Contemporary TV series and movies reflect and shape cultural understandings of sexual consent and refusal, crucial for promoting bodily autonomy, preventing assault, and fostering healthy relationships. This study analyzes 124 sex initiation scenes, focusing on 35 cases of verbal and embodied refusals. Using a critical conversation-analytic approach, the analysis reveals that a verbal “no” rarely operates as a straightforward indicator of unwillingness. Instead, it often co-occurs with expressions of desire and accounts unrelated to refusal, embedding it in a complex assemblage of interactional resources, especially in morally ambiguous contexts. By contrast, physical immobility often communicates an unambiguous refusal, though its recognition is inconsistent. Male passivity tends to be treated as rejection, while female passivity is frequently disregarded, reflecting entrenched gendered sexual scripts. These scripts perpetuate disparities in how sexual boundaries are communicated and understood, complicating the affirmative consent model's reliance on explicit cues such as “no means no” and “yes means yes.” By examining portrayals of sexual refusal in popular media, the study throws light on the limitations of such simplistic consent slogans, arguing that they fail to capture the nuanced realities of communication while highlighting the need for representations that expose problems and challenge entrenched scripts.

In this study, youth participation in a participatory democracy project is examined at the intersection of the deontic and emotional order. The data are drawn from a yearlong participatory democracy project where 14–15-year-olds meet with politicians and public servants to decide on a vision for how the community should be in 2050. By analysing their interactions, the present study shows how adult community representatives elicit adolescents’ negative emotional experiences and transform these into deontic building blocks in the impending decision-making. The analysis shows how the transformation of adolescents’ negative emotional experiences casts the adolescents as emotional perceivers and deontic objects, a role they are shown to comply with. Furthermore, this sets up a proximal deontic order that, in turn, re-establishes a distal deontic order, both in which the adolescents’ positions are subordinated and regulated. Ultimately, by inviting youths to participate in the democracy project itself as well as eliciting their negative emotional experiences the politicians and public servants are shown to use the youths as emotional gearwheels in an already set larger deontic machinery.

Sexual consent is advocated around the world to reduce sexual assault. The widespread affirmative consent model emphasizes a need for unambiguous consent. In this paper, we contribute to a deeper understanding of how ambiguities in the initiations of sexual activities are routinely solved to achieve consent. Drawing on conversation analytic research on joint decision-making, and a dataset of 80 cases of sexual initiation in contemporary TV-series and movies, we investigate the interactional practices by which sexual activities are presented as consensual and how consent is achieved across sequences of interaction. We found there to be social advantages of synchronous initiation, compared to sequential verbal initiations, which were associated with various social vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities could however be circumvented by two practices, each of which made use of a distinct combination of verbal and embodied resources. While ambiguities exist, our results oppose the idea of sexual consent as a practically hopeless and awkward endeavor. Instead, consent consists of joint action that is achieved through recognizable and systematic ways.

This thesis explores the social organization of rights-to-decide in participatory democracy meetings where adolescents are invited. In such meetings, young citizens are given the opportunity to influence decision-makers and participate in determining future political action. Specifically, this thesis focuses on how social inclusion in decision-making is accomplished in adolescent-politician interaction as well as youth-peer interaction. 

Employing a Conversation Analytic perspective, naturally occurring participatory democracy meetings are analyzed to explore how adolescents are offered possibilities to influence decisions. The data investigated consists of a popup democracy workshop and a yearlong participatory democracy project (approx. 81 h), where adolescents are invited to contribute to decision-making. 

Three papers comprise the current thesis and examine 1) how adolescents are encouraged to participate in decision-making, 2) how a youth participatory role is delimited, and 3) how jointness is accomplished in decision-making. These questions are approached with a social deontic framework where human powerplay is investigated through participants’ interactional negotiations of rights to determine action. The analysis reveals that the participating adults’ pep talks and instructions offer a narrow adolescent role of influence. Inclusion therefore ultimately becomes alignment to adults' conceptions of who the adolescents are and how they should contribute to decision-making. Furthermore, the analysis shows how adult community representatives elicit adolescents’ negative emotional experiences and transform these into deontic building blocks in the impending decision-making. Community representatives’ superior deontic rights permeate the initiatives of inclusion directed at adolescents. Regarding jointness, the analysis reveals that, in adolescent-politician interaction, jointness is not accomplished, rather asymmetries of power are re-established by participants. However, in adolescent peer interaction joint decision-making is accomplished through verbal, embodied and material resources. 

By studying interactional efforts of inclusion, this thesis tackles critical aspects of the practices that facilitate and constrain political participation. The thesis extends our understanding of youth inclusion in decision-making by illuminating complex challenges inherent in the practice of inviting adolescents to participatory democracy meetings. By tackling these issues, this thesis also contributes theoretically and analytically to central notions within social deontics and research on joint decision-making and points out crucial future directions for research on inclusion and political action. 

Ascertaining jointness in decision-making requires the recipients of proposals to extend the base sequence of proposal-acceptance and make room for displays of agreement. However, the extension takes different forms, depending on the number of participants receiving a proposal and when the decision is to be carried out. On the basis of video-recordings from a participatory democracy workshop, the act of collaborative writing was used to observe how proximal proposals are transformed into joint decisions. The analysis reveals that displays of access and agreement to the proposal are achieved in a distributed manner among the participants. The access component is expanded to contain actions that delimit the content and scope of the proposal. These meta-decisions then result in a writable produced by someone other than the proposer to whom agreement is displayed. Given the proximal nature of the decision-making, commitment to future action can be bypassed. Instead, execution of the decision is deployed in a manner that retrospectively presents the sequence as a joint one. The study demonstrates the significance of the temporal, social, and material aspects associated with proposing and achieving jointness in multiparty proximal decisions.

Young citizens are increasingly being invited to take part in participatory democracy meetings as joint decision-making has grown popular in public administration. The backbone of participatory democracy is that some authority is granted to the citizenry and by drawing on video data (38 hours) from a year-long participatory project, this conversation analytic study shows that the adolescents are instructed to a deontic role rooted in epistemics, benefactive considerations, as well as temporal aspects relating to future citizenship and hope. The institutional representatives perform actions that determine how the adolescents should, in their turn, perform actions of influence. In this way, authority is ascribed through an ambivalent configuration in which compliance with the directives is supposed to establish a strengthened deontic position.