October 2. Sasha Kurlenkova, Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University. and Ekaterina Rudneva, Institute for Linguistic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences (Laboratory of Anthropological Linguistics) in Saint Petersburg: Negotiating Multiactivity in Interactions of a Child with Cerebral Palsy and His Teacher.

In this data-session, Sasha Kurlenkova and Ekaterina Rudneva will present their current work-in-progress – analysis of how Vlad, a non-speaking child with cerebral palsy, and Tatiana, his orally speaking teacher, negotiate different school-related activities on the computer controlled via a touchpad (Teacher), an eyetracking device and a mouse control app (Vlad). Both are engaged in doing exercises aimed at teaching Vlad to distinguish between soft, hard and vowel sounds in the Russian language.

We are interested in multiactivity, which is “the different ways in which two or more activities can be intertwined and made co-relevant in social interaction” [Haddington et al. 2014: 3]. Multiactivity in this case consists in switching between an educational activity and an activity, initiated by a child, which can be framed as “fooling around”. While Tatiana focuses primarily on the educational agenda, i.e. moving from one exercise to another prescribed by the school program, and is supposed to scaffold Vlad’s learning of the rules and skills of Russian, Vlad sometimes gets bored along the way and starts to “fool around”. He may also actively resist a particular exercise suggested by Tatiana. Both Tatiana and Vlad have their ways of pursuing the educational course of action or resisting and subverting it, though those of Vlad are restricted by his available physical resources. These multimodal ways, resources and strategies will be the subject of our exploration in this data-session.

The data were collected by Vlad’s family living in Russia as a part of Sasha’s dissertation research in 2020-2022.

Reference

Haddington Pentti, Keisanen Tiina, Mondada Lorenza, Nevile Мaurice. Towards multiactivity as a social and interactional phenomenon // Multiactivity in social interaction: Beyond multitasking, ed. by Haddington P., Keisanen T., Mondada L., Nevile М. John Benjamins Publishing Company. 2014. P. 3–32.

October 9.  Jianhong Lin jh911561172@gmail.com, Graduate School of Humanities, Osaka University.

Nested Position Reimagined: How Children Adjust and Shape Family Reading Habitusì

This study focuses on how children engage with the practice of reading picture books with their parents, particularly through the lens of bodily positioning and social roles. By examining 86 hours of video recordings from family book reading sessions, the research aims to explore how children are socialized into the act of reading by mimicking and adjusting the physical arrangements their parents initially encourage.

The study utilizes Conversation Analysis and Language Socialization methodologies to delve into these interactions. One of the key observations is how parents attempt to position their children on their laps during reading sessions. Over time, children begin to offer to sit on their parents’ laps without much prompting, suggesting that they internalize and reshape the reading habitus.

This raises some important research questions, such as 1) how children perceive and reshape this particular bodily relationship of “lap reading” 2) what social roles they adopt as they adjust their bodily configurations in relation to their parents during reading sessions. The data analyzed comes from Chinese and Japanese families (2-year-olds and their parents).

October 16  Nicolo Nasi : University of Bologna, Dept. of Education Studie

Children’s peer interactions during collaborative tasks with a digital device

Children have been shown to use various multimodal resources to negotiate their peer participation frameworks and social relationships, both in ordinary and institutional contexts (Goodwin 1990, 2006; Cekaite et al. 2014). These interactional negotiations also map onto interactions with digital devices, which increasingly characterize the material ecology of children’s mutual engagement (Danby et al. 2018, Jakonen & Niemi 2020).

In this data session, I will show data involving children aged 10 to 11 who work on a shared task with a digital device. Specifically, the (physically co-present) children work in small groups with the task of narrating a story through the digital device. I’m interested in how children exploit the resources in their interactional repertoires and in the surrounding socio-material environment to negotiate the local participation framework and their peer relationships and hierarchies. Children locally mobilize verbal, embodied, and material resources to negotiate and dispute their roles and responsibilities for the task (e.g. they negotiate access to the device or dispute dominant/subordinate roles), thereby co-operatively reconstructing the social organization of the peer group.

