January 10. Sasha Kurlenkova, Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University
Tying techniques: the various uses of ‘activity framework’ by a boy with dysarthria and his adult communication partners
In this data-session, I’d like to explore the various ways in which a young multimodal dysarthric speaker, his mother and his school teacher rely on “activity frameworks” to build co-operative actions.
The recordings were done inside a Russian-speaking household during 2 consecutive school years (2020/2021 & 2021/2022), when Vlad, a 8-10 year-old speaker with cerebral palsy, was mastering the 1st and 2nd grades of the mainstream primary school program at home. The people assisting him in this process were his mother, Alisa, and his schoolteacher, Tatiana. Their interactions with Vlad were organized primarily around a computer screen managed through a mouse and a touchpad by the adults, and through an eye-tracking device by Vlad (who doesn’t use hands, but relies on eyes, face and whole-body movements in his communication and accomplishment of practical tasks on the computer). The studies included working on several web resources used by school-aged children in Russia, such as Uchi.ru and IQsha.ru The various elements of these resources, as well as the overall framework of an activity, were used by Vlad to initiate tellings or ask questions. I would like to analyze these sequences initiated by Vlad and tied to the affordances of the computer screen and web elements at hand.
Although almost all of Vlad’s methods of communication are tied in one way or another to the material and sequential context of the interaction, it seems important to make finer distinctions in his ways of tying his utterances to the environment. I hope that Harvey Sacks’ notion of “tying techniques” and the work of Charles Goodwin on how Chil tied his utterances to the “activity frameworks” can serve as points of inspiration in our discussion.
January 17. Virginia J. Flood and Emma T. Booth, Department of Learning and Instruction, Graduate School of Education, U at Buffalo, SUNY
Gesturing Together in Collaborative Problem Solving in Physics
In this study, we are investigating how repeated gestures tie together collaboratively constructed physics explanations, when different elements of an explanation are contributed by two or more students.
We draw on Goodwin’s concept of Intertwined Actors to understand how multiple participants co-author single actions and utterances through embodied interaction. Data come from video of undergraduate students working together to solve physics problems. Our goal is to better understand some of the ways students achieve close forms of coordination in group work and the different types of co-construction that arise in these settings. This study is part of an NSF funded project.
January 24. Randeep Singh Hothi. Asian American Studies Center, UCLA, Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow.
Co-Operative Openings: Gesture, Posture, and Crescendo
On November 19, 2021, a global protest movement prevailed over India’s newly enacted agricultural market reforms. For sixteen months (Aug 2020 – Nov 2021), the “farmers movement” mobilized hundreds of thousands in marches, rallies, occupations, and long-term encampments from Punjab to Delhi. This talk offers an ethnographically grounded investigation into the movement’s distinct sociality, focusing specifically on its day-to-day face-to-face goings-on. An analytic sensitivity to Sikh social sensibilities reveals key interactional routines enervating the sprawling encampments at the center of the movement. This talk will specifically analyze the “fateh”, a greeting routine that is sometimes performed one speaker at a time (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson:1974) and interestingly sometimes performed in chorus. Each respective mode of greeting also indexes ethical stances, with loud, exuberant, and lengthy choral performances standing for the emotional ecstasy characteristic of a mystical emancipation from life and death. In the Sikh tradition, affective exuberance, or “cardi kala”, is a sign of sovereignty, particularly in the initiation, organization, and performance of face-to-face contact. This study of face-to-face interaction suggests a way to think ego-loss in relation to the political which has been largely misunderstood in the study of religion.
January 31 Federica Raia; Education, UCLA. Caring Touch in High-Tech Medicine- How do we do without it?
The work is part of a participatory research project of caring-for-the-Other in the high-tech medicine practice of Advanced Heart Failure (AdHF). Data from AdHF routine practices in which various forms of caring touch are employed from one physician’s practice are compared to situations in which touching the Other is impossible in telemedicine encounters during COVID lockdowns. I show the existential grounding power of caring touch in AdHF medical practice and how other forms of bodily co-participation emerge in the physician’s practice and adjust and adapt to the new space of telemedicine.
