Projects & Collaborations 10 foundShow per page10 10 20 50 The first five words: Multilingual cities in Switzerland and Belgium and the grammar of language choice in public space Research Project | 2 Project MembersThis project studies how unacquainted persons spontaneously engage in interaction in multilingual cities in Switzerland and Belgium, thereby shedding light on language practices in present-day, urban environments. Officially multilingual cities, such as Fribourg (Switzerland) and Brussels (Belgium), have received extended attention with regard to how language policies are locally implemented. Little is known, however, about how people choose and negotiate the language of conversation when addressing an unknown person - who might speak the local language, but also a language of immigration or tourism. Based on video-recordings collected in bilingual cities (Fribourg, Brussels), in touristic locations (Lugano, Ghent) and in areas of multiple contacts (Basel, Eupen), this project documents everyday language practices in public space. It focuses on encounters between unknown persons within two types of events: (1) Symmetrical Ordinary Encounters, which happen when people going about the same activity (e.g. sitting on a bench, walking the dog) start talking to each other; (2) Asymmetrical Institutional Encounters, during which someone requests something (e.g. a signature, political support, money) from a passer-by or offers something (e.g. a flyer, a product sample). It shows how, during the opening phase of an encounter, individuals progressively discover the linguistic options they have for efficiently engaging in interaction (ranging from the choice of one common language, to a mode of interaction in which speakers alternate languages, to conversations in which each individual speaks a different language, etc.). The diversity of resources speakers deploy in order to establish focused interaction with each other is analysed from a multimodal perspective, taking into account how linguistic resources are embedded in the individuals' embodied actions. Using multimodal conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, this project will provide the following results: (1) it will contribute to the analysis of conversational openings by systematically taking into account the individuals' embodied resources;(2) it will provide a situated analysis of language contact "as it happens" and show that the speakers' language choices are sensitive to the social categorisation of the interactants; (3) it will describe urban public space as a locus of multilingualism, hence challenging the present-day image of public space (often associated to fear and insecurity) in contemporary societies, by showing its relevance for pro-social ways of living; (4) it will also engender methodological guidelines for video recording in natural public settings of interaction DIS-AGREE Research Project | 6 Project MembersDas geisteswissenschaftliche Projekt aus der Linguistik steht unter der Leitung der Universität Freiburg und wird gemeinsam mit den Universitäten Basel, Haute-Alsace und Strasbourg umgesetzt. Ziel ist es, aktuelle Forschungsansätze an den vier Universitäten in drei Ländern zum Thema "(dis)agreement & (dis)alignment" (d.h. Konfliktpotentiale in Gesprächen) zusammenzuführen und mit innovativen Methoden in Multimodalität und Multimedialität weiterzuentwickeln. Ein besonderer Fokus wird auf die Frage gelegt, wie mittels sprachlicher und körperlicher Ressourcen Konfliktmomente in der Interaktion ausgehandelt werden. Das Projekt wird von Eucor - The European Campus mit "Seed Money" in der Förderlinie "Forschung und Innovation" unterstützt. Kontakt: Universität Freiburg: Stefan Pfänder ( stefan.pfaender@romanistik.uni-freiburg.de ); Universität Basel: Miriam Locher ( miriam.locher@unibas.ch ); Université de Haute-Alsace: Greta Komur-Thilloy ( greta.komur-thilloy@uha.fr ); Université de Strasbourg: Rudolph Sock ( sock@unistra.fr ) Projektveranstaltungen: Workshop: Multimedia I: SMS: "Social practices of (dis)agreement and (dis)alignment" ( Mulhouse, 16.01.2020 ) Workshop: Multimodality: Multiactivites: "Alignment and alignables in the analysis of interaction" ( Zoom 25.03.2021 ) Workshop: Multimedia II: Film: Part 1: (Dis)Agree: Affective stance in fictional and non-fictional interactional scenarios ( Zoom, 15.10.2020 ) Part 2: Dis/agree and argumentation in school contexts ( Zoom, 19.03.2021 ) Workshop: (Dis)-agreement und (dis-)alignment: positioning practices in specialized discourse from a construction grammar perspective ( Basel, 27.-28. 09 2021 ) PostDoc Elliott Hoey Research Project | 2 Project MembersWhat's the value of doing things together? Human sociality is perhaps the distinguishing characteristic of our species, the foundations of which lie in direct face-to-face social interaction. Much research has been directed toward uncovering the psychological mechanisms and processes underpinning coordinated social action, but what remains to be described are the precise ways that participants in real life activities decide to act together or separately. Rather than relying on laboratory experimentation, the proposed research will use naturally occurring social activities to specify participants' understandings of the utility and appropriateness of joint action. In particular, I will examine a setting where participants must recurrently appraise the relevance of collaborative action: building construction sites. I will undertake three studies using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to uncover how participants who are committed to a common project detect and act upon opportunities for closely interlocked action. This project serves as an empirical advancement in research on social interaction by articulating the connections between these fundamental modes of human conduct. The findings of this project will also resonate with researchers of pragmatic disorders, workplace organization, and human-robot interaction. (186 words) From Multimodality to Multisensoriality: Language, Body, and Sensoriality in Social Interaction (intSenses) Research Project | 1 Project MembersSensoriality is a fundamental dimension of the human experience in and of the world - since people engage in the material world using their entire body, their senses and their language. However, despite a growing interest in language and embodiment in various disciplines the role of sensoriality is still neglected. Moreover, sensoriality is often considered as relying primarily on individual and private perceptions. Although some research on the senses exists in cognitive linguistic and historical-anthropological fields, sensoriality remains largely ignored from an interactional perspective. The intSenses project aims at filling these gaps, by recognizing sensoriality a central theoretical and empirical role within an integrated model of language and body in social interaction. Rooted in conversation analysis, the project aims at developing current research on multimodality in social interaction - that is, the way participants mobilize together language, gesture, gaze, body postures and movements in order to act