Eric Laurier | University of Edinburgh

Eric Laurier is Reader in Geography & Interaction at the University of Edinburgh. Currently he is inquiring into the maintenance and transformation of human relationships as a shared ordinary concern. Relationships have a nearness to one another perhaps not best understood as knowledge. His more longstanding interests have been around the visual and spatial aspects of practical reasoning. Like many other members of the EMCA community he has drawn upon ordinary language philosophy’s conceptualisation of criteria, human practices and human encounters. Over his research career he has undertaken projects on interaction in the car; work and sociability in cafes; editorial work in video production; the valuation of secondhand goods; playing videogames; wayfinding with paper and digital maps; human-animal joint action; family mealtimes and arts collaboration. Trained as a cultural geographer, he was warned by one of his PhD supervisors to stay away from ethnomethodologists because ‘they study things like kung fu and tyre-fitting’.

When the breaching was over: Praxiologies of personal relationships
On the close of his acting-like-a-boarder-in-your-own-home exercise and of his assume-hidden-motives-in-others exercise, Garfinkel briefly describes what happens when his students restore the situation to normal appearances. Families, intimates and friends are usually ‘not amused’ nor do they find the events ‘instructive’. From the annoyance and disapproval generated by the procedures he shows the moral and enforceable character of compliance with maintaining everyday appearances. Garfinkel hints at something more though in the restoration vignettes: for some families and in some marriages the situation could not be restored. For one student, her husband has a ‘residue of uneasy feelings’ and it is in reflecting on that ‘residue’ that we see the deeper and more enduring trouble that Garfinkel’s procedures could bring to personal relationships. In disrupting what Garfinkel and his students took to be common sense, what the procedures also threatened was the understanding that is shared by and constitutive of each particular sets of persons’ relationship (e.g. as mother and son, husband and wife, friends). In my talk, I aim to consider a realm of practice where actions are trying to modify, revise or transform personal relationships and where, then, the joint of joint-actions thereby itself can no longer be assumed. This is most obvious when relationships break-up but inhabits the emergence of friendships and families. It is not a realm of scientific practice, nor workplaces, nor everyday life, nor mind and yet members’ concern with relationships infuses conversation analysis from its outset.

Kenneth Liberman | University of Oregon & University of Southern Denmark

Ken Liberman is Professor Emeritus from the University of Oregon.  He has a long research career in ethnomethodology and has done research in many different environments, from his early research among aboriginal people in Australia to many years of engagement with Tibetan philosophical culture.  In his most recent book, More Studies in Ethnomethodology (2013), he presents a number of EM studies and explores – among other topics – his interest for the phenomenological roots of EM. Ken Liberman has for many years been interested in how coffee tasters establish objectivity in their description of taste, working with coffee tasters all over the world. His recent studies of congregational work of surfers in the water have brought EM together with his lifelong love for surfing. Ken Liberman is Hans Christian Andersen visiting professor at the University of Southern Denmark 2013-2016

Studying Objectivation Practices
Ethnomethodology’s sight is directed to identifying and describing how social organization emerges from the mundane local details of everyday life in the way that it really does develop. Discounting voluntarism and rational choice, Garfinkel has said that affairs are self-organizing and that society consists of authochthonous orders, and he has recommended that we turn our attention to the neglected practical objectivity of social facts as they operate in a course of events because these practical objectivities are tools with which these events set up their orderlinesses.

I elucidate these practical objectivities by outlining an arational, collaborative model of objectivation practices that respects the local myopia of participants who are engaged in developing organizational matters, immanent affairs that can render parties anonymous participants in their own quotidian life, and where much of the thinking is a public activity. I review a number of interactional settings – games-with-rules, Tibetan debaters, and professional coffee tasters – where order is found and sense is discovered and developed as the tendentious concerted work of local practices of objectivating social action.

Aug Nishizaka | Chiba University

Aug Nishizaka is Professor of Sociology at Chiba University. He has been investigating the organization of interaction in various settings, such as prenatal check-ups in clinical settings. His current research is concerned with the study of interaction between evacuees/residents and volunteers/professionals in several settings in the districts directly affected by the earthquake on March 11, 2011 and in particular, interactions connected with the subsequent nuclear power plant explosion. His recent publications include: “Conversing while massaging: Multidimensional asymmetries of multiple activities in interaction,” in Research on Language and Social Interaction (with M. Sunaga, 2015), and “Instructed perception in prenatal ultrasound examination,” in Discourse Studies (2014).

The structuring of the body in interaction
In the conversation analytic literature, how participants in interaction use their bodies in the coordination with other resources (such as talk) to organize the interaction has been discussed in various ways since Charles Goodwin, Marjorie-Harness Goodwin, and Christian Heath started the intensive analysis of video-recordings of interaction in the 1970s and 1980s. The body is used in the organization of interaction. However, the usability of the body presupposes that the body is structured in a particular way. In this talk, I explore the ways in which the body is structured and restructured in relation to other bodies in the course of interaction. The body is not only a visible, audible or touchable resource for interaction but the source of multiple modes of orientation. How do interactants orient to the orientations displayed on each other’s body? How are their mutually oriented-to bodies structured in interaction? How do such structured bodies, orientationally connected to each other, constitute the interactional order in which they are structured? I address these issues through the detailed analysis of video-recorded interaction in several distinct settings and discuss some consequences of the exploration for the reconceptualization of perception.