February 7Jianhong Lin Graduate School of Humanities, Osaka University; Choreography in parents’ and children’s co-enactments of picture books
Utilizing the methodology of conversation analysis, this study focuses on trajectories of parents’ acts of choreography in shared picture book reading, in which parents enact what is portrayed in picture books, make their enactments observable to children, and attempt to modify their children to imitate it. Building on Goodwin & Cekaite (2018)’s notion of “embodied family choreography”, which is similar to creating the composition and specification of movements in dance, this study uses this term to refer to parents’ actions of initiating and calibrating steps and movements of children’s actions, while enacting something from picture books (such as birds flying, balloon releases). During this process, gesture, prosody, space, object as well as language (onomatopoeia, formulaic words in Chinese and Japanese) are all made available in parents’ choreographic actions over successive turns that crucially shape children’s actions and enhance their understanding of picture books. Data are in Chinese and Japanese.
February 14 Nils Klowait, Department of Technology and Diversity, Paderborn University and Maria Erofeeva, Laboratoire d’Anthropologie des Mondes Contemporains, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Communication and Media, Université Libre de Bruxelles & Ulster University. with Dr. Patricia Jimenez, Department of Technology and Diversity, Paderborn University.
“Can AI Explain AI?: Investigating Telemediated Encounters with Artificial Explainer Agents.”
Our talk investigates the multimodal sensemaking practices of participants interacting with a conversational artificial intelligence (AI) system. We draw on multimodal videographic data collected during the ‘AI explains AI’ project, where our team created a custom technological interactional environment within which telemediated and in-person participants interact with an artificial intelligence. The project features a dual AI system: a primary AI, designed with complex, non-transparent functions (explanandum), and a secondary AI (based on GPT-4), tasked with interpreting and explaining the primary AI’s operations.
While the project itself intersects topics of explainability, epistemics, and the positioning of affordance theory within conversation-analytic human-computer interaction research, we invite the lab participants to go beyond these topics in their contribution to our understanding of how these encounters are locally accomplished. The data session will be framed in a brief overview of emerging analytic themes (role-ascription, evidential procedures, sequentiality).
February 21 Shannon Ward: Anthropology, University of British Columbia Okanagan Campus
“Agency in repair sequences: Implications for multilingual children’s linguistic identities”
This presentation examines everyday conversations in two Tibetan-Canadian families, to address young children’s claims to linguistic knowledge. By analyzing repair sequences, I show how children agentively display their knowledge, or lack of knowledge, in relation to the Tibetan heritage language as well as the dominant language of English. While young children show agency by initiating repair sequences, adults and older siblings often elaborate these repairs into narrative assessments about the intelligibility and correctness of young children’s speech. Drawing from theories of narrative and the construction of the self, I consider how these everyday language experiences may lead children to adopt identities that are rooted in or dissociated from particular codes.
February 28. Amy Kyratzis. Education, UCSB
Indigenous Mixtec Community teachers’ practices for rescaling Mixteco: Mobilizing Epistemic ecologies in a preschool language maintenance program
March 6. Yi Ju Lai. Department of Anthropology, University of South Carolina, Postdoctoral research affiliate
Making invisible visible: Understanding in instructed actions in physics as spatiotemporal co-operative action.
Understanding, a key component of mutual communication and interaction in instruction, is constantly studied as a situated embodied achievement in sequentially relevant next actions (ref. Lynch, 2011). Understanding as meaning-making activities involves socialization into discipline-situated discursive systems of practices. Throughout the socialization activities, individuals are actively engaged in making sense of the sequence organization of the activity–– the structure, objects, relationships–– drawing on their previous experiences of similar activities and on available spatial repertoires. A New Materialist orientation of spatial repertories recognizes that human actors, language, multimodalities, and materials work together as assemblage in meaning-making in disciplinary situated activities.
This data session explores the meaning-making methods of undergraduate STEM (physics) students and their international graduate instructors in the problem-solving activities. Specifically, this session examines how students and instructors discursively and multimodally make sense of the problems and cooperatively construct meanings in order to solve the problems. This session also looks at the moments-by-moments interactions where the instructors’ expertise is momentarily ‘up for grabs’ in the problem-solving activities, sparking displays of understanding among undergraduates that create a space for student peer-oriented socialization and for students to co-build an in-group identity through circulation of textual forms of science-based humor.