and communicate - on the new territory of multisensoriality - that is, the way participants collectively engage in sensorial practices involving all of the senses. More particularly, the project will develop empirical analyses of how people smell, taste, and touch food within joint activities such as cooking together, how their body and their language feature in these practices in specific and complementary ways, how they manifest publicly and communicate intersubjectively what they sense within social interaction. These empirical analyses will inspire conceptual advances, reflecting on the role of sensoriality in the multimodal organization of social interaction. Thus, the project's general aim is to propose a new approach to multisensoriality based on a multimodal approach of social interaction. The focus of the study are sensory practices - that is, meaningful social acts of sensing - carried out via movements of the hand and the body. These sensory practices are embedded within specific courses of action and broader activities in talk and social interaction. The focus will be on the more neglected sensory practices - tasting, touching, and smelling - and their interrelationships. Gazing and hearing will also be considered as they are crucial for establishing the intersubjectivity of sensory practices. Multisensoriality will be studied using an innovative methodology involving video recordings of sensory practices and detailed multimodal transcription and analysis of these recordings. The data will document how people in authentic social settings, speaking different languages, experience their senses during ordinary activities. The analytical focus will be on the multimodal resources (language, gesture, gaze, facial expressions, body postures, movements, etc.) that organize these practices in a publicly intelligible way. This also entails the study of how language and the body, i.e. audible (verbal and vocal) and visible resources, achieve the intersubjectivity of sensory practices in social interaction. An empirical focus will be given to tasting, touching, and smelling in food activities as an exemplary domain for empirical investigations of sensoriality in action. Instances of sensory practices in selecting, preparing, and discovering food will be studied in detail. On the one hand, the project aims at analyzing how people collectively engage in sensory practices - such as tasting food, for example - by mobilizing different aspects of their body and their language in a way that is publicly and intersubjectively intelligible. One the other hand, the project aims at showing how sensoriality features in the multimodal organization of interaction, by showing how not only visual and audible but also haptic, aromatic, and tasty features are oriented to by participants in building the accountability of their mutual and coordinated activities Speaking in public: Social interactions within large groups (SpIP-2) Research Project | 1 Project MembersThis project (called SpIP-2, 2016-2017, 18 months) constitutes the continuation of the previous one, still on-going (called SpIP-1, 2013-2016, 3 years). SpIP-1 is being currently developed with success and very rich outputs, and 2 dissertations are being written. SpIP-1 also has represented considerable work of the team on an evolving corpus: this opens up new exciting topics of study, to be developed in SpIP-2. Importantly, SpIP-2 also concerns the completion of the 2 dissertations, which, given the amount of work and outputs of SpIP-1, will be almost finished but not entirely completed at the end of SpIP-1. SpIP-1 has offered an extensive study of a video corpus documenting a participatory project in urban planning concerning the transformation of a military site into a public park in the centre of the city of Lyon in France. This form of participatory democracy involves meetings with citizens, associations, and interest groups, the sharing of information gathered among various kinds of experts, exchanges with political representatives at various levels, discussions, and brainstorming sessions with the citizens, in which they elaborate proposals for the park, discuss plans and critically inspect the work in progress on the construction site. This kind of public and civic process represents an exemplary site for the study of institutional social interactions, of public speech both by novices and professionals, and of the collective elaboration of ideas. Adopting the approach of Conversation Analysis, the SpIP-1 project, according to the initial plan, has investigated the specific organization of these meetings, by focusing on turn-taking procedures (the way in which the right to talk is orchestrated among the numerous participants of the meetings) and on practices through which citizen elaborate proposals, discuss them, express and negotiate agreements and disagreements. These analyses also raise and respond to more general and innovative issues, such as the organization of talk in interaction in larger groups of participants; the institutional organization of opportunities to participate and the local and interactional definition of what 'participation' means; the multimodal (i.e. taking into account language, gesture, gaze, body postures, embodied manipulation of objects, and the arrangements of bodies in the environment) analysis of meetings including the embodied and visible practices for grasping turns and organizing actions, and the collective manipulation of texts and plans. Moreover, SpIP-1 has offered innovative insights about the longitudinal study of interactional processes, since the corpus studied covers 8 years of debates. The success of SpIP-1 has opened new important avenues for researching these phenomena, thanks to the collection of new data. SpIP-1 began as a project based on an initial video corpus collected by the PI between 2008 and 2012, covering the launching of the participatory consultation of citizens, the initial debates and collective ateliers on the plans with the architect. During SpIP-1 new data were collected in 2013-2014, concerning an important new phase of the project, the implementation of the plans in an emerging construction site, until its partial opening. This evolution of the corpus, following the evolution of a long-time urban project, opens up new interesting questions: the participatory procedure has evolved from debating about the park as a discursive object (2008-2009), to the park as an object 'in the planning' (2012 on) and as a built environment critically inspected by the citizens (2013 on). On this basis, SpIP-2 aims first at completing the data collection in such a way to produce a total video interactional documentation of a participatory process lasting for almost 10 years - which represents an absolute novum not only in Conversation Analysis but broadly in the social sciences. Second, SpIP-2 aims at the study - not yet conceivable in SpIP-1 - of how discussions about the park evolve during its appropriation by the citizens not only as an idea, but as an emerging material object. More precisely, these new analyses concern a) different facets of the longitudinal development of the