Discourse studies and the material turn: from representation (facts) to participation (concerns)

Discourse studies has shown how language use matters in various political and societal settings. With the »material turn«, the focus on language has meant that discourse studies have been deemed as a symbolic and representationalist approach. In contrast, this paper shows how discourse studies have been concerned about material issues, language included, in local achievements of sense. »Nexus analysis« is introduced as an ethnographic framework to study »assemblages« and affects as entangled material-discursive practices, where close analysis of embodied practices is crucial. Nexus analysis encourages participatory research, providing a framework for agential research on matters of concern

Ethnomethodological conversation analysis and the study of assemblages

The material turn has challenged traditional social scientific and humanistic research approaches. Both individual and community are rejected as a starting point for theorizing what is going on in societies and cultures. In fact, all dichotomies are deemed suspect, and the research focus draws heavily on actual practices. The concept heterogeneous assemblage is used in at least two strands of the material turn with slightly different takes on the entangled nature of practices. These are actor-network theory, ANT (cf. STS, e.g., Callon, Latour, Law) and new materialism(s) (cf. process philosophy, e.g., Deleuze, Guattari). Both can be placed under the umbrella term sociomaterialism. In their analysis of concrete phenomena, Deleuzian assemblages tend to focus on embodied sensations (affect) that have rhizomatic threads of connection, whereas ANT’s assemblages include how heterogeneous entities (actants) stabilize certain practices. With a revised understanding of how the world works (ontology), the usefulness of traditional research methods (epistemology) to study concrete phenomena has also been questioned. Margaret Wetherell has suggested that affect assemblages can be analyzed as observable social practices, giving an EMCA-based study as an illustrative example. The question is whether both new materialist intensities (cf. certain approaches in psychology) and ANT’s connections to other people, places, and practices (e.g., in organization studies) could be analyzed with an EMCA approach. This paper acknowledges the existing possibilities EMCA offers to analyze heterogeneous assemblages as situated interactional and material entanglements and enlarges the repertoire by focusing on 1) how the material specifics can make the EMCA “why that now” analysis connect to larger assemblages than the local accomplishment of action, and 2) how observable orientations to phenomena outside of the situation can be treated as an assemblic activity. It will do this with 1) Goodwin’s concept lamination that enlarges the strictly situation-bound contextual configuration analysis to the cultural-historical formations through the use of material tools, and with 2) mentionings that combine Membership Categorization Analysis and Cooren’s interest in non-human (material) actors. In other words, the well-known sociomaterial concept material-discursive is translated into two analytical possibilities to study sociomaterial heterogeneous assemblages. An empirical study illustrates the tools in practice

Two Shared Rapid Turn Taking Sound Interfaces for Novices

This paper presents the results of user interaction with two explorative music environments (sound system A and B) that were inspired from the Banda Linda music tradition in two different ways. The sound systems adapted to how a team of two players improvised and made a melody together in an interleaved fashion: Systems A and B used a fuzzy logic algorithm and pattern recognition to respond with modifications of a background rhythms. In an experiment with a pen tablet interface as the music instrument, users aged 10-13 were to tap tones and continue each other's melody. The sound systems rewarded users sonically, if they managed to add tones to their mutual melody in a rapid turn taking manner with rhythmical patterns. Videos of experiment sessions show that user teams contributed to a melody in ways that resemble conversation. Interaction data show that each sound system made player teams play in different ways, but players in general had a hard time adjusting to a non-Western music tradition. The paper concludes with a comparison and evaluation of the two sound systems. Finally it proposes a new approach to the design of collaborative and shared music environments that is based on ''listening applications''

Copresence video conference mediated interaction

Abstrac

Participant status through touch-in-interaction in a residential home for people with acquired brain injury

The focus of this paper is twofold. It first analyzes the types of touch-in-interaction in occupational therapy in an acquired brain injury residential home, and then looks more closely at the participant status of one specific resident in the context of the touches received and given. Touches are primarily initiated by staff members or researchers, and rarely by residents. In addition to those touches necessary for the practical help that the residents need in their care, touches are also part of greeting and leaving, getting attention, making requests or refusals, and commenting on or teasing others. Taps on the shoulder are considered firstly as a type of fleeting haptic sociality and, secondly, as a type of touch that only one of the residents seemed to be receiving. The taps the resident received suggest he is treated differently from the other residents and more like able-bodied participants. Therefore, his agency, his how-ability (vs. disability) in interactions, will be examined more closely in two examples. A close multimodal interaction analysis of the complexity of interactional situations reveals how the taps were accomplished as a lamination of the material, linguistic and embodied resources (the communicative resources of the resident and the embodied conduct made possible by the affordances of the setting) in the unfolding situation