Interactional analyses have increasingly, and fruitfully, been applied to the communication of healthcare workers and their patients. But there are ethical risks and dangers, given the sensitivity of the issues involved. Marco Pino and Ruth Parry have kindly offered their reflections on how to handle the difficulties, and to come out with data that are as ethically sound as they are analytically useful. Continue reading →

The beautiful hill city of Perugia in northern Italy was the site of a small but high-quality meeting in early April. In this guest blog, Uwe Küttner gives his reflections on the event. Continue reading →

In this guest blog, Maurice Nevile tracks the way that articles in ROLSI have coped with the complex task of choosing what terms to use in describing …. well, what to call it? Bodily movement? Embodied activity? Gesture? Each of these (and many more) have pros and cons as descriptors. But with the rise of multi-modal analysis in CA, there may be a growing need for some sort of consensus.

Maurice Nevile, University of Southern Denmark

The body in interaction: terminology for the body in ROLSI papers

In studies of language and social interaction there are many ways to refer to the contribution of the body. I was surprised to discover just how many when preparing a review paper (Nevile 2015) to track the growth of ‘embodiment’ in 400+ ROLSI papers from its first issue right up to 2013. Continue reading →

It won’t have escaped anyone’s notice that Conversation Analysis has been very successfully (and some would say belatedly) spreading its wings to encompass people’s interactions with things as well as other people. In this illuminating account of one of Finland’s most active research groups, Antti Kamunen tells us what CA can tell us about multi-tasking (and vice-versa).

iTask (1st September 2015 ‒ 31st August 2019) is a new international research project funded by Academy of Finland and led by Professor Pentti Haddington. Based at the unit of English Philology at University of Oulu, our project takes a fresh angle on both multitasking and social interaction by studying interactional multitasking. We started in December 2015, when we (Antti Kamunen, Sylvaine Tuncer, Pentti Haddington, Anna Vatanen) all got together for the first time in Loughborough to plan and discuss the project. Continue reading →

Among the articles in the current issue of the journal, Kristian Mortensen has a very lively account of a familiar bit of gestural communication – cupping the hand behind the ear. In this guest blog, he explains some of the work that went into the study, and into distilling it down into a journal article.

Kristian Mortensen, University of Southern Denmark

Since Seo & Koshik’s fascinating 2010 paper on ‘gestures that engender repair’, a handful studies or so have discussed how the human body serves as a resource for organizing repair – in part embedded in a discussion of how bodily conduct is sequentially organized. Continue reading →

The current issue of the journal has a very thoughtful debate about how we should conceptualise that family of actions that end up getting others to help us. Kobin Kendrick and Paul Drew make the bold claim that these all fall under the rubric of ‘recruitment”, and set out the terms in which they can all be analysed*. It is a fascinating argument, with commentaries by John Heritage, Jörg Zinken and Giovanni Rossi; here, Kobin gives an account of the paper and its genesis.

Kobin Kendrick, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

One of the greatest mysteries in the social and biological sciences is the evolution of altruism. Given that natural selection favours the survival of the fittest, how did the tendency for humans to help one another evolve? Continue reading →