October 13 Introductions of New Participants and Rachel Chen UC -Berkeley, Education The Sound of Touch: Non-speaking Autistic children and their parents stimming together
The homes of non-speaking Autistic children are intimate spaces, delicately fraught with both tension and care. At the very center of family life is the Autistic child, navigating daily interaction with neurotypical others. Non-speaking Autistic children do not share the same interactional modality as their speaking-family members, and yet are often expected to engage in verbal conversation. What if we flipped the interactional context, so that as neurotypical family members and researchers, we accommodated to the adaptive modalities of Autistic children? My dissertation work forefronts Autistic rhythmic behavior (e.g. stimming) as having potential to create an empathetic experience of belonging and relatedness. During my recent fieldwork, I entered into the homes of non-speaking Autistic children with an artifact I had designed: a musical mat that maps interpersonal touch to musical sounds. I worked closely with each family to customize the environment to each child, then filmed families interacting with one another on the mat. In this session, I bring video data of parents and their non-speaking Autistic children producing rhythmic movement together.
October 20 Maria Erofeeva, Nils Klowait, Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences
Interaction without the interchangeability of standpoints: the case of VRChat
Alfred Schutz demonstrated that our everyday interactions are built on a fundamental interchangeability of standpoints, i.e. on the participants’ mutual understanding that they are experiencing the same world. When a participant points out a lone bird in the sky, they expect that the other participants are able to understand that this particular bird is being pointed at. This interchangeability of standpoints becomes problematic in VRChat – a social platform made for interaction within virtual reality (VR). Different VR users may – by virtue of settings or the technological specificities of their VR system – see the same social setting differently: they may not see or hear the same number of people, and experience the same in-game objects differently. Mediated environments were previously described as ‘fractured ecologies’ (Luff et al. 2003) because they provide limited perceptual access to the space where the action is performed. But unlike other mediated spaces, in VR participants may even fail to understand that something is invisible to other interactants. Our question is how the participants сo-operatively reconstruct the interchangeability of standpoints (if they do). And, if not, what bearings on the interaction this fractured ecology has. The other question is methodological: How can we research interaction when it is unclear what is mutually available to the interactants? We would be happy to hear both conceptual, methodological and data-driven insights about the interaction in virtual reality. The data is video recordings of VR-based interaction recorded from the perspective of one of the participants (first person perspective).
October 27 Jan Hauck, Anthropology London School of Economics and Political Science and Lilit Ghazaryan, UCLA Anthropology
Discussion of ACYIG Invited Session: Highlighting Language through Repair Practices in Children’s Interactions (Anthropology of Children and Youth Interest Group)
Session Type: Executive Session – Roundtable / Townhall (Virtual) This roundtable explores mechanisms through which children and their caregivers make language salient as an object in ongoing discourse. We focus especially on repairs (Schegloff et al. 1977), recasts (Chouinard and Clark 2003), repetitions (Rossi 2020), replacements (Sidnell and Barnes 2013), and recycling of prior talk (Goodwin 2018), primarily by children and youth, but also by caregivers and other members of children’s communicative environment, as they give evidence of and socialize metalinguistic awareness of children. For the child, these practices are a way of demonstrating linguistic and sociocultural knowledge, while for caregivers, they are a socialization tool of that knowledge. Repairs, recasts, and the like are phenomena that make explicit reflexivity in language, a topic that has long been a cornerstone of linguistic anthropology (Silverstein 1976; Babcock 1980; Bauman and Briggs 1990). The capacity of discourse to simultaneously function as medium and object of communication lies at the heart of metapragmatic phenomena such as reported speech, translation, deictics, or poetics (Lucy 1993; Silverstein 1993). All of these make different aspects of discourse salient and thus “highlight” (Goodwin 1994) them in more or less explicit ways. In this roundtable, we focus on mechanisms that specifically draw attention to the code (sensu Jakobson 1956). While this is often accomplished by explicitly talking about it • for example, “correcting” someone’s pronunciation, teaching a word or a phoneme of a language, or otherwise commenting on some aspect of discourse • it can also be accomplished without the use of overtly metapragmatic expressions through repairs, recasts, and parallel phenomena. In some cases, such strategies explicitly foreground language as an object in the child’s consciousness. In others, the linguistic competencies and ideologies remain largely implicit and in the background. Yet all of them make the code available as object of attention in discourse. We will discuss short examples of such interactional highlighting of the code through repair sequences, reformulations, recasts, and replacements in Armenian•Russian•English kindergartens in Armenia, a Breton-medium secondary school in Brittany, France, a bilingual English•Japanese heritage language classroom, an indigenous Aché village in eastern Paraguay, Tibetan children in Canada, and between French and English-speaking parents and their children in France. Some of the practices examined involve substitutions that replace constituents from one language with equivalent ones from another, others involve multimodal recasts, verbally reformulating gestures and other nonverbal behavior. At stake are ideologies of standardization, of speaking “beautifully,” of speech as primary medium of expression, and of boundary maintenance, creation, and crossing between languages. In different ways, all of these practices make the code available as a discursive and phenomenological object and thus provide crucial tools for children not only to demonstrate linguistic and sociocultural knowledge, but also to actively and creatively manipulate linguistic resources, taking responsibility for their linguistic futures into their own hands.
