The doctor, the refugee and the dark thoughts

International audience ; Research on migrants in health services meets ethical issues at many levels. We can even say that these issues beset all those who are engaged in the field of asylum as actors or activists, as well as all the researchers who venture into it. My data for this study are (video-recorded) medical consultations with migrants, including an interpreter. I started with identifying moments in these data when participants seemed to refer to background moral judgments (Paveau 2013). Then, on the basis of the collection I gathered, I sought to find the marks and cues that participants gave of such reference to backgrounds (cf. Bergmann ed. 1998).In the first part of the paper, I present these data and the situation in which they were collected highlighting the different levels of moral tension within which the participants conduct their exchanges. The analyses are then carried out on a single-case consultation, which is a good representation of what happens in the corpus as a whole. They rely on interactional linguistics methodology, which focuses on the co-construction of multimodal practices, and puts great emphasis on temporality and sequentiality. One of the outcomes of the analysis is to show how participants, particularly doctors and interpreters, are gradually led to make explicit some of the normative backgrounds on which their statements are based.