debates, b) an important focus on the various materialities and spatialities involved in the collective elaboration of the urban project, such as plans and other visualizations, and the in fieri material architectural realization, c) the mobile apprehension of the park in the critical inspections by the citizens in visits of construction site with the architect, in historical visits organized by and for citizens, as well as in their everyday use of the partially - and then totally - opened park. These new foci constitute innovative contributions to contemporary important topics in Conversation Analysis and more broadly in linguistics, sociology and anthropology, concerning the interactional organization of institutionality, history, multimodality and mobility. Finland Distinguished Professor Programme Research Project | 1 Project MembersThe project Multimodality: Reconsidering language and action through embodiment is funded by the Academy of Finland (FiDiPro/ Finnish Distinguished Professorship program). The FiDiPro program is a very competitive grant, open worldwide to all senior academic outside Finland and within all disciplines. The project will be based at the Centre of Excellence on Intersubjectivity in Interaction at the University of Helsinki. Human communication in face-to-face interaction involves unavoidably both language and the body - be it interaction between family members, colleagues at work, or people in services and health care. Despite this, communication and action have been largely studied by favoring spoken language only. Consequently, the orchestration between language, gesture, gaze, head movements and body postures is still largely ignored. This has also led to a theoretical emphasis that ignores the connection of language to other semiotic resources for communication and underestimates that most of its features are actually strongly associated with and even shaped by situated embodied practice. This project aims at proposing an integrated and holistic view of the multimodality of social interaction, considering the full range of multimodal resources. This broader vision will be developed at theoretical, analytical and methodological levels. Moreover, on the basis of rich corpora of video recordings of authentic interactions in Finnish, French, English and German, an empirical exemplary study of specific social actions will be conducted, in order to foster cross-linguistic comparison. Systematic analyses of general patterns, as well as cross-linguistic and cross-setting comparisons form a novel contribution of the project in the field of multimodal conversation analysis. Multimodality: Reconsidering language and action through embodi-ment Research Project | 1 Project MembersThe project Multimodality: Reconsidering language and action through embodiment is funded by the Academy of Finland (FiDiPro/ Finnish Distinguished Professorship program). The FiDiPro program is a very competitive grant, open worldwide to all senior academic outside Finland and within all disciplines. The project will be based at the Centre of Excellence on Intersubjectivity in Interaction at the University of Helsinki. Human communication in face-to-face interaction involves unavoidably both language and the body - be it interaction between family members, colleagues at work, or people in services and health care. Despite this, communication and action have been largely studied by favoring spoken language only. Consequently, the orchestration between language, gesture, gaze, head movements and body postures is still largely ignored. This has also led to a theoretical emphasis that ignores the connection of language to other semiotic resources for communication and underestimates that most of its features are actually strongly associated with and even shaped by situated embodied practice. This project aims at proposing an integrated and holistic view of the multimodality of social interaction, considering the full range of multimodal resources. This broader vision will be developed at theoretical, analytical and methodological levels. Moreover, on the basis of rich corpora of video recordings of authentic interactions in Finnish, French, English and German, an empirical exemplary study of specific social actions will be conducted, in order to foster cross-linguistic comparison. Systematic analyses of general patterns, as well as cross-linguistic and cross-setting comparisons form a novel contribution of the project in the field of multimodal conversation analysis. Interacting Bodies: Multimodal Analysis of the Organization of Turns and Sequences Research Project | 1 Project MembersWithin the social sciences and humanities, the use of video introduces two challenges: methodologically, it radically changes the nature of the data documenting human action; theoretically, it revisits notions concerning language, action, context and the body. My work is situated in this innovative framework. Drawing on conversation analysis, interactional linguistics and video analysis, it integrates within the study of language in interaction a wide range of multimodal resources: language, gesture, gaze, facial expressions, body postures, movements in space, and manipulations of objects. This impacts our vision of how action is organized in context, how these resources are mobilized in a timely coordinated and a mutually intelligible way by humans acting together. Within the past 15 years, my work has contributed in a significant way to sketch a multimodal approach to language and human action - now internationally recognized in Europe and the USA. For this research semester, I propose to develop it further through conceptual reflections and empirical analyses focusing on a specific kind of action, directives and requests in ordinary and institutional settings. This project will be realized while being hosted mainly at the Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo (Japan) and the University of Helsinki, with short visits to the University of Oslo and the University of Linköping. Speaking in public: Social interactions within larger groups. Contributions from a conversation analytic multimodal perspective Research Project | 4 Project MembersThis project aims at investigating social interaction within larger public groups, and at offering a detailed micro-analysis of the systematic organisation of the interactional order of meetings, based on video recordings treated in the perspective of Conversation Analysis. If meetings have been analysed within a broader perspective in sociology, social psychology, discourse analysis and more recently in management research, micro-analytic approaches of the moment-by-moment details of embodied conduct in meetings are still scarce. Moreover, if business meetings are increasingly studied, public meetings in which citizens actively participate are still understudied. This lack of in-depth detailed analyses can be related to methodological difficulties (recordings often concentrate on the focal persons doing a speech or on chairmen directing the debates, and only seldom offer details about what all of the participants are doing), but also to perspectives focusing more