Winter 2022
Jan 12 Norma Mendoza Denton (UCLA) and Ashley Stinnett (Western Kentucky U.)
Histories of Representation in Visual and Multimedia Anthropology
Our crossover textbook addresses a holistic approach to teaching the process of collecting, analyzing, and producing multimodal ethnographies. In essence we aim to provide a roadmap for professors and students to engage in the anthropological research process at the upper division undergraduate and beginning graduate student level. The theoretical focus of the course is grounded in visual anthropology and linguistic anthropology, combined with some aspects of ethnomethodology and media anthropology.
The content provided in this presentation addresses the introductory components of the text. These include the historical underpinnings of the process of ethnography, the confluence of technological and scientific innovations that have led to the multimedia landscapes we experience today, combined with history of anthropological representation.
Jan 19 Xiaoting Li: Chinese Linguistics Department of East Asian Studies, Calgary
Marmorstein, Michal (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Szczepek Reed, Beatrice (King’s College London)
Newsmarks in Arabic, Mandarin and English
Abstract
In this study we approach the interactional phenomenon ‘newmarks’ in three language data sets (Arabic, English, Mandarin). We examine the extent to which linguistic forms serving as newsmarks are cross-linguistically comparable (or not) by juxtaposing the two most frequent newsmark forms in each corpus: Arabic wallāhi (lit. ‘by God’, ～ ‘really’) and bigadd (lit. ‘in-seriousness/in earnest’); English really and freestanding elliptical questions (FEQs) such as ‘did you’, and Mandarin shi ma (gloss. ‘COP Q’, lit. ‘is (it)?’) and zhende(a/ya, ma) (lit. ‘real/really’). The comparison suggests that one fruitful avenue for understanding the social action(s) performed by these forms is expectation stance. While previous work has frequently focused on the epistemic (a)symmetry between the news-deliverer and newsmark-producer, our work shows that participants’ displayed expectations play an important role in marking prior talk as news, and might possibly be more important than displayed knowledge. Expectation here refers broadly to existing opinions and views of what is true, right, or acceptable. The data are recordings of naturally occurring interactions in Arabic (audio), English (audio, video), and Mandarin (audio, video) with glosses where appropriate.
Jan 26 Pauline Beaupoil-Hortel; Ecole Supérieure du Professorat et de l’Education, Paris, Sorbonne University
Adult’s spoken reformulations of children’s plurisemiotic productions
In parent-child interactions, adults often interpret and reformulate children’s non-verbal and multimodal cues and productions into spoken forms. In this process, I am interested in how parents contribute to shape their children’s language and how children learn to adapt to their parents’ interpretations and reformulations.
I will present two video clips of a longitudinal English-speaking adult-child dyad filmed at home to analyze how adults reformulate the child’s productions. By providing glosses of the child’s multimodal cues, and highlighting the value of speech, adults transform those cues into speech turns and integrate them in the verbal interaction. The videos illustrate how the adults in the data foreground speech as the primary vehicle to language their and others’ experience. In the process, children learn to inhibit their capacity for rich syncretic embodied communication but develop a fruitful expertise to adapt to adults and creatively appropriate the intricacies of the forms of expression specific to their surrounding cultural community.
February 2 Shannon Ward (UBC)
“Multimodal mechanisms of repair in Tibetan parent-child interaction”.
This presentation addresses the conversational resources that young, multilingual children use to make themselves understood. By examining conversational sequences in a Tibetan-Canadian family, we show how children use gesture, intonation, and the material environment to respond to other-initiated repairs. We present three excerpts from video-recorded samples from one family, made up of three-year-old sister Yangmo, eight-year-old sister Tashi, and their parents. The videos were created by the parents in their home and community from March 2020 to November 2021, and analyzed collaboratively through zoom meetings. We show how Yangmo used repetition, prosody, and iconic gestures to manage other-initiated repairs regarding word pronunciation. We also consider metalinguistic discourse from parents’ commentary during analysis meetings. This analysis suggests that parents’ and siblings’ knowledge of a younger child’s particular activity patterns shapes their mutual understanding, and that metalinguistic discourse associates mutual understanding with positive social bonds.
February 9 Adrienne Isaac, Georgetown U. The relative positioning of the sensory environment as a first pair-part in interactional initiations by individuals with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia
In this presentation, I will workshop ideas that I am working on for my dissertation. My dissertation involves instances of interactional initiations temporally related to environmental stimuli in interactions between individuals with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) and their family members. bvFTD is an early-onset (occurring before 65 years of age) neurodegenerative disease that becomes noticeable to family members because of its effect on social behavior, most typically, in the form of a loss of social etiquette and adherence to social norms; changes in eating preferences; compulsive and ritualistic behavior; and apathy, or reduced engagement in interaction with others. The data include ethnographic videorecorded segments during mealtime activity of eight families throughout southern California. In my analysis, I focus on apathy in particular through an investigation of bvFTD participants’ instances of conversational initiations. As I do this, I provide evidence to argue that the initiations are temporally restrictive: they are sensory reliant, relatively more retrospective than prospective, stimuli- rather than interlocutor-oriented, and occur at particular cross-sections of interactional time and space that are not sustained. In arguing this, I propose an analytic framework in which stimuli in the environment serve as first pair-parts, and conversational initiations, second pair-parts. I discuss the implications of these findings, particularly that interactional sustainment (preliminary term) relies on the displayed presence and stability of communicative intentions.
