How students get help:Institutional identities as a resource for recruitment

This paper explores the intersection between institutional identity and recruitment practices in craft workshops. It argues that students orient to both their own identity as students in need and to the instructor's institutional identity as assistance-provider as a key resource for obtaining assistance. The analysis is organised into three main analytic sections: instructors self-selecting to assist without being explicitly addressed, students selecting instructors as providers of assistance, and students pursuing assistance when an initial attempt is not immediately successful. Across these practices, students rely on the instructor's category-bound activity of providing assistance and their own identity as students. Through the analysis of a corpus of video recordings from a range of craft workshops, this study demonstrates how institutional identity and the category-bound activity of providing assistance are procedurally consequential in recruitment, highlighting the omnirelevance of the identity of the instructor in workshops. The data are in English.