often on active speakers rather than on recipients, audiences or entire participation frameworks. Within Conversation Analysis, there is a long tradition of detailed analyses of small groups, but only few studies concerning interactions in larger groups. This project aims at offering significant advances in the analysis of public talk and social interaction in larger groups, by focusing on a diversity of public meetings in which citizens actively participate, speaking and debating publicly. The aim of the project is to describe the systematic organisation of interaction, turn-taking, and participation in these activities. The project is based on an important corpus, that has already been established and that will be further enlarged by pursuing fieldwork. The data concern a series of exemplary instances of interactions in larger groups: they document a participatory democracy project in urbanism in Lyon (France), concerning the rehabilitation of an ancient military site and its transformation into a public park. The participatory process has been implemented in a series of meetings involving a large number of citizens: information meetings, collective visits on the site to be transformed, brainstorming meetings. The empirical basis of this research project is secured: meetings have already been video recorded during past fieldwork (2008-2011) by the Principal Investigator (PI) as she was working at Lyon University; collaboration with public institutions in Lyon is secured, which guarantees an access to the archives and to further documentation; access to future fieldwork - since the project is still evolving - is also secured, and authorisations to video record future meetings is granted. Moreover, collaboration with the ICAR research lab in Lyon facilitates the logistics of future fieldwork as well as exchanges about the analysis. The rich videographic corpus already available has been collected by the PI without any specific funding and has never been the subject of any supported project. Substantial teamwork, largely exceeding individual forces, is required to properly and systematically analyse it. The current project wants to exploit these materials and secure the pursuit of data collection when the public citizens consultation will move on: this offers the possibility of constituting and analysing a unique corpus of longitudinal recordings. The study of the corpus will produce not only novel scientific analyses of public talk but also offer detailed feedback to the public institutions organising participatory meetings. On this basis, the project aims at developing an extensive detailed analysis of interaction in larger groups, within the perspective of Conversation Analysis. More particularly, it deals with: - Analysis of a variety of episodes of public speaking, involving lay people who are not used to speak in public; - Analysis of the specific turn-taking system(s) involved in the management of social interaction in large groups, as well as of larger participation frameworks, including not only 'main' speakers and chairmen, but also all of the participants (not reducible to a mere 'audience'); - Analysis of proposals, negotiations, disagreements, collective elaboration of solutions, decision-taking in brainstorming sessions; - Analysis of the embodied and visible conduct of the participants, as a crucial dimension for a detailed understanding of their action and participation; - Analysis not only of talk-in-interaction (public discussions) but also of public note-taking (writing-in-interaction), which is important for the understanding of decision-taking in larger groups; - Analysis of longitudinal aspects, on the basis of recordings covering 3 years of activities. These topics represent considerable novel issues for micro-analysis; they also constitute challenging methodological aspects. Moreover, the project aims at offering feedback to participants on the field - who already manifested their interest and are open to collaboration. Riding motorcycles, making urban road traffic. An ethnomethodological perspective on moto-mobility in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso Research Project | 3 Project MembersL'objectif de cette recherche est de contribuer à une meilleure compréhension de la production en situation de la circulation routière, à travers l'exemple du régime de mobilité deux-roues à Ouagadougou. Cette recherche se focalise sur les enjeux méthodologiques dans l'analyse de la performativité du savoir-circuler. Cadre de recherche La circulation routière est un arrangement socio-spatial complexe de technologies, matérialités et d'usagers. Contribuant depuis une dizaine d'année au renouvellement théorique et méthodologique de l'étude de la mobilité quotidienne, le champ des Mobility studies constitue un cadre fertile pour repenser la production au quotidien de la circulation routière. Principalement axé sur l'interaction usager-véhicule et les nouvelles technologies automobiles (en Europe et Etats-Unis), ce champ tend à négliger le rôle des usagers en interaction dans la production d'un ordre socio-spatial de la circulation routière. Terrain Cette recherche prend comme terrain d'étude le régime de mobilité deux-roues (motorisés) dans la capitale burkinabè. La circulation routière à Ouagadougou est en pleine mutation depuis une dizaine d'années. L'introduction massive de scooters de fabrication chinoise et de voitures d'occasion a densifié le trafic urbain, et ainsi transformé l'expérience individuelle des usagers et leur savoir-circuler. Objectifs Questionnant le rapport entre connaissances et pratiques des usagers, cette recherche a pour objectif de comprendre comment les compétences de conduite -le savoir‐circuler- des usagers deux-roues sont mises en action, dans un contexte a priori faiblement régulé. Comment les micro-tactiques de gain de temps, d'évitement, de sécurisation sont-elles apprises, réalisées et négociées? Différentes grilles d'analyse telles que les notions de règle et de confiance ou les mobile methods peuvent être exploitées pour étudier la performativité de la mobilité deux-roues. Méthodologie L'enjeu méthodologique est de décrire la performativité de la mobilité deux-roues en explorant les interactions entre usagers, artefacts physiques, et les abords de la rue. Documenter les tactiques de négociation dans la circulation routière nécessite différentes méthodes: entretiens, observations et enregistrements vidéo statiques et mobiles. 1 1