References 

Cekaite, Asta, Shoshana Blum-Kulka, Vibeke Grøver and Eva Teubal. 2014. Children’s peer talk: Learning from each other. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Danby, Susan, Ann-Carita Evaldsson, Helen Melander and Pal Aarsand. 2018. Situated collaboration and problem solving in young children’s digital gameplay. British Journal of Educational Technology 49(5): 959-972.

Goodwin, Marjorie. 1990. He-said-she-said: Talk as social organization among Black children. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

October  23 Ali Reza Majleski, Dept. of Education, Stockholm University

Affectivity and Accountability in Human-Robot Interactions.

My presentation will be in form of a data session which will focus on video-recorded interactions between high school students and a humanoid robot named Furhat. The selected sequences are drawn from a dataset of human-robot interactions (HRI) involving students from two distinct educational programs: a natural science program and an electronic and energy program. In these sessions, the students interact with Furhat to solve electronic circuit problems. While the conversations were based on pre-designed tasks, Furhat was programmed to operate autonomously. These recordings provide insight into how the exchange of questions and answers not only progresses the conversation but also influences the emotional stances the human participants adopt toward both the robot and the topics under discussion. Furhat’s responses, though shaped by its design, are limited in their sensitivity to the situational context, offering a unique opportunity to study how accountability and affectivity are co-constructed in real-time.

October 30. Mick Smith; Dept. of Culture and Society, Linköping U.

Maxims & Mock-ups in cadaver-based surgical training

Cadavers, considered the “gold standard” for surgical training, provide the closest, highest fidelity medium, short of ‘live’ operation, for instructing surgical skills. Despite this fidelity, instructors and learners must ‘mock up’ the cadaver as an instructional artifact in order to render it into an intelligible, structure-governed medium, not only for providing experiences and instructing on skills but for contextualizing those within the learners’ everyday work as practicing surgeons. Mockups, as models, function as representations of given phenomena because they preserve and make accessible a set of specific relationships consistent with the phenomena of interest. Moreover, they are ostensively treated as provisional in that they only capture “some relationships and some of the features” at the expense of others, while simultaneously making “specifically and deliberately false provisions” for other essential features of the phenomena (Garfinkel, 1963, p. 9).

While we tend to think of fabricated ‘mock-ups’ in educational settings (e.g., a plastic anatomical model), mocking up can also be accomplished through interactional practices, particularly when instructing on ‘natural’ objects or materials (e.g., cadavers in medicine, rock outcrops in field geology, etc.). These objects are unfabricated—whatever relationships they preserve are not intended in their creation, nor are they treated as obvious for the participants. Rather, these relations are made accessible through discursive practice in instruction. In this study we investigate the training of surgeons using cadavers and analyze the instructional practices that instructors use for making the cadaver intelligible and actionable as an instructional medium, focusing in particular on the instructors’ use of maxims in instruction—phrases or sayings capturing general truths or principles shared within a community of practice (Button, 2023).

In this setting, maxims are routinely formulated as prescribed/proscribed rules of conduct for trainees to follow. In our analysis, we observe that maxims are routinely produced for the purpose of contextualizing a given instruction within the experiences of the trainees as practicing surgeons as lesson that is transitional across occasions (ibid, p. 127). In doing so, learners not only get instruction on performing a procedure in the here-and-now, but in its application in the there-and-then of similarly constituted scenarios in their surgical practice.

NOTE: Lab will not meet from November 6 to November 20.

November 27, Maria Erofeeva: Laboratoire d’Anthropologie des Mondes Contemporains, Université Libre de Bruxelles

Dealing with Diversity in a Virtual Reality Classroom

My data come from French sign language classes in virtual reality, which include both Deaf and hearing students. The core activity involves students repeating signs after the teacher. The environment is highly asymmetrical and diverse in terms of participants’ sensory access to the world, language proficiency, and technological skills. In such a setting, different types of trouble are occasioned to arise, while students may not necessarily have conventional resources to signal it (such as vocals or gaze). Thus, the teacher’s practical task is to accommodate the diverse needs of the participants to ensure efficient learning. I am interested in how trouble is signaled, managed, and anticipated in this fully non-vocal interaction.