Participants: Aliyah Morgenstern, Pauline Beaupoil-Hourdel, Matt Burdelski, John Lucy, Shannon Ward, Alex Thomson, Lilit Gharzaryan, Jan David Hauck
November 3 Julia Katila, Social Sciences, Tampere University
The Moments of Touch and Affection: Negotiations of Physical Togetherness and Separation in Romantic Relationships
While there are ample studies that consider the embodied and affective nature of interaction between children and their caregivers (De Leon, 2012, Cekaite, 2016, M.H. Goodwin and Cekaite, 2018), romantic couples as a form of intimate relationship have received less attention among video analysis of authentic interaction. In this datasession, I will present my study that examines the intercorporeal—co-experienced and co-embodied (Merleau-Ponty, 1962; Meyer et al., 2017)—interaction between Finnish romantic partners. The study employs video analysis of interaction to examine how the participants negotiate over their personal space and “appropriate” moments to touch. The dataset entails video- and interview data of 6 romantic couples, whose everyday life I videorecorded for 10-20 hours for seven days and whom I interviewed about their own interpretation of the video-recorded events in their life. In the datasession I will provide examples of how the participants physically or verbally initiate touching or being touched. By the time of the datasession, I have almost finished my datacollection and will start the analysis and writing so all comments on the data and project are very welcome.
November 10 Adrienne Isaac, Linguistics, Georgetown University 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.
November 17 AAA; no lab
November 24 (Thanksgiving) We will discuss if we have lab this date or not because some in the US travel on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving
December 1 Grace Miao: Communications, UCLA “Remember…you can always just”: Approaching the Zone of Proximal Development
Francis F. Steen, David DeLiema, Qiyuan Grace Miao Learning is a voluntary act; it depends on the child’s willingness to learn. How does the child regulate her own learning? In this study, we consider three student-teacher interactions and examine how students regulate their own engagement in learning by engaging with the instructor, selectively allocating the appropriate resources, and generating a state of readiness. We situate this process within the framework of Vygotsky’s notion of a zone of proximal development, extending and elaborating it by developing the student’s perspective on the ZPD. To further characterize this perspective, we introduce the notion of a communicative potential (CP), or a calibrated state of readiness for probabilistically targeted learning. We show that instructors pitch prospective new strategies to students and that successful pitches succinctly highlight low costs and high benefits. We infer from observed behavior that students make probabilistic assessments of the costs and benefits of the proposed new strategy and generate a communicative potential calibrated to the task at hand. Building on recent literature on the importance of student authority in learning, we recommend an attentive and explicit engagement with a student’s communicative potential in order to foster a high-level capacity in the students to skillfully regulate their own learning.
December 8 Ali Reza Majlesi, Stockholm University, Education. Working out action for a relevant next: Co-operative response in talk with people with late-stage dementia
This study deals with the interpretive work of building (responsive) actions in interaction with people with late-stage dementia who are unable to speak. Studies of interaction have pointed out that understanding of a prior action is located in the subsequent turns (Sacks et al., 1974; see also Stivers and Rossano, 2010). Action ascription is further defined as “the assignment of an action to a turn as revealed by response of the next speaker” (Levinson, 2012: 104). However, Goodwin (2018) shows that “co-operative, accumulative action occurs not only when one party provides a response to an earlier action that has come to completion, but in the midst of emerging action itself” (p. 55). Drawing on conversation analysis and multimodal analysis of interaction (e.g., Goodwin, 2018; Mondada, 2021), I will show how responses in interaction with people with late-stage dementia are co-operatively and accumulatively shaped as ongoing achievements. The results of the study are based on the detailed analysis of two types of joint activities with a person with late-stage dementia: (a) assisted eating/drinking activities, (b) communicating with the help of pictorial objects. The findings point to response making procedures as sense making activities which involve a continuous work of resolving the indeterminacy of action through following procedures: the relevancy of the next action is settled through working out the embodied display of intent by either testing the relevancy of the next action or soliciting confirmations before making the next move. Unresolved determinacy of actions is managed by other practices including affective responses. The implications of the study point to the distribution of accountability not only for understanding a single action but its production, and also understanding “agency” as a socially distributed and embodied achievement in interaction.