The first five words: Multilingual cities in Switzerland and Belgium and the grammar of language choice in public space Research Project | 2 Project MembersThis project studies how unacquainted persons spontaneously engage in interaction in multilingual cities in Switzerland and Belgium, thereby shedding light on language practices in present-day, urban environments. Officially multilingual cities, such as Fribourg (Switzerland) and Brussels (Belgium), have received extended attention with regard to how language policies are locally implemented. Little is known, however, about how people choose and negotiate the language of conversation when addressing an unknown person - who might speak the local language, but also a language of immigration or tourism. Based on video-recordings collected in bilingual cities (Fribourg, Brussels), in touristic locations (Lugano, Ghent) and in areas of multiple contacts (Basel, Eupen), this project documents everyday language practices in public space. It focuses on encounters between unknown persons within two types of events: (1) Symmetrical Ordinary Encounters, which happen when people going about the same activity (e.g. sitting on a bench, walking the dog) start talking to each other; (2) Asymmetrical Institutional Encounters, during which someone requests something (e.g. a signature, political support, money) from a passer-by or offers something (e.g. a flyer, a product sample). It shows how, during the opening phase of an encounter, individuals progressively discover the linguistic options they have for efficiently engaging in interaction (ranging from the choice of one common language, to a mode of interaction in which speakers alternate languages, to conversations in which each individual speaks a different language, etc.). The diversity of resources speakers deploy in order to establish focused interaction with each other is analysed from a multimodal perspective, taking into account how linguistic resources are embedded in the individuals' embodied actions. Using multimodal conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, this project will provide the following results: (1) it will contribute to the analysis of conversational openings by systematically taking into account the individuals' embodied resources;(2) it will provide a situated analysis of language contact "as it happens" and show that the speakers' language choices are sensitive to the social categorisation of the interactants; (3) it will describe urban public space as a locus of multilingualism, hence challenging the present-day image of public space (often associated to fear and insecurity) in contemporary societies, by showing its relevance for pro-social ways of living; (4) it will also engender methodological guidelines for video recording in natural public settings of interaction
DIS-AGREE Research Project | 6 Project MembersDas geisteswissenschaftliche Projekt aus der Linguistik steht unter der Leitung der Universität Freiburg und wird gemeinsam mit den Universitäten Basel, Haute-Alsace und Strasbourg umgesetzt. Ziel ist es, aktuelle Forschungsansätze an den vier Universitäten in drei Ländern zum Thema "(dis)agreement & (dis)alignment" (d.h. Konfliktpotentiale in Gesprächen) zusammenzuführen und mit innovativen Methoden in Multimodalität und Multimedialität weiterzuentwickeln. Ein besonderer Fokus wird auf die Frage gelegt, wie mittels sprachlicher und körperlicher Ressourcen Konfliktmomente in der Interaktion ausgehandelt werden. Das Projekt wird von Eucor - The European Campus mit "Seed Money" in der Förderlinie "Forschung und Innovation" unterstützt. Kontakt: Universität Freiburg: Stefan Pfänder ( stefan.pfaender@romanistik.uni-freiburg.de ); Universität Basel: Miriam Locher ( miriam.locher@unibas.ch ); Université de Haute-Alsace: Greta Komur-Thilloy ( greta.komur-thilloy@uha.fr ); Université de Strasbourg: Rudolph Sock ( sock@unistra.fr ) Projektveranstaltungen: Workshop: Multimedia I: SMS: "Social practices of (dis)agreement and (dis)alignment" ( Mulhouse, 16.01.2020 ) Workshop: Multimodality: Multiactivites: "Alignment and alignables in the analysis of interaction" ( Zoom 25.03.2021 ) Workshop: Multimedia II: Film: Part 1: (Dis)Agree: Affective stance in fictional and non-fictional interactional scenarios ( Zoom, 15.10.2020 ) Part 2: Dis/agree and argumentation in school contexts ( Zoom, 19.03.2021 ) Workshop: (Dis)-agreement und (dis-)alignment: positioning practices in specialized discourse from a construction grammar perspective ( Basel, 27.-28. 09 2021 )
PostDoc Elliott Hoey Research Project | 2 Project MembersWhat's the value of doing things together? Human sociality is perhaps the distinguishing characteristic of our species, the foundations of which lie in direct face-to-face social interaction. Much research has been directed toward uncovering the psychological mechanisms and processes underpinning coordinated social action, but what remains to be described are the precise ways that participants in real life activities decide to act together or separately. Rather than relying on laboratory experimentation, the proposed research will use naturally occurring social activities to specify participants' understandings of the utility and appropriateness of joint action. In particular, I will examine a setting where participants must recurrently appraise the relevance of collaborative action: building construction sites. I will undertake three studies using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to uncover how participants who are committed to a common project detect and act upon opportunities for closely interlocked action. This project serves as an empirical advancement in research on social interaction by articulating the connections between these fundamental modes of human conduct. The findings of this project will also resonate with researchers of pragmatic disorders, workplace organization, and human-robot interaction. (186 words)
From Multimodality to Multisensoriality: Language, Body, and Sensoriality in Social Interaction (intSenses) Research Project | 1 Project MembersSensoriality is a fundamental dimension of the human experience in and of the world - since people engage in the material world using their entire body, their senses and their language. However, despite a growing interest in language and embodiment in various disciplines the role of sensoriality is still neglected. Moreover, sensoriality is often considered as relying primarily on individual and private perceptions. Although some research on the senses exists in cognitive linguistic and historical-anthropological fields, sensoriality remains largely ignored from an interactional perspective. The intSenses project aims at filling these gaps, by recognizing sensoriality a central theoretical and empirical role within an integrated model of language and body in social interaction. Rooted in conversation analysis, the project aims at developing current research on multimodality in social interaction - that is, the way participants mobilize together language, gesture, gaze, body postures and movements in order to act and communicate - on the new territory of multisensoriality - that is, the way participants collectively engage in sensorial practices involving all of the senses. More particularly, the project will develop empirical analyses of how people smell, taste, and touch food within joint activities such as cooking together, how their body and their language feature in these practices in specific and complementary ways, how they manifest publicly and communicate intersubjectively what they sense within social interaction. These empirical analyses will inspire conceptual advances, reflecting on the role of sensoriality in the multimodal organization of social interaction. Thus, the project's general aim is to propose a new approach to multisensoriality based on