Social actions such as advice and feedback are sensitive actions, often triggering emotional and defensive reactions. Moreover, just how to understand and describe such actions – for instance, as “constructive advice”, “complaints”, or even “insults” – is a potential point of contention and dispute for participants in interaction. Based on a unique corpus of video data from higher education (500h, from 12 different settings), the project aims to develop a conceptual and empirically grounded understanding of the social organization of feedback. We focus on how participants orient to the sensitive nature of feedback, and deal with situations where emotional reactions, resistance and defensiveness become focal. The diversity of the corpus also allows distinguishing generic from setting-specific phenomena and specify the relevance of contextual and situational characteristics, strengthening the potential for theoretical development. The project is a timely contribution not only empirically and theoretically, but also in its ambition to conduct analyses of a large corpus of existing video data. Encouraging secondary use of data is currently priority nationally and internationally. An important methodological contribution of the project is to develop workflows for secondary use of video data, potentially serving as a model for similar future initiatives.