This paper studies, from the perspective of ethnomethdology and conversation analysis, how people at meetings in a club-house for sufferers of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) practically use memories and categories. TBI is brain damage caused by traffic accidents or similar events, whose symptoms include disruption to memory, emotion, activity and other analogous problems. At the end of day meeting, staff ask members of the club-house what they did in the daytime, but members are some-times unable to answer them. First, we discovered an IRE sequence (Mehan 1979) in the meeting, where staff initiates a question, a member responds and the staff evaluates that response. This sequence relates the categories and category-bound activities of staff and members. Second, various sets of categories are used when this IRE sequence fails, due to TBI. At that time, staff assist member's remembrance using their situated categories co-experienced in the clubhouse, which are logically different from those categories which speech therapists use in the hospitals. This study explicates how staff and members practically use the situated categories at the closing sessions in the TBI clubhouse.
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