In classroom interaction studies, the notions of repair and correction, including fully embodied ones, have been extensively employed to analyze communicative and instructional breakdowns. In contrast, the notion of recruitment denotes the presence of trouble during the execution of a practical activity. I would like to discuss the relevance of these terms in the study of L2 learning in an asymmetrical environment where producing signs is the main practical activity that is not inherently communicative, which might make the notion of repair less relevant (although breakdowns of intersubjectivity are quite common in this setting and may accompany the observed practices). Additionally, it is not always the teacher who initiates the process, which would typically bring the notion of correction into play.

Finally, I invite participants to consider how anticipated trouble, within the context of the teacher’s pedagogical project, influences instructional sequences.

December 4

Mandy Bateman  Dept. of Early Years, Faculty of Health, Education and Social Work, Birmingham City University  and Xiaoting Li; Department of East Asian Studies, U of Alberta, Canada

‘Intertwining food and laughter during mealtimes’.

Looking across data from an early childhood setting in Wales to Mandarin speaking adults in mainland China, we aim to explore commonalities and differences at the intersection of eating and laughing in public mealtime episodes. We will discuss preliminary interests regarding how the mouth can attend to the function of eating morsels of food whilst also providing an acoustic/vocal acknowledgement and receipt of a humorous prior turn. Participants’ bodily movements presented as torso leans, head positioning that manage physical embodied displays of humour alignment with interlocutors, and employment of hands to touch specific parts of the face – including covering open mouths full of food – will also be explored in the symphony of mealtime activity. The broader impact of cultural norms around eating in the two diverse settings, such as sharing food in Xiaoting’s data as opposed to bringing one’s own individual meal in Mandy’s data, will provide further discussion.

October 19 Rachel Chen (Education UC Berkeley)

Transcribing interactive stimming

Repetition is a foundational component of any communication system, mediating much of our everyday lived experience. Despite its pervasiveness, the production of repetitive behavior, stimming, is a behavior of both stigma and celebration in discourse around Autism. Although these repetitive behaviors have traditionally been seen as constituting barriers to sociality, the phenomenon of interactive stimming, as written in autistic autobiographies, and empirically investigated in my work, shows that it has potential to constitute a rich communicative practice for autistic individuals. In this data session, I bring video data from two different projects on interactive stimming in the everyday lives of non-speaking autistic individuals. The first interactions are of autistic adults interacting with one another in the context of a drum circle within an autism institution. The second interactions involve autistic children interacting with their mothers on musical mats that map interpersonal touch to music. Informed by literature on embodied interaction, and in combination with musical notation, I look forward to discussing these interactional sequences and their accompanying transcripts.

October  26. Sarah Jean Johnson (Education, UT-  El Paso)

La mariposita. ¿Lo recuerda?: Bilingual storytelling, metaphor, and touch within a pedagogic ensemble in children’s learning to play the violin 

Authors: Sarah Jean Johnson; María Teresa de la Piedra; Alejandra Sanmiguel López (Education, UT- San Antonio)

We examine professional perception in children’s learning of the violin; that is, how teachers structure their pedagogy through the use of multiple and diverse semiotic channels to communicate the cognitive and embodied discriminations that are part of artistic practice. We focus on the role of bilingual storytelling, metaphor, and touch with the intention of expanding on existing research, which has largely characterized embodied, artistic skill as being communicated through physical demonstration coupled with vocal explanation (e.g., Douglah, 2021). We further aim, through this focus, to enhance descriptions of asset-based pedagogies for students of non-dominant backgrounds (García-Sánchez and Orellana, 2019).

Two complementary frameworks are brought to bear on this study. One is research in the socio-cultural tradition, which elucidates how children acquire cultural competence through engagement in purposeful, goal directed interaction (Lave and Wegner, 1991; Rogoff, 1990). The second is Goodwin’s (1994, p. 606) notion of professional vision, which he defines as, “The ability to see relevant entities within a professional domain that is consistent with the vision held by experts within the discursive community of practice.”

Our method is microethnographic (Erickson, 1992), relying on multiple data sources including, videotaped classes taken over the course of the academic year of 2021-2022, artifact collection, and interviews with students, their families, and teachers. The research site is a community music education program held in an unincorporated, rural town bordering Mexico.