Yi-Ju Lai, PhD
March 13 Yani Liu, CLIC visiting scholar; and Sociology, U of Hong Kong
The Assistance Inside Taxis: Collaboration between Passengers and Drivers
Assistance is integral to our daily lives, where individuals frequently encounter challenges and seek or provide help (Kendrick & Drew 2016). Under service encounters, service providers naturally bear the responsibility and duty to help customers because service requests and their fulfilment form the primary purpose and goal of interaction (Merritt 1976). Various Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (EMCA) studies have explored requests and assistance in different service settings. For instance, research has examined how agents manage unfulfillable customer requests in airline service calls (Lee 2011) or the grammatical variations in requesting forms at a shoe repair store (Hox & Heinemann 2016).
This paper focuses on assistance dynamics within the distinctive context of taxi-hailing. Two key features make assistance intriguing and complex in this service encounter. Firstly, the blurred service boundaries within platform taxis create challenges in describing and measuring the extent of assistance provided. It is commonly known that passengers pay for the service of transporting them from pick-up locations to destinations, but passengers often seek help for non-driving-related issues. Secondly, the symbiotic relationship between drivers and passengers in a shared space during the journey blurs the lines between “beneficiaries” and “benefactors” (Couper-Kuhlen 2014; Clayman and Heritage 2014). Because they share the space inside the car together along the journey, passengers as beneficiaries are undeniable. What if drivers can be “beneficiaries” and “benefactors” at the same time? As a result, cooperation becomes particularly crucial in this shared space compared to other service encounters.
The data I used in this study are drawn from video recordings of naturally occurring interactions between drivers and passengers during approximately 300 rides. Two GoPro cameras and one 360-degree camera were installed in the car. While GoPro recorded interactions within the car, the 360-degree camera also captured the outside view, enhancing our understanding of drivers’ resources and engagements when assisting passengers. Although driving is the primary service, the study specifically examines instances where drivers provide more assistance than driving. The analysis delves into how passengers express difficulties verbally and non-verbally, how drivers respond, and how passengers and drivers negotiate challenges with limited visibility and body movements in tackling difficulties together. By exploring the meaning of assistance as a social action within the service encounter, this research contributes to our comprehension of cooperative organization in interaction dynamics.
Winter 2024 Lab Presentations
/Presentations by nalamattinaJanuary 10. Sasha Kurlenkova, Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University
Tying techniques: the various uses of ‘activity framework’ by a boy with dysarthria and his adult communication partners
In this data-session, I’d like to explore the various ways in which a young multimodal dysarthric speaker, his mother and his school teacher rely on “activity frameworks” to build co-operative actions.
The recordings were done inside a Russian-speaking household during 2 consecutive school years (2020/2021 & 2021/2022), when Vlad, a 8-10 year-old speaker with cerebral palsy, was mastering the 1st and 2nd grades of the mainstream primary school program at home. The people assisting him in this process were his mother, Alisa, and his schoolteacher, Tatiana. Their interactions with Vlad were organized primarily around a computer screen managed through a mouse and a touchpad by the adults, and through an eye-tracking device by Vlad (who doesn’t use hands, but relies on eyes, face and whole-body movements in his communication and accomplishment of practical tasks on the computer). The studies included working on several web resources used by school-aged children in Russia, such as Uchi.ru and IQsha.ru The various elements of these resources, as well as the overall framework of an activity, were used by Vlad to initiate tellings or ask questions. I would like to analyze these sequences initiated by Vlad and tied to the affordances of the computer screen and web elements at hand.
Although almost all of Vlad’s methods of communication are tied in one way or another to the material and sequential context of the interaction, it seems important to make finer distinctions in his ways of tying his utterances to the environment. I hope that Harvey Sacks’ notion of “tying techniques” and the work of Charles Goodwin on how Chil tied his utterances to the “activity frameworks” can serve as points of inspiration in our discussion.
January 17. Virginia J. Flood and Emma T. Booth, Department of Learning and Instruction, Graduate School of Education, U at Buffalo, SUNY
Gesturing Together in Collaborative Problem Solving in Physics
In this study, we are investigating how repeated gestures tie together collaboratively constructed physics explanations, when different elements of an explanation are contributed by two or more students.
We draw on Goodwin’s concept of Intertwined Actors to understand how multiple participants co-author single actions and utterances through embodied interaction. Data come from video of undergraduate students working together to solve physics problems. Our goal is to better understand some of the ways students achieve close forms of coordination in group work and the different types of co-construction that arise in these settings. This study is part of an NSF funded project.