a multimodal approach of social interaction. The focus of the study are sensory practices - that is, meaningful social acts of sensing - carried out via movements of the hand and the body. These sensory practices are embedded within specific courses of action and broader activities in talk and social interaction. The focus will be on the more neglected sensory practices - tasting, touching, and smelling - and their interrelationships. Gazing and hearing will also be considered as they are crucial for establishing the intersubjectivity of sensory practices. Multisensoriality will be studied using an innovative methodology involving video recordings of sensory practices and detailed multimodal transcription and analysis of these recordings. The data will document how people in authentic social settings, speaking different languages, experience their senses during ordinary activities. The analytical focus will be on the multimodal resources (language, gesture, gaze, facial expressions, body postures, movements, etc.) that organize these practices in a publicly intelligible way. This also entails the study of how language and the body, i.e. audible (verbal and vocal) and visible resources, achieve the intersubjectivity of sensory practices in social interaction. An empirical focus will be given to tasting, touching, and smelling in food activities as an exemplary domain for empirical investigations of sensoriality in action. Instances of sensory practices in selecting, preparing, and discovering food will be studied in detail. On the one hand, the project aims at analyzing how people collectively engage in sensory practices - such as tasting food, for example - by mobilizing different aspects of their body and their language in a way that is publicly and intersubjectively intelligible. One the other hand, the project aims at showing how sensoriality features in the multimodal organization of interaction, by showing how not only visual and audible but also haptic, aromatic, and tasty features are oriented to by participants in building the accountability of their mutual and coordinated activities
Speaking in public: Social interactions within large groups (SpIP-2) Research Project | 1 Project MembersThis project (called SpIP-2, 2016-2017, 18 months) constitutes the continuation of the previous one, still on-going (called SpIP-1, 2013-2016, 3 years). SpIP-1 is being currently developed with success and very rich outputs, and 2 dissertations are being written. SpIP-1 also has represented considerable work of the team on an evolving corpus: this opens up new exciting topics of study, to be developed in SpIP-2. Importantly, SpIP-2 also concerns the completion of the 2 dissertations, which, given the amount of work and outputs of SpIP-1, will be almost finished but not entirely completed at the end of SpIP-1. SpIP-1 has offered an extensive study of a video corpus documenting a participatory project in urban planning concerning the transformation of a military site into a public park in the centre of the city of Lyon in France. This form of participatory democracy involves meetings with citizens, associations, and interest groups, the sharing of information gathered among various kinds of experts, exchanges with political representatives at various levels, discussions, and brainstorming sessions with the citizens, in which they elaborate proposals for the park, discuss plans and critically inspect the work in progress on the construction site. This kind of public and civic process represents an exemplary site for the study of institutional social interactions, of public speech both by novices and professionals, and of the collective elaboration of ideas. Adopting the approach of Conversation Analysis, the SpIP-1 project, according to the initial plan, has investigated the specific organization of these meetings, by focusing on turn-taking procedures (the way in which the right to talk is orchestrated among the numerous participants of the meetings) and on practices through which citizen elaborate proposals, discuss them, express and negotiate agreements and disagreements. These analyses also raise and respond to more general and innovative issues, such as the organization of talk in interaction in larger groups of participants; the institutional organization of opportunities to participate and the local and interactional definition of what 'participation' means; the multimodal (i.e. taking into account language, gesture, gaze, body postures, embodied manipulation of objects, and the arrangements of bodies in the environment) analysis of meetings including the embodied and visible practices for grasping turns and organizing actions, and the collective manipulation of texts and plans. Moreover, SpIP-1 has offered innovative insights about the longitudinal study of interactional processes, since the corpus studied covers 8 years of debates. The success of SpIP-1 has opened new important avenues for researching these phenomena, thanks to the collection of new data. SpIP-1 began as a project based on an initial video corpus collected by the PI between 2008 and 2012, covering the launching of the participatory consultation of citizens, the initial debates and collective ateliers on the plans with the architect. During SpIP-1 new data were collected in 2013-2014, concerning an important new phase of the project, the implementation of the plans in an emerging construction site, until its partial opening. This evolution of the corpus, following the evolution of a long-time urban project, opens up new interesting questions: the participatory procedure has evolved from debating about the park as a discursive object (2008-2009), to the park as an object 'in the planning' (2012 on) and as a built environment critically inspected by the citizens (2013 on). On this basis, SpIP-2 aims first at completing the data collection in such a way to produce a total video interactional documentation of a participatory process lasting for almost 10 years - which represents an absolute novum not only in Conversation Analysis but broadly in the social sciences. Second, SpIP-2 aims at the study - not yet conceivable in SpIP-1 - of how discussions about the park evolve during its appropriation by the citizens not only as an idea, but as an emerging material object. More precisely, these new analyses concern a) different facets of the longitudinal development of the debates, b) an important focus on the various materialities and spatialities involved in the collective elaboration of the urban project, such as plans and other visualizations, and the in fieri material architectural realization, c) the mobile apprehension of the park in the critical inspections by the citizens in visits of construction site with the architect, in historical visits organized by and for citizens, as well as in their everyday use of the partially - and then totally - opened park. These new foci constitute innovative contributions to contemporary important topics in Conversation Analysis and more broadly in linguistics, sociology and anthropology, concerning the interactional organization of institutionality, history, multimodality and mobility.