Our paper focuses on two teaching sequences. The first is with novice children who are learning the proper hold of a violin bow. For children to learn the quality of the hand position—which the teacher describes as “suave, separado, y circulo” (soft, separated, and circular)—the teacher engages children in a collaboratively told story about a family of gallinas (hens) while forming various participation frameworks, such as facing a child while tactilely moving her fingers to rest lightly on the bow.

In the second sequence the teacher is helping a more experienced (and older) student, Jay, with his hold of the violin neck. Noticing the tension in the child’s hand position, she touches lightly the underside of Jay’s hand, opening it, while asking him, “La mariposita. ¿Lo recuerda? ¿Y como se llama tu mariposa?” (The little butterfly. Remember it? And what is your butterfly’s name?) This question leads to both the teacher and child sharing stories in English and Spanish of their respective butterflies, named after her wife and his baby brother. These stories conclude with humor as the teacher reiterates the lesson (in English), “Okay so don’t squish your butterfly,” and the boy responds in Spanish with laughter, “ya se fue” (It already left).

Our findings demonstrate how bilingual story structure and its embodied, tactile enactments provide a format for elaborating on the perceptual discrimination children need to acquire for violin performance while also building on children’s linguistic strengths. In such, they make novel contributions to scholarship in social interaction and bilingual education while opening our vision to new understandings of cognition that avoid binaries between mental activity (thinking/conceptual) and physical activity (doing/applied).

Douglah, J. (2021). “BOOM, so it will be like an attack” Demonstrating in a dance class through verbal, sound and body imagery. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 29(1).

Erickson, F. (1992). Ethnographic microanalysis of interaction. In M. LeCompte, W.L. Millroy, & J. Preissle (Eds.).The handbook of qualitative research in education (pp. 201-225). Academic Press.

García-Sánchez, I. M., & Orellana, M. F. (2019). Language and Cultural Practices in Communities and Schools: Bridging Learning for Students from Non-dominant Groups. New York: Routledge.

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rogoff, B. (1990). Apprenticeship in thinking: Cognitive development in a social context. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sarah Jean’s zoom Presentation
https://ucla.zoom.us/rec/share/5Mdj6_g2pcdmCDWTXDBXrsycc8f1ObGEU1cc7GBmvKV8EtORieeZG5XIPX3nW2lh.h3ZX6GGfZy-zgSXs
Passcode: dE2#j^P@

November 2. Kreeta Niemi. (Education and Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and UCLA CLIC Visitor) Choreographing Participation in the context of Team Teaching

Co-teaching – when two or more teachers plan, teach lessons, and assess the students together – is becoming more common (e.g., King 2022). In the present study context, Finland, and more globally, schools are nowadays incorporating larger and more flexible classrooms involving multiple classes and team of teachers. Thus, the spatial design of the classroom is enabling or even encouraging teachers to teach together. Based on my preliminary observations, teachers may carry out some of their teaching independently, but shared classroom space requires collaboration with other teachers at least to some extent. In this data session, I’m especially interested in:

1) how teachers accomplish co-teaching in-situ by distributing roles and tasks and how this distribution shapes students’ participation and

2) how emergent contingencies of space and materiality are utilized to support achieving joint attention and participation

My data are drawn from video recordings of open and flexible basic education learning spaces in Finland, and my research is based on larger project that has adopted ethnography and EMCA to explore the spatial, material and social ecology of these classrooms. My theoretical framework is inspired by the work distributed cognition (Hutchins 1995), footing (Goffman 1979) and interactive organization (Goodwin 1979).

REFERENCES

Goffman, E. (1981). Forms of talk. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Goodwin, C. (1979). The Interactive Construction of a Sentence in Natural Conversation. In G. Psathas (Ed.), Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology (pp. 97-121). New York: Irvington Publishers.

Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the Wild. MIT press

King, A. (2022). Synchronizing and amending: A conversation analytic account of the “Co-ness” in co-teaching. Linguistics and Education. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2022.101015

November 16 Mick Smith (Dept. of Culture and Society: Linkoping University) Assessing professional perception through multisensorial depictions in scientific practice.

