I’m delighted to introduce a series of short guest blogs written by friends of ROLSI who were at the Antwerp IPrA conference, and took active roles in Panels and presentations. I’ll be publishing their reflections in a series over the next couple of weeks.

We start with a report by two early-career researchers on their experiences of one of the linguistics world’s largest international meetings, then a report on a panel of papers reporting research on “change-of-state” tokens. Continue reading →

In June 2015, the “Revisiting Participation: Language and Bodies in Interaction” conference took place at the University of Basel in Switzerland. It was a tremendous success, and I’m delighted that three of the organisers, David Monteiro, Hanna Svensson & Nynke van Schepen have sent this enthusiastic report. Continue reading →

Conversation Analysis (CA) is a particularly attractive research tool for investigating the communication of people with autism: its careful, moment-by-moment method picks up just how it is that their interactional moves fail (and succeed). In this very welcome guest blog, Tom Muskett explains the promises of CA in working with the complexities of this often distressing disorder.

Tom Muskett, now at Leeds Beckett University

I was a speech and language therapist with an interest in working with children on the autism spectrum. By definition, this diagnosis is associated with so-called deficits in social interaction and communication, but I had become increasingly dissatisfied with the accepted representations of these, particularly within research and clinical writing.

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In this guest blog, two enterprising young researchers, Fabio Ferraz de Almeida and Joe Ford, grapple with the slippery combination of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. They ask: for a given research topic, which bits of each does one use?

Fabio Ferraz de Almeida and Joe Ford, Loughborough University

Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (hereafter EMCA) have a long history of being used to examine social (inter)action in institutional environments. Moreover, they are also frequently used as a way of re-examining topics that have been previously studied using other approaches. This synthesis can yield a number of benefits – for the institutions, for our understanding of the topics and, of course, for EMCA.

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CA researchers have given talks all over the world, but few can have done so in a venue as venerable as the Royal Institution. Liz Stokoe, whose work has rightly gained a world-wide following (see for example her TEDx talk) reports on her experiences as the first scholar of  interaction to be invited into its historic lecture theatre

In May 2015, I was invited to present a Royal Institution ‘Friday Evening Discourse’. The Royal Institution’s most famous lecture series is probably the Christmas Lectures, but the Discourses have been running since 1825. They were started by English scientist Michael Faraday, and most “eminent scientists” have presented one. Continue reading →

Transcribing and analysing touch and bodily control is a very demanding business, as Asta Cekaite attests. In this guest blog, she takes us behind the scenes of her recent article in ROLSI.

Asta Cekaite, Linkoping University

Setting up a study about children inevitably implies sensitivity to embodied aspects of social interaction. For me, moving into children’s everyday spaces involves an exciting challenge and a possibility to turn to the some of less explored issues – touch, movement, multi-activities, bodily integrity and affection. The list is quite long. For researchers, interested in complex interactions, management of multi-activities, cooperation or social control, interactions from children’s everyday life – families and educational settings – can provide an inspiring venue for scrutinizing the taken-for-granted aspects of social interaction. Continue reading →