Finland Distinguished Professor Programme Research Project | 1 Project MembersThe project Multimodality: Reconsidering language and action through embodiment is funded by the Academy of Finland (FiDiPro/ Finnish Distinguished Professorship program). The FiDiPro program is a very competitive grant, open worldwide to all senior academic outside Finland and within all disciplines. The project will be based at the Centre of Excellence on Intersubjectivity in Interaction at the University of Helsinki. Human communication in face-to-face interaction involves unavoidably both language and the body - be it interaction between family members, colleagues at work, or people in services and health care. Despite this, communication and action have been largely studied by favoring spoken language only. Consequently, the orchestration between language, gesture, gaze, head movements and body postures is still largely ignored. This has also led to a theoretical emphasis that ignores the connection of language to other semiotic resources for communication and underestimates that most of its features are actually strongly associated with and even shaped by situated embodied practice. This project aims at proposing an integrated and holistic view of the multimodality of social interaction, considering the full range of multimodal resources. This broader vision will be developed at theoretical, analytical and methodological levels. Moreover, on the basis of rich corpora of video recordings of authentic interactions in Finnish, French, English and German, an empirical exemplary study of specific social actions will be conducted, in order to foster cross-linguistic comparison. Systematic analyses of general patterns, as well as cross-linguistic and cross-setting comparisons form a novel contribution of the project in the field of multimodal conversation analysis.
Multimodality: Reconsidering language and action through embodi-ment Research Project | 1 Project MembersThe project Multimodality: Reconsidering language and action through embodiment is funded by the Academy of Finland (FiDiPro/ Finnish Distinguished Professorship program). The FiDiPro program is a very competitive grant, open worldwide to all senior academic outside Finland and within all disciplines. The project will be based at the Centre of Excellence on Intersubjectivity in Interaction at the University of Helsinki. Human communication in face-to-face interaction involves unavoidably both language and the body - be it interaction between family members, colleagues at work, or people in services and health care. Despite this, communication and action have been largely studied by favoring spoken language only. Consequently, the orchestration between language, gesture, gaze, head movements and body postures is still largely ignored. This has also led to a theoretical emphasis that ignores the connection of language to other semiotic resources for communication and underestimates that most of its features are actually strongly associated with and even shaped by situated embodied practice. This project aims at proposing an integrated and holistic view of the multimodality of social interaction, considering the full range of multimodal resources. This broader vision will be developed at theoretical, analytical and methodological levels. Moreover, on the basis of rich corpora of video recordings of authentic interactions in Finnish, French, English and German, an empirical exemplary study of specific social actions will be conducted, in order to foster cross-linguistic comparison. Systematic analyses of general patterns, as well as cross-linguistic and cross-setting comparisons form a novel contribution of the project in the field of multimodal conversation analysis.
Interacting Bodies: Multimodal Analysis of the Organization of Turns and Sequences Research Project | 1 Project MembersWithin the social sciences and humanities, the use of video introduces two challenges: methodologically, it radically changes the nature of the data documenting human action; theoretically, it revisits notions concerning language, action, context and the body. My work is situated in this innovative framework. Drawing on conversation analysis, interactional linguistics and video analysis, it integrates within the study of language in interaction a wide range of multimodal resources: language, gesture, gaze, facial expressions, body postures, movements in space, and manipulations of objects. This impacts our vision of how action is organized in context, how these resources are mobilized in a timely coordinated and a mutually intelligible way by humans acting together. Within the past 15 years, my work has contributed in a significant way to sketch a multimodal approach to language and human action - now internationally recognized in Europe and the USA. For this research semester, I propose to develop it further through conceptual reflections and empirical analyses focusing on a specific kind of action, directives and requests in ordinary and institutional settings. This project will be realized while being hosted mainly at the Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo (Japan) and the University of Helsinki, with short visits to the University of Oslo and the University of Linköping.