This research has brought many ideas to the surface, and for two distinct professional visions: those of clinicians working with neurological disorders involving forms of apathetic behavior; and analysts of interaction. For the former group, this involves reconciling clinical notions of apathy in neurobehavioral disorders with social behavior, particularly social initiation, in patients’ home settings, and conceptualizing the initiation of a conversation as a potent and codable form of behavioral motivation and goal-direction; for the latter group, this involves acknowledging conversational initiations as accomplishments in their own right; considering the talk-based conceptualizations of “continuing states of incipient talk” and of adjacency pairs; and differentiating between conversational progressivity and sustainment.
February 16
Nils Klowait and Maria Erofeeva Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences
Orientation to Embodied Insight – A Multimodal Study of Cognitive Psychological Experiments
This two-year research project extends our team’s initial work on ‘The Multimodal Accomplishment of Body Control in a Cognitive Laboratory’ (https://www.conversationanalysis.org/the-multimodal-accomplishment-of-body-control-in-a-cognitive-laboratory/), where we studied the ways objects and bodies are deployed by participants to organize a cognitive experiment.
In the current project, which is still underway, we teamed up with our psychologist colleagues to organize a replication experiment of the eight-coin problem (Öllinger et al. 2012), which is being debated in the context of the ecological turn in cognitive and social psychology (Kirsh 2009; Cowley, Vallée-Tourangeau 2017; Albert & de Ruiter 2018): insight problems, i.e. tasks designed to require a leap of understanding to solve (a ‘moment of insight’), are increasingly recognized as having a substantial embodied component – problem solving happens in space, and in-interaction, not just “in the participants’ heads”.
While our psychologist colleagues are interested in the way the embodied dimension impacts the speed at which the participants solve the insight task—the original hypothesis being that solving a task ‘with hands’ is more effective—we are studying the way this new re-orientation to the body-in-interaction transforms the relationship between experimenter and experimental subject. We are particularly interested in the way the orientation of the body, particularly the conjunction of gaze and hand motion trajectory, become orientable as embodied manifestations of cognitive events to the psychologist researchers.
We will report on preliminary methodological and empirical insights based on a videographic analysis of two instances of the eight-coins experiment which we helped organize: in one instance, both the ‘subject’ and ‘experimenter’ are physically co-located; in the other, either the subject or both participants are interacting in a digital copy of the room—through simplified embodied avatars—using virtual reality helmets.
During our discussion, we would like to hear your insights on the data, as well as discuss the problem of professional vision (Goodwin 2009) as it pertains to cognitively-oriented, situationally-oriented, and pragmatically-oriented modes of understanding embodied action.”
February 23 Rachel Chen Siew Yoong Education, UC Berkeley
Transforming pain into joy: healing through research
Over the course of my academic journey thus far, my personal and professional lives have been deeply intertwined. My research began in 2012 when I started collecting video ethnographic data of my then 5-year-old non-speaking autistic brother in our home. In the years that followed, these videos and the analyses I conducted led me into an academic profession, and I began a life that often entangled both personal life and academic scholarship. In this data session, I bring two videos of my brother’s interactions, taken in 2012 and 2014, that I had brought into my research. I also bring a third video, taken in 2016, that documents a major milestone in my brother’s communicative journey. There is profound emotional labor in bringing private experiences into the public and professional eye. Yet, through research I have been given the chance to understand deeply and come to terms with the pains and joys in my home. My brother has his own story to tell, and I am certain his story will unfold over time. In this session, I celebrate him and thank him for inspiring my academic career.
* I have received permission to share details about my brother’s life from my brother.
** I am in the midst of understanding from my family what they feel comfortable in revealing to a larger audience. As such, I may not be able to record this session, or else I may be granted limited permissions to record.
*** Details of this session are to be discussed with great caution and sensitivity.
March 2 Sarah Jean Johnson Division of Bilingual Education, Early Childhood Education, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies The University of Texas at El Paso
Title: Practices of professional proprioception in children’s cultural learning of the violin in a community arts program at the U.S. and Mexico border
Presenters: Sarah Jean Johnson, Alejandra Sanmiguel-López, Claudia Saldaña, María Teresa de la Piedra
UTEP College of Education, Division of Bilingual Education, Early Childhood Education, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies
Abstract:
The burgeoning field of multimodality research has made inroads with that of situated cognition to provide nuanced understandings of human learning and development in ways that have discredited long-held distinctions in developmental research between mental activity (thinking/conceptual) and physical activity (doing/applied). How embodied learning intersects with aesthetic perception in arts learning, however, has largely failed to capture the curiosity of scholars within these traditions. We attend to this oversight by drawing upon Charles Goodwin’s conceptualization of professional vision in our study of professional proprioception in children’s learning to play the violin.