Mick’s zoom presentation

https://ucla.zoom.us/rec/share/GttpH9cSPQXzJhwfz2ROK50VfI7X0PwhBwrVos_Hbm3jcFSroQ5mbiqGQYz4RUw.lIa0Nje_6M9jLIry?startTime=1668621949000

Passcode: fP.9!Gqx

November 23 Julia Katila (Social Research: Tampere University, Pirkanmaa, Finland). Interaction during the emergence of the patient’s fear, pain or resistance  

Dental fear is highly prevalent among pediatric patients and has been shown to lead to nonhabitual use of dental services (Grisolia et al. 2021, Liinavuori et al., 2019). When children experience fear, pain, or discomfort their bodily reactions are not entirely under their control, which not only leads to an interactionally challenging situation for the children, but also disrupts the dental team’s management of the ongoing dental procedures.

In this data session, I will show some data from Finnish pediatric dental encounters. The interest is in what happens in the interaction when the children show signs of resistance, fear or pain; for example,when their breath becomes observably heavy, when they vocalize response cries or cry, or when they “close” or turn their bodies away to anticipate or react to pain. I focus on how the dentists, dental nurses, and the patients’ caregivers attend to the children’s bodily reactions through various embodied and verbal means, and what consequences do various types of responses have for the ongoing interaction. The study data includes video recordings of authentic visits to the dental clinic of 6- to 11-year-old child patients with signs of dental fear and interviews with the dentists.

November 30 Hansun Zhang Waring (Applied Linguistics, Teachers’ College) Language Socialization at the Dinner Table:The Case of a Child’s Because-Prefaced Utterances

I’m working on a collection of 43 cases of a child’s because-prefaced utterances (BPU) (at ages 3 and 8) that account for assertions during family mealtime interactions with two questions in mind: (1) how are BPUs that are assertion accounts used by the child, and (2) what does this use say about socialization? Depending on how much progress I’ll make by November 30, this may be more of a data session than a talk. In either case, I will have a handout with extracts (along with their video clips) that showcase the diversity of my collection for us to work through.

December 7 Olga Anatoli Smith (Child Studies, Linkoping University) Collaborative discovery of word meaning in a bilingual preschool

In this data session I will show excerpts on spontaneous vocabulary work that is collaboratively achieved by teachers and children in a bilingual preschool. The excerpts illustrate implicit and explicit strategies that teachers use to highlight certain words, provide definitions, and invite children to explore the word meaning. The data were collected through ethnographically informed videorecorded observation in a Swedish-English preschool and analyzed with the method of multimodal interactional analysis. Tentatively, the analysis shows that during an ongoing structured activity, teachers employ implicit word definitions through self-initiated self-repair and in so doing preserve continuity of the activity. When a shared understanding of the word appears essential for the progression of the activity, teachers create space for the explicit vocabulary work by demonstrating the word meaning and/or addressing children directly with the question about the word meaning. In doing so, teachers invite children to a collaborative exploration and discovery. The organization of spontaneous vocabulary work demonstrates teachers’ orientation to children as language learners, while the genre of explanatory talk allows children participating in adult-child interaction from an egalitarian standpoint.

December 14 Shannon Ward: (Anthropology, U. British Columbia)

Reading in the City: Grassroots Literacy Instruction as Resistance to Assimilation

This presentation considers informal Mandarin and English literacy instruction as a syncretic practice, through which urban Amdo children acquire new subjectivities. It analyzes interactions in a multilingual reading group for preschoolers run by Tibetan parents in Xining city. I argue that parents’ increased involvement in their young children’s education has led to new forms of resistance to assimilation. Instead of promoting a standard literary Tibetan on the same terms as standard Mandarin, these reading groups encourage culturally valued forms of sociality among multiethnic urban children. This chapter portrays reading groups as a subtle form of activism that encourages children to express their Tibetan identities while avoiding discourses of exclusion that pervade formal, institutionalized efforts to promote a standard Tibetan language. It asserts that expanding urban Amdo Tibetan children’s social networks beyond their immediate households can allow for cultural and linguistic continuity.