Fall 2021
/Presentations by nalamattinaOctober 13 Introductions of New Participants and
Rachel Chen UC -Berkeley, Education
The Sound of Touch: Non-speaking Autistic children and their parents stimming together
The homes of non-speaking Autistic children are intimate spaces, delicately fraught with both tension and care. At the very center of family life is the Autistic child, navigating daily interaction with neurotypical others. Non-speaking Autistic children do not share the same interactional modality as their speaking-family members, and yet are often expected to engage in verbal conversation. What if we flipped the interactional context, so that as neurotypical family members and researchers, we accommodated to the adaptive modalities of Autistic children? My dissertation work forefronts Autistic rhythmic behavior (e.g. stimming) as having potential to create an empathetic experience of belonging and relatedness. During my recent fieldwork, I entered into the homes of non-speaking Autistic children with an artifact I had designed: a musical mat that maps interpersonal touch to musical sounds. I worked closely with each family to customize the environment to each child, then filmed families interacting with one another on the mat. In this session, I bring video data of parents and their non-speaking Autistic children producing rhythmic movement together.
October 20 Maria Erofeeva, Nils Klowait, Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences
Interaction without the interchangeability of standpoints: the case of VRChat
Alfred Schutz demonstrated that our everyday interactions are built on a fundamental interchangeability of standpoints, i.e. on the participants’ mutual understanding that they are experiencing the same world. When a participant points out a lone bird in the sky, they expect that the other participants are able to understand that this particular bird is being pointed at. This interchangeability of standpoints becomes problematic in VRChat – a social platform made for interaction within virtual reality (VR). Different VR users may – by virtue of settings or the technological specificities of their VR system – see the same social setting differently: they may not see or hear the same number of people, and experience the same in-game objects differently. Mediated environments were previously described as ‘fractured ecologies’ (Luff et al. 2003) because they provide limited perceptual access to the space where the action is performed. But unlike other mediated spaces, in VR participants may even fail to understand that something is invisible to other interactants. Our question is how the participants сo-operatively reconstruct the interchangeability of standpoints (if they do). And, if not, what bearings on the interaction this fractured ecology has. The other question is methodological: How can we research interaction when it is unclear what is mutually available to the interactants? We would be happy to hear both conceptual, methodological and data-driven insights about the interaction in virtual reality. The data is video recordings of VR-based interaction recorded from the perspective of one of the participants (first person perspective).
October 27 Jan Hauck, Anthropology London School of Economics and Political Science and Lilit Ghazaryan, UCLA Anthropology
Discussion of ACYIG Invited Session: Highlighting Language through Repair Practices in Children’s Interactions (Anthropology of Children and Youth Interest Group)
Session Type: Executive Session – Roundtable / Townhall (Virtual) This roundtable explores mechanisms through which children and their caregivers make language salient as an object in ongoing discourse. We focus especially on repairs (Schegloff et al. 1977), recasts (Chouinard and Clark 2003), repetitions (Rossi 2020), replacements (Sidnell and Barnes 2013), and recycling of prior talk (Goodwin 2018), primarily by children and youth, but also by caregivers and other members of children’s communicative environment, as they give evidence of and socialize metalinguistic awareness of children. For the child, these practices are a way of demonstrating linguistic and sociocultural knowledge, while for caregivers, they are a socialization tool of that knowledge. Repairs, recasts, and the like are phenomena that make explicit reflexivity in language, a topic that has long been a cornerstone of linguistic anthropology (Silverstein 1976; Babcock 1980; Bauman and Briggs 1990). The capacity of discourse to simultaneously function as medium and object of communication lies at the heart of metapragmatic phenomena such as reported speech, translation, deictics, or poetics (Lucy 1993; Silverstein 1993). All of these make different aspects of discourse salient and thus “highlight” (Goodwin 1994) them in more or less explicit ways. In this roundtable, we focus on mechanisms that specifically draw attention to the code (sensu Jakobson 1956). While this is often accomplished by explicitly talking about it • for example, “correcting” someone’s pronunciation, teaching a word or a phoneme of a language, or otherwise commenting on some aspect of discourse • it can also be accomplished without the use of overtly metapragmatic expressions through repairs, recasts, and parallel phenomena. In some cases, such strategies explicitly foreground language as an object in the child’s consciousness. In others, the linguistic competencies and ideologies remain largely implicit and in the background. Yet all of them make the code available as object of attention in discourse. We will discuss short examples of such interactional highlighting of the code through repair sequences, reformulations, recasts, and replacements in Armenian•Russian•English kindergartens in Armenia, a Breton-medium secondary school in Brittany, France, a bilingual English•Japanese heritage language classroom, an indigenous Aché village in eastern Paraguay, Tibetan children in Canada, and between French and English-speaking parents and their children in France. Some of the practices examined involve substitutions that replace constituents from one language with equivalent ones from another, others involve multimodal recasts, verbally reformulating gestures and other nonverbal behavior. At stake are ideologies of standardization, of speaking “beautifully,” of speech as primary medium of expression, and of boundary maintenance, creation, and crossing between languages. In different ways, all of these practices make the code available as a discursive and phenomenological object and thus provide crucial tools for children not only to demonstrate linguistic and sociocultural knowledge, but also to actively and creatively manipulate linguistic resources, taking responsibility for their linguistic futures into their own hands.