The data we present are from a larger project funded by the National Endowment for the Arts to study the cultural contexts for learning in community arts programs in El Paso, Texas. Last spring in the Co-action Lab, we presented data from a ballet folklórico program also using the lens of professional proprioception. We now present on Tocando, a music education program of the El Paso Symphony Orchestra for elementary and middle-school children, which is held in local schools in the El Segundo Barrio section of El Paso and in the unincorporated, rural town of Tornillo, Texas. These two communities, located at ports of entry with Mexico, have long histories of being a home for new migrants and of severe neglect from the city.
We are interested in how teachers structure their pedagogy through the use of multiple and diverse symbol systems so as to communicate the cognitive and embodied discriminations that are part of artistic practice, which in this setting is learning to play the violin. Within this practice we also attend to evolving participation frameworks of care and accountability that help children imagine oneself as capable and as a member of the community of practice. We contextualize our sequences of video data with our interviews with teachers, children, and family members. Our analysis begins to detail the complex social, cultural and historical organization of teaching and learning in musical performance—practices that are multisemiotic, multisensorial, and cognitive in combination.
March 9 Kreeta Niemi, Ph D candidate at University of Jyväskylä, Finnish Education, CLIC visiting scholar for 2022
Managing participation and learning in children’s joint reading activities
The data for this presentation comes from the joint reading activities of two first-grade students (a girl and a boy) as they practice using proper names by circling them in a newspaper. The students lie on the floor side by side, and they display peer intimacy with their proximity to each other. The reading activity requires the coordination of visual and cognitive learning, and the shared learning material and space necessitate the coordination of hand and body movements on and around the newspaper.
In my presentation, I will discuss different situated activity systems, such as reading aloud and circling, affirming correctness, correcting one another’s reading errors with gestures, and taking turns by repositioning bodies. I will consider how these activities impact affect and engagement during cognitive activity. This video data is part of a larger study that examines primary school transformation in Finland and children’s activities in learning environments, where there is a strong emphasis on self-directed learning and peer learning.
March 16 Julia Katila, Tampere, Pirkanmaa, Finland
The Interactional Emergence of Affect in Conflict Situations Among Romantic Couples
The embodied interaction among romantic couples and its affective moments are still an undiscovered field of human sociality. In this data session, I will show some clips from authentic interaction among Finnish romantic couples. Focusing on moments of conflict and argument, I explore the interactional and embodied emergence of strong emotions during such moments. How is emotion experienced and communicated through embodied means, and how is it deployed as a resource to display disalignment and -affiliation? Relying on hundreds of hours of video-data and interviews with the participants, I wish to uncover how conflict and emotions arise from mundane topics, e.g. how to wash the laundry, whether or not to buy a robot vacuum or how to decorate the Christmas tree. The analysis is still at its preliminary stage, so I would love to hear your insights on the data.
March 23 Le Song, (Telecom Paris–Institut Polytechnique de Paris-I3 UMR 9217–CNRS) Enhua Guo (Ocean University of China)
Exploring the Multimodal Organization of Tasting Sequences in Live Video Streaming
Abstract:
Research on the activity of tasting from the perspective of multimodal conversation analysis (Mondada, 2018) shows that tasting in face-to-face context is interactively organized and sequentially achieved as an individual sensorial experience that also has a public, witnessable, accountable and intersubjective dimension. We argue that this view can be extended to the context of livestream tasting shows—whereby the live streamers demonstrate and communicate the taste of the food product to the online viewers while engaging them via live streaming.
In this study, we address: (1) how the live streamer’s tasting activity—which is embedded in a more global activity of live streaming communication with viewer via comments—, is organized and achieved temporally and sequentially, and (2) how the technology affordances impact on the configuration of this livestream tasting interactions. By adopting the ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approach, we have examined 20 cases of screen-recorded, naturally occurring, livestream tasting shows, gathered from live streaming platform Periscope.
Our analysis indicates that: (1) the live stream tasting activity is conducted in a way that is sensitive to the affordances of live video streaming. That is, the mediation of the screen in the live streaming communication has rendered the screen as the home position (Schegloff 1998) of the live streamer(s)’ ‘talking heads’ (Licoppe & Morel, 2012) and eye gaze (Rossano 2012); (2) the live streamer’s tasting activity is multimodally and inter-sensorially organized and interactionally achieved, moment by moment, in a way that is finely-tuned to the audience online responses via comments. (3) The live streamer(s) normally convey a high epistemic stance with regard to the tasted product in and through embodied, multimodal resources.
Key words:
Multimodal conversation analysis; tasting activity; live video streaming; technology affordances