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

March 24 Ignasi Clemente: Anthropology, Hunter College, CUNY
Another Competent Speaker Who Can’t Speak: Alan’s Use of Emblems and other Gestures to Create an Incipient Gestural Grammar

Inspired by Charles Goodwin’s (2004) illustration of the communicative competence and rich and fulfilling social life of a man with aphasia who can only speak three words, I analyze here the gestural virtuosity and dexterity of Alan, a young adult who has mostly lost the ability to speak because of a traumatic brain injury, but nonetheless manages to make jokes and to tease just about everybody that he interacts with. In particular, I continue my exploration of the “grammaticality” of Alan’s gestures, and focus on the order, number, and types of gestures that he combines as he create “gestured” actions (see below for an explanation of why I do not call them “signed” actions). If in my previous presentation I examined Alan’s combination of attention-grabbing gestures and emblems/quotable gestures, I examine here Alan’s combination of emblems, pointing gestures, and facial expressions to create an incipient gestural syntax to communicate complex messages such as “I want to walk with him and not with you” or “I am worried about my leg.” The larger theoretical question that I pursue is where Alan’s gestures fall within Kendon’s continua (McNeill, 2000). That is, whether the presence of multiple linguistic properties places Alan’s combination of gestures closer to sign languages (segmented, analytic, fully grammaticalized, and conventionalized) rather than as emblems (segmented, synthetic, partly conventionalized, and with some linguistic properties), or somewhere in between, as is the case of homesigns, the “natural” signs that deaf children produce on their own before they learn a sign language (Goldin-Meadow 2003). With rare exceptions, such as Brookes’ (2005) outstanding analysis of South African youth’s use of emblems, most research on emblems has relied on one-emblem-at-a-time elicitation and has not focused on the use of emblems in naturally occurring interactions. Thus, it is perhaps possible that gestural syntax/combination of emblems that express grammatical relations occurs much more often than previously thought, which could potentially lead to a reformulation of the linguistic properties of emblems.

March 31 Shannon Ward. Anthropology, University of British Columbia
Coordinating Multi-Party Play with Directives: Insights from Amdo, Tibet

This presentation examines video data from multi-party peer group play in a village in Amdo, Tibet. In this community, young children engage in free play in multi-aged peer groups, from the time they are mobile. Children tend to play with related peers, and move freely throughout their homes and the village. The peer group is often involved in several activities at once, and children coordinate competing play trajectories through directive sequences. Existing literature on the coordination of directives with embodied resources has focused extensively on touch, especially in caregivers’ directives to children (for example, Cekaite 2016; Goodwin & Cekaite 2018). In Amdo Tibetan play groups, in contrast, children tend to exert social control through a combination of gesture and movement, in addition to touch. This presentation considers how children link these diverse, embodied resources to establish play trajectories. It analyzes embodied directive sequences in light of the cultural significance of the village homeland as an anchor for belonging.

April 7, Adrienne Isaac: Linguistics, Georgetown: Environmentally-responsive interactional initiations by individuals with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia and their family member interlocutors

For this lab, I will workshop instances I am analyzing for my dissertation involving interactional initiations that are responsive to the sensory environment by individuals with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and by their family members. I chose interactional initiations as my unit of analysis because one of the main symptoms of FTD – a young-onset neurodegenerative disease largely manifested through interpersonal behavior – is apathy; however, I found in the ethnographic videorecordings of meal-time interactions that I am analyzing that individuals with FTD are initiating conversations, and that these initiations are largely responsive to the immediate sensory environment. This led to the problematization of the temporal connection between talk and the sensory environment, as the initiations by the participants with FTD felt “sudden.” To more objectively describe what I was feeling, and to operationalize this “suddenness,” I compared and contrasted a corpus of instances initiated by the participants with FTD and their family member interlocutors, some of which we will analyze together. Such an analysis may also afford a better understanding of the non-normativity – normativity behavioral spectrum driving research in atypical interaction.