Trine Heinemann | University of Helsinki

Trine Heinemann is a Marie Curie Fellow at the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Intersubjectivity in Interaction. She is a trained Conversation Analyst, who is interested both in the purely grammatical aspects of social interaction, as well as in the role played by gesture, embodied actions and the overall material surroundings in which interaction takes place. Her recent studies include the investigation of where and for what reasons designers point as well as the ways in which home helps manipulate vacuum cleaners in relation to ongoing interaction.

On delayed perception of absent and present objects: The Danish change-of-state token nå:rh.
While the ‘local sensitivity’ of conversation is such that any object in the environment can in principle impose upon and become the focus of participants’ talk (Bergmann, 1990; 2012), it seems to be the case that most objects are ‘talked into being’ as resources for coordinating actions. The inherently social and situated nature of objects entails that participants need not only see, hear, smell or feel the relevant object at a particular point in time, but also – and more importantly – perceive that object in an interactionally relevant way, to identify the ways in which the object relates to the coordination of the ongoing action, activity or task they are engaged in (e.g. Goodwin, 1996; Nishizaka, 2000; Keisanen, 2012; Nevile, 2013; De Stefani, 2014).

In this presentation, I shall focus on situations in which participants’ awareness of the necessity to perceive an object (rather than just see, feel, hear or smell it) come to the forefront of interaction. These are situations in which perception is delayed, i.e. not accomplished at the point of seeing, hearing, smelling or feeling an object. In such situations, participants orient to perception as momentarily absent, by producing a change-of-state token upon its delayed occasion. In Danish, this change-of-state is indexed by nå:rh, which is a prosodic variant of the generic change-of-state token nå (e.g. Femø Nielsen, 2002). This prosodic variant is otherwise used to indicate ‘now-understanding’ in a similar fashion to that of the Finnish change-of-state token aa (Koivisto, 2015), i.e. as a sign of problem resolution that enables sequence closure and resumption of the ongoing activity. In the context of delayed perception, nå:rh thus serves to register that while perception was not immediately occasioned by seeing, smelling, hearing or feeling an object, it has now been achieved.

Bergmann, Jörg (1990) On the local sensitivity of conversation. In: Markova, I. & Foppa, K. (eds.), The Dynamics of Dialogue. Hertfordshire: Harvester, 201-226.

Bergmann, Jörg (2012) Irritationen, Brüche, Katastrophen – Über soziale Praktiken des Umgangs mit ”Störungen” in der Interaktion. Abschiedsvorlesung am 25.01.2012, University of Bielefeld.

De Stefani, E. (2014). Establishing joint orientation towards commercial objects in a self-service store: How practices of categorisation matter. In: Nevile, M., Haddington, P., Heinemann, T. and Rauniomaa, M. (eds.), Interacting with objects. Language, materiality, and social activity. Amsterdam/Philadephia: John Benjamins.

Femø Nielsen, Mie (2002) Nå! En skiftemarkør med mange funktioner. Studier i Nordisk 2000–2001 (pp. 51–67). Copenhagen, Denmark: Selskab for Nordisk Filologi.

Goodwin, Charles (1996) Transparent vision. In: Ochs, E., Schegloff, E.A. & Thompson, S. (eds.), Interaction and Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 370-404.

Keisanen, Tiina (2012) “Uh-oh, we were going there”: Environmentally occasioned noticings of trouble in in-car interaction. Semiotica, 191:1/4, 197-222.

Koivisto, Aino (2015) Displaying now-understanding: The Finnish change-of-state token aa. Discourse Processes.

Nevile, M. (2013). Collaboration in crisis: Pursuing perception through multiple descriptions (how friendly vehicles became damn rocket launchers). In: De Rycker, A. and Mohd Don, Z. (eds.), Discourse and crisis: Critical perspectives. Amsterdam/Philadephia: John Benjamins.

Nishizaka, Aug (2000) Seeing what one sees: Perception, emotion, and activity. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 7:1-2, 105-123.

Lorenza Mondada | University of Basel & University of Helsinki

Lorenza Mondada is Professor of General and French Linguistics at the University of Basel and Distinguished Professor at The Finnish Centre of Excellence in Interaction in Intersubjectivity at the University of Helsinki.  She has published widely about embodied conduct in interaction, especially about the relation between language, embodiment, space and mobility.  Her research material is collected in a wide array of different settings inside and outside of institutions and workplaces where people speak a multitude of languages.  She has done prominent research on surgeons, architects, of people walking in the street – or debating in participatory democracy meetings.  Lorenza Mