences, this paper argues that the assertion of a disagreement is primarily an epistemic act. The initial assertion functions to establish the speaker’s epistemic position on a specific issue, and the first disagreement is designed to display greater epistemic authority relative to that position. This kind of epistemic authority is particularly evidenced through emphatic prosody in the first disagreements in our data. Overall, we found that disagreement is not only a reflection of the differences in opinions but about how deliberation of epistemic authority is managed and maintained in conversation.