April 14 Cheryl Lee Anthropology, UCLA: “Guakamoore, guacamole”: Identity Claims, Authenticity, and Expertise in a Multilingual Classroom”
How do language identities emerge in classroom interactions? How is expertise negotiated and contested by multilingual students? By moving beyond theoretical paradigms of the “bilingual brain” and taking on an orientation of dynamic bilingualism, I turn to an ethnographic case study of one six-year-old Japanese Indian American student, Niko, from my field site, a trilingual full language immersion Montessori school located in the San Francisco Bay Area. In this data workshop, I present two events in which Niko’s linguistic expertise and authenticity in Spanish and Hindi respectively are challenged by peers through the lens of locally situated metalinguistic practice. I highlight the spontaneous peer interactional moments in which underlying monoglossic language ideologies of bilingualism are destabilized, offering emergent discursive spaces for heteroglossic linguistic practices and identity formations. An analysis of Niko’s embodied negotiations of expertise with her peers shows how young multilingual children take the discursive construction of their own linguistic identities into their own hands in ideologically supportive spaces.

April 21 Kreeta Niemi. Education and Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Bee-Bot Robot as a Moral and Technological Artefact in Children’s Classroom Activities

In this data session, I will present video data from a first grade classroom in which seven- to eight-year-old pupils use Bee-Bot robots to learn mathematics and computational thinking. In the context of this activity, the participants are huddled on a big carpet in an embodied configuration that foreground haptic resources for action. The top of the Bee-Bot robot, which resembles a bee, features directional buttons for programming its motion on the carpet. The pupils program the bots in pairs, and the activity involves a playful competition against other pairs.
The concrete haptic materials enabled the children to learn abstract mathematical and programming concepts by using diverse semiotic resources (Goodwin 2000), including embodied actions such as handling the bots and observing their movement on the carpet. At the same time, the competitive setting fostered an affective atmosphere in which ownership of the bot and its own territory became salient features of the local moral order. The participants regulated turn-taking to handle the bot mostly by embodied means. They also created ‘territories’ (Goffman 1971) to the carpet and protected them from the intrusion of the other participants’ bots. In addition, the children were attentive to others’ bots, and used their teacher’s rules of the game as resources for competing (Goodwin 1998, 25), by accusing others of breaching the rules, and justifying rule breaches. The data are part of a larger postdoctoral project on how the designed environment influences learning activities.

Goffman, E. (1971). Relations in public: Micro-Studies of the public order. Harper and Row.

Goodwin, M. H. 1998. Games of Stance: Conflict and Footing in Hopscotch. In Kids’ Talk: Strategic Language Use in Later Childhood, Susan Hoyle and Carolyn Temple Adger, eds. Pp.23-46. New York: Oxford University Press.

Goodwin, C. (2018). Co-operative action. Cambridge University Press.

April 28 Kristella Montiegl Sociology, UCLA: Hearing as an Interactional Accomplishment: Observations of DHH Children Developing Listening and Spoken-Language

This project is part of my dissertation research on the socialization and learning practices of deaf or hard-of-hearing (DHH) children in an oral preschool classroom. In this setting, the primary objective is to develop children’s listening and spoken-language skills with the goal of transitioning into mainstream schooling. The total data collection consists of approximately 25 hours of audio-visual recordings in one oral classroom located in Southern California. For this project, I look at instances of adult-child interaction where a child’s hearing occasions a problem of intersubjectivity. What practices are involved in resolving this problem? What role does the child’s hearing assistive device play in this process? I will show how a DHH child’s auditory experience can become a joint activity, wherein the adult and child collaboratively achieve intersubjective understanding of what the child hears through various verbal and embodied resources.

May 5 Mick Smith: Culture and Society, Linkoping U., Sweden:
RE sequences and Multi-sensoriality in Anatomy Teaching

Building on previous work in manual skills training in crafts (Lindwall & Ekström, 2012), dentistry (Rystedt et al, 2013), and field geology (Goodwin & Smith, in press), the current study investigates the training of teaching assistants in the dissection of cadavers in a Swedish teaching hospital. Focusing on the preparation of cadavers, i.e., the extraction of relevant anatomical structures from surrounding viscera, we analyze the methods that participants use for highlighting the various tactilities of different anatomical structures in the dissection. As our analysis shows, cultivating tactile understanding of the cadaver, its anatomical structures, is crucial to training, as the differences between different structures, e.g., nerves, veins, tendons, muscle, fat, etc., are rarely as obvious as in anatomical drawings. The analytical questions pursued here include: Where does tactile experience become relevant in distinguishing various anatomical structures? What resources, embodied and otherwise, do participants use in publicly establishing that they indeed collaboratively recognize these tactile distinctions? As our analysis shows, effective instruction in this context utilizes a broader range of embodied and multimodal resources organized toward coordinating the learner’s attention toward not only seeing, but feeling relevant distinctions in anatomical structure.