Speaking in public: Social interactions within larger groups. Contributions from a conversation analytic multimodal perspective Research Project | 4 Project MembersThis project aims at investigating social interaction within larger public groups, and at offering a detailed micro-analysis of the systematic organisation of the interactional order of meetings, based on video recordings treated in the perspective of Conversation Analysis. If meetings have been analysed within a broader perspective in sociology, social psychology, discourse analysis and more recently in management research, micro-analytic approaches of the moment-by-moment details of embodied conduct in meetings are still scarce. Moreover, if business meetings are increasingly studied, public meetings in which citizens actively participate are still understudied. This lack of in-depth detailed analyses can be related to methodological difficulties (recordings often concentrate on the focal persons doing a speech or on chairmen directing the debates, and only seldom offer details about what all of the participants are doing), but also to perspectives focusing more often on active speakers rather than on recipients, audiences or entire participation frameworks. Within Conversation Analysis, there is a long tradition of detailed analyses of small groups, but only few studies concerning interactions in larger groups. This project aims at offering significant advances in the analysis of public talk and social interaction in larger groups, by focusing on a diversity of public meetings in which citizens actively participate, speaking and debating publicly. The aim of the project is to describe the systematic organisation of interaction, turn-taking, and participation in these activities. The project is based on an important corpus, that has already been established and that will be further enlarged by pursuing fieldwork. The data concern a series of exemplary instances of interactions in larger groups: they document a participatory democracy project in urbanism in Lyon (France), concerning the rehabilitation of an ancient military site and its transformation into a public park. The participatory process has been implemented in a series of meetings involving a large number of citizens: information meetings, collective visits on the site to be transformed, brainstorming meetings. The empirical basis of this research project is secured: meetings have already been video recorded during past fieldwork (2008-2011) by the Principal Investigator (PI) as she was working at Lyon University; collaboration with public institutions in Lyon is secured, which guarantees an access to the archives and to further documentation; access to future fieldwork - since the project is still evolving - is also secured, and authorisations to video record future meetings is granted. Moreover, collaboration with the ICAR research lab in Lyon facilitates the logistics of future fieldwork as well as exchanges about the analysis. The rich videographic corpus already available has been collected by the PI without any specific funding and has never been the subject of any supported project. Substantial teamwork, largely exceeding individual forces, is required to properly and systematically analyse it. The current project wants to exploit these materials and secure the pursuit of data collection when the public citizens consultation will move on: this offers the possibility of constituting and analysing a unique corpus of longitudinal recordings. The study of the corpus will produce not only novel scientific analyses of public talk but also offer detailed feedback to the public institutions organising participatory meetings. On this basis, the project aims at developing an extensive detailed analysis of interaction in larger groups, within the perspective of Conversation Analysis. More particularly, it deals with: - Analysis of a variety of episodes of public speaking, involving lay people who are not used to speak in public; - Analysis of the specific turn-taking system(s) involved in the management of social interaction in large groups, as well as of larger participation frameworks, including not only 'main' speakers and chairmen, but also all of the participants (not reducible to a mere 'audience'); - Analysis of proposals, negotiations, disagreements, collective elaboration of solutions, decision-taking in brainstorming sessions; - Analysis of the embodied and visible conduct of the participants, as a crucial dimension for a detailed understanding of their action and participation; - Analysis not only of talk-in-interaction (public discussions) but also of public note-taking (writing-in-interaction), which is important for the understanding of decision-taking in larger groups; - Analysis of longitudinal aspects, on the basis of recordings covering 3 years of activities. These topics represent considerable novel issues for micro-analysis; they also constitute challenging methodological aspects. Moreover, the project aims at offering feedback to participants on the field - who already manifested their interest and are open to collaboration.
Riding motorcycles, making urban road traffic. An ethnomethodological perspective on moto-mobility in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso Research Project | 3 Project MembersL'objectif de cette recherche est de contribuer à une meilleure compréhension de la production en situation de la circulation routière, à travers l'exemple du régime de mobilité deux-roues à Ouagadougou. Cette recherche se focalise sur les enjeux méthodologiques dans l'analyse de la performativité du savoir-circuler. Cadre de recherche La circulation routière est un arrangement socio-spatial complexe de technologies, matérialités et d'usagers. Contribuant depuis une dizaine d'année au renouvellement théorique et méthodologique de l'étude de la mobilité quotidienne, le champ des Mobility studies constitue un cadre fertile pour repenser la production au quotidien de la circulation routière. Principalement axé sur l'interaction usager-véhicule et les nouvelles technologies automobiles (en Europe et Etats-Unis), ce champ tend à négliger le rôle des usagers en interaction dans la production d'un ordre socio-spatial de la circulation routière. Terrain Cette recherche prend comme terrain d'étude le régime de mobilité deux-roues (motorisés) dans la capitale burkinabè. La circulation routière à Ouagadougou est en pleine mutation depuis une dizaine d'années. L'introduction massive de scooters de fabrication chinoise et de voitures d'occasion a densifié le trafic urbain, et ainsi transformé l'expérience individuelle des usagers et leur savoir-circuler. Objectifs Questionnant le rapport entre connaissances et pratiques des usagers, cette recherche a pour objectif de comprendre comment les compétences de conduite -le savoir‐circuler- des usagers deux-roues sont mises en action, dans un contexte a priori faiblement régulé. Comment les micro-tactiques de gain de temps, d'évitement, de sécurisation sont-elles apprises, réalisées et négociées? Différentes grilles d'analyse telles que les notions de règle et de confiance ou les mobile methods peuvent être exploitées pour étudier la performativité de la mobilité deux-roues. Méthodologie L'enjeu méthodologique est de décrire la performativité de la mobilité deux-roues en explorant les interactions entre usagers, artefacts physiques, et les abords de la rue. Documenter les tactiques de négociation dans la circulation routière nécessite différentes méthodes: entretiens, observations et enregistrements vidéo statiques et mobiles.
