In the United States an overwhelming emphasis on communication and representation pervades conflict resolution, decision-making and problem-solving processes. The combination of emphasis on communication and public participation offers important opportunities for representation; research and practical experience suggest that the ensuing forums for solving conflicts, typically in the form of meetings, frequently result in frustration, alienation, and lack of results which have significant impact on the particular conflict. Extensive research, both theoretical and empirical suggests that such lack of resolution is to a great extent a product of culturally embedded practices of communication in which persuasive appeals and debate are privileged over dialogue.

This research poses that the intractable nature of this and many other conflicts is a result of strategies of talk—that is, particular strategies of talk construct this conflict as a certain kind of conflict between identities. In this ethnography I explore how identities are discursively constructed during a variety of communicative events—in particular meetings—and how the constructive practices by which identities are (re)produced, as well as the identities themselves, frame and impact the resolution of conflict. For this research I focused on a local community conflict in a residential neighborhood and business district (the Hill) adjacent to the University of Colorado at Boulder. While in many ways a classic town-gown issue, this particular conflict between a wide-variety of stakeholders—including long-term residents, students, business owners, City of Boulder City Council members and police, landlords and property owners, and University administrators and student representatives—has escalated at times, resulting in riots and extensive property damage. Through observations of bi-monthly city council meetings and monthly neighborhood association meetings, the primary sites of my investigation, as well as interviews and focus groups, and analysis of organizational documents, meeting agendas/minutes, websites and newspaper articles, I identified two primary identities in this conflict—victims and rescuers—and explicated the communicative practices by which these identities are constructed. In the final interpretation of findings I explore the impact victim and rescuer identities have on the intractability of the conflict.