May 12 Jan Hauck, British Academy Newton International Fellow Department of Anthropology
London School of Economics and Political Science; The Co-Operative Reproduction and Transformation of Culture in Aché Children’s Song”

This paper discusses creative, co-operative innovations on meaning and function of a song genre in Aché children’s peer groups. The Aché used to live as nomadic hunter-gatherers in the subtropical forests of what today is eastern Paraguay. Deforestation, disease, and persecutions forced them onto reservations in the 1960s and 70s where they now live in villages and subsist on small-scale agriculture and gardens. Sedentarization entailed many sociocultural transformations, including the abandoning of most rituals and verbal art. However, certain songs are still being performed by elders at public events showcasing Aché “culture.” Younger generations have ambivalent stances towards such practices. On the one hand, they are admired as indexes of a way of life mostly lost, yet increasingly important for a newly emerging ethnic consciousness. On the other hand, elders are also frequently ridiculed for their lack of knowledge in dealing with “modern” life, their ways of speaking often mocked, and their songs made fun of. In this paper, I analyze children’s non-serious performances of elders’ songs. These songs have become publicly available as a substrate upon which children innovate to construct an oppositional stance to their grandparents. However, in ongoing performance even in a mocking fashion, the structures, melodies, prosodies, voices, and content of these songs become available anew for further transformations, and can turn into a serious performance by children. I use such a case here to discuss the relevance of detailed analysis of co-operative action for anthropological discussions of cultural reproduction and transformation more generally.

May 19 Virginia Flood and Benedikt W. Harrer , Education, U of Buffalo:
Responding to STEM Students’ Gestured Candidate Responses in Whole-Class Discussions

In whole-class discussions, to answer teachers’ questions, students sometimes use representational gestures to provide unspoken, “off-the-record,” tentative responses. By attending to these “gestured candidate responses,” teachers can preview students’ potential contributions to the discussion and ratify or ignore the contribution. Students’ gestured candidate responses can be taken up by the teacher and shared with the class (whether publicly ratified or not). This study contributes to a better understanding of the nuanced roles gesture plays in STEM classroom discourse. Preliminary results will appear in Flood, V. J. & Harrer, B.W. (2021). Responding to STEM students’ gestured candidate responses. In E. de Vries, J. Ahn, & Y. Hod (Eds.), Proceedings of the 15th International Conference of the Learning Sciences – ICLS 2021. International Society of the Learning Sciences, 2021

May 26 No Lab

June 2 Farzad Amoozegar-Fassie, Music, UCLA: Being with the Dead

My presentation examines the Syrian refugee children’s narratives about the dead other that elicit “feelings of disorientation and discomfort that in turn become further prompts to rationalization along new pathways” (Doostdar 2018: 19-20). For the children death becomes an unresolved feeling, an “amalgam of curiosity and repulsion” (Saif 2020: 135) that invites questions and explanations. These “uncanny” experiences are not only of strangeness or alienation; more accurately, these sentiments become “a peculiar commingling of the familiar and unfamiliar” (Royle 2003: 1). I build on the work of the anthropologist Alireza Doostdar’s use of ‘ajib va gharib (wondrous and strange) in an attempt to diverge from Western understandings, particularly Freud’s das Unheimliche (“the uncanny”) and der Todestrieb (“the death drive”). ‘Ajib va gharib can be explained as the “familiar-strange” experience rooted in the Islamic perception of death’s dual nature. The duality in death, according to Islamic writings, is rooted in pleasant feelings for the believer (the desire for the soul to reunite with Allāh) and haunting for the skeptic or the non-believer (Haj Manouchehri and Hirtenstein 2017). The dead, while no longer capable of morally significant actions, have awareness and knowledge far superior to the living (see al-Rāzī 1988: 36). In Islamic thought the soul relishes reunification with Allāh, but the intermediary space unhinges the heavenly understanding of the dead with the force of evil spirits.