Although silences are an ever-present part of human communication, there is a conventionally agreed-upon adjective to describe them: awkward. Why do we experience discomfort in an interaction when arguably, there is simply nothing happening? Professor Elliott Hoey of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam uses conversation analysis (CA) to investigate how people arrive at and deal with silences. I sat down with him to ask him why CA seems to be a useful tool to look at the understudied phenomenon of silence.