Participants: Aliyah Morgenstern, Pauline Beaupoil-Hourdel, Matt Burdelski, John Lucy, Shannon Ward, Alex Thomson, Lilit Gharzaryan, Jan David Hauck
November 3 Julia Katila, Social Sciences, Tampere University
The Moments of Touch and Affection: Negotiations of Physical Togetherness and Separation in Romantic Relationships
While there are ample studies that consider the embodied and affective nature of interaction between children and their caregivers (De Leon, 2012, Cekaite, 2016, M.H. Goodwin and Cekaite, 2018), romantic couples as a form of intimate relationship have received less attention among video analysis of authentic interaction. In this datasession, I will present my study that examines the intercorporeal—co-experienced and co-embodied (Merleau-Ponty, 1962; Meyer et al., 2017)—interaction between Finnish romantic partners. The study employs video analysis of interaction to examine how the participants negotiate over their personal space and “appropriate” moments to touch. The dataset entails video- and interview data of 6 romantic couples, whose everyday life I videorecorded for 10-20 hours for seven days and whom I interviewed about their own interpretation of the video-recorded events in their life. In the datasession I will provide examples of how the participants physically or verbally initiate touching or being touched. By the time of the datasession, I have almost finished my datacollection and will start the analysis and writing so all comments on the data and project are very welcome.
November 10 Adrienne Isaac, Linguistics, Georgetown University 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.
November 17 AAA; no lab
November 24 (Thanksgiving) We will discuss if we have lab this date or not because some in the US travel on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving
December 1 Grace Miao: Communications, UCLA “Remember…you can always just”: Approaching the Zone of Proximal Development
Francis F. Steen, David DeLiema, Qiyuan Grace Miao Learning is a voluntary act; it depends on the child’s willingness to learn. How does the child regulate her own learning? In this study, we consider three student-teacher interactions and examine how students regulate their own engagement in learning by engaging with the instructor, selectively allocating the appropriate resources, and generating a state of readiness. We situate this process within the framework of Vygotsky’s notion of a zone of proximal development, extending and elaborating it by developing the student’s perspective on the ZPD. To further characterize this perspective, we introduce the notion of a communicative potential (CP), or a calibrated state of readiness for probabilistically targeted learning. We show that instructors pitch prospective new strategies to students and that successful pitches succinctly highlight low costs and high benefits. We infer from observed behavior that students make probabilistic assessments of the costs and benefits of the proposed new strategy and generate a communicative potential calibrated to the task at hand. Building on recent literature on the importance of student authority in learning, we recommend an attentive and explicit engagement with a student’s communicative potential in order to foster a high-level capacity in the students to skillfully regulate their own learning.
December 8 Ali Reza Majlesi, Stockholm University, Education. Working out action for a relevant next: Co-operative response in talk with people with late-stage dementia
This study deals with the interpretive work of building (responsive) actions in interaction with people with late-stage dementia who are unable to speak. Studies of interaction have pointed out that understanding of a prior action is located in the subsequent turns (Sacks et al., 1974; see also Stivers and Rossano, 2010). Action ascription is further defined as “the assignment of an action to a turn as revealed by response of the next speaker” (Levinson, 2012: 104). However, Goodwin (2018) shows that “co-operative, accumulative action occurs not only when one party provides a response to an earlier action that has come to completion, but in the midst of emerging action itself” (p. 55). Drawing on conversation analysis and multimodal analysis of interaction (e.g., Goodwin, 2018; Mondada, 2021), I will show how responses in interaction with people with late-stage dementia are co-operatively and accumulatively shaped as ongoing achievements. The results of the study are based on the detailed analysis of two types of joint activities with a person with late-stage dementia: (a) assisted eating/drinking activities, (b) communicating with the help of pictorial objects. The findings point to response making procedures as sense making activities which involve a continuous work of resolving the indeterminacy of action through following procedures: the relevancy of the next action is settled through working out the embodied display of intent by either testing the relevancy of the next action or soliciting confirmations before making the next move. Unresolved determinacy of actions is managed by other practices including affective responses. The implications of the study point to the distribution of accountability not only for understanding a single action but its production, and also understanding “agency” as a socially distributed and embodied achievement in interaction.