January 24. Randeep Singh Hothi. Asian American Studies Center, UCLA, Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow.
Co-Operative Openings: Gesture, Posture, and Crescendo
On November 19, 2021, a global protest movement prevailed over India’s newly enacted agricultural market reforms. For sixteen months (Aug 2020 – Nov 2021), the “farmers movement” mobilized hundreds of thousands in marches, rallies, occupations, and long-term encampments from Punjab to Delhi. This talk offers an ethnographically grounded investigation into the movement’s distinct sociality, focusing specifically on its day-to-day face-to-face goings-on. An analytic sensitivity to Sikh social sensibilities reveals key interactional routines enervating the sprawling encampments at the center of the movement. This talk will specifically analyze the “fateh”, a greeting routine that is sometimes performed one speaker at a time (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson:1974) and interestingly sometimes performed in chorus. Each respective mode of greeting also indexes ethical stances, with loud, exuberant, and lengthy choral performances standing for the emotional ecstasy characteristic of a mystical emancipation from life and death. In the Sikh tradition, affective exuberance, or “cardi kala”, is a sign of sovereignty, particularly in the initiation, organization, and performance of face-to-face contact. This study of face-to-face interaction suggests a way to think ego-loss in relation to the political which has been largely misunderstood in the study of religion.
January 31 Federica Raia; Education, UCLA. Caring Touch in High-Tech Medicine- How do we do without it?
The work is part of a participatory research project of caring-for-the-Other in the high-tech medicine practice of Advanced Heart Failure (AdHF). Data from AdHF routine practices in which various forms of caring touch are employed from one physician’s practice are compared to situations in which touching the Other is impossible in telemedicine encounters during COVID lockdowns. I show the existential grounding power of caring touch in AdHF medical practice and how other forms of bodily co-participation emerge in the physician’s practice and adjust and adapt to the new space of telemedicine.
February 7 Jianhong Lin Graduate School of Humanities, Osaka University; Choreography in parents’ and children’s co-enactments of picture books
Utilizing the methodology of conversation analysis, this study focuses on trajectories of parents’ acts of choreography in shared picture book reading, in which parents enact what is portrayed in picture books, make their enactments observable to children, and attempt to modify their children to imitate it. Building on Goodwin & Cekaite (2018)’s notion of “embodied family choreography”, which is similar to creating the composition and specification of movements in dance, this study uses this term to refer to parents’ actions of initiating and calibrating steps and movements of children’s actions, while enacting something from picture books (such as birds flying, balloon releases). During this process, gesture, prosody, space, object as well as language (onomatopoeia, formulaic words in Chinese and Japanese) are all made available in parents’ choreographic actions over successive turns that crucially shape children’s actions and enhance their understanding of picture books. Data are in Chinese and Japanese.
February 14 Nils Klowait, Department of Technology and Diversity, Paderborn University and Maria Erofeeva, Laboratoire d’Anthropologie des Mondes Contemporains, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Communication and Media, Université Libre de Bruxelles & Ulster University. with Dr. Patricia Jimenez, Department of Technology and Diversity, Paderborn University.
“Can AI Explain AI?: Investigating Telemediated Encounters with Artificial Explainer Agents.”
Our talk investigates the multimodal sensemaking practices of participants interacting with a conversational artificial intelligence (AI) system. We draw on multimodal videographic data collected during the ‘AI explains AI’ project, where our team created a custom technological interactional environment within which telemediated and in-person participants interact with an artificial intelligence. The project features a dual AI system: a primary AI, designed with complex, non-transparent functions (explanandum), and a secondary AI (based on GPT-4), tasked with interpreting and explaining the primary AI’s operations.
While the project itself intersects topics of explainability, epistemics, and the positioning of affordance theory within conversation-analytic human-computer interaction research, we invite the lab participants to go beyond these topics in their contribution to our understanding of how these encounters are locally accomplished. The data session will be framed in a brief overview of emerging analytic themes (role-ascription, evidential procedures, sequentiality).
February 21 Shannon Ward: Anthropology, University of British Columbia Okanagan Campus
“Agency in repair sequences: Implications for multilingual children’s linguistic identities”
This presentation examines everyday conversations in two Tibetan-Canadian families, to address young children’s claims to linguistic knowledge. By analyzing repair sequences, I show how children agentively display their knowledge, or lack of knowledge, in relation to the Tibetan heritage language as well as the dominant language of English. While young children show agency by initiating repair sequences, adults and older siblings often elaborate these repairs into narrative assessments about the intelligibility and correctness of young children’s speech. Drawing from theories of narrative and the construction of the self, I consider how these everyday language experiences may lead children to adopt identities that are rooted in or dissociated from particular codes.
February 28. Amy Kyratzis. Education, UCSB
Indigenous Mixtec Community teachers’ practices for rescaling Mixteco: Mobilizing Epistemic ecologies in a preschool language maintenance program
March 6. Yi Ju Lai. Department of Anthropology, University of South Carolina, Postdoctoral research affiliate
Making invisible visible: Understanding in instructed actions in physics as spatiotemporal co-operative action.
Understanding, a key component of mutual communication and interaction in instruction, is constantly studied as a situated embodied achievement in sequentially relevant next actions (ref. Lynch, 2011). Understanding as meaning-making activities involves socialization into discipline-situated discursive systems of practices. Throughout the socialization activities, individuals are actively engaged in making sense of the sequence organization of the activity–– the structure, objects, relationships–– drawing on their previous experiences of similar activities and on available spatial repertoires. A New Materialist orientation of spatial repertories recognizes that human actors, language, multimodalities, and materials work together as assemblage in meaning-making in disciplinary situated activities.
This data session explores the meaning-making methods of undergraduate STEM (physics) students and their international graduate instructors in the problem-solving activities. Specifically, this session examines how students and instructors discursively and multimodally make sense of the problems and cooperatively construct meanings in order to solve the problems. This session also looks at the moments-by-moments interactions where the instructors’ expertise is momentarily ‘up for grabs’ in the problem-solving activities, sparking displays of understanding among undergraduates that create a space for student peer-oriented socialization and for students to co-build an in-group identity through circulation of textual forms of science-based humor.
Yi-Ju Lai, PhD
March 13 Yani Liu, CLIC visiting scholar; and Sociology, U of Hong Kong
The Assistance Inside Taxis: Collaboration between Passengers and Drivers
Assistance is integral to our daily lives, where individuals frequently encounter challenges and seek or provide help (Kendrick & Drew 2016). Under service encounters, service providers naturally bear the responsibility and duty to help customers because service requests and their fulfilment form the primary purpose and goal of interaction (Merritt 1976). Various Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (EMCA) studies have explored requests and assistance in different service settings. For instance, research has examined how agents manage unfulfillable customer requests in airline service calls (Lee 2011) or the grammatical variations in requesting forms at a shoe repair store (Hox & Heinemann 2016).
This paper focuses on assistance dynamics within the distinctive context of taxi-hailing. Two key features make assistance intriguing and complex in this service encounter. Firstly, the blurred service boundaries within platform taxis create challenges in describing and measuring the extent of assistance provided. It is commonly known that passengers pay for the service of transporting them from pick-up locations to destinations, but passengers often seek help for non-driving-related issues. Secondly, the symbiotic relationship between drivers and passengers in a shared space during the journey blurs the lines between “beneficiaries” and “benefactors” (Couper-Kuhlen 2014; Clayman and Heritage 2014). Because they share the space inside the car together along the journey, passengers as beneficiaries are undeniable. What if drivers can be “beneficiaries” and “benefactors” at the same time? As a result, cooperation becomes particularly crucial in this shared space compared to other service encounters.
The data I used in this study are drawn from video recordings of naturally occurring interactions between drivers and passengers during approximately 300 rides. Two GoPro cameras and one 360-degree camera were installed in the car. While GoPro recorded interactions within the car, the 360-degree camera also captured the outside view, enhancing our understanding of drivers’ resources and engagements when assisting passengers. Although driving is the primary service, the study specifically examines instances where drivers provide more assistance than driving. The analysis delves into how passengers express difficulties verbally and non-verbally, how drivers respond, and how passengers and drivers negotiate challenges with limited visibility and body movements in tackling difficulties together. By exploring the meaning of assistance as a social action within the service encounter, this research contributes to our comprehension of cooperative organization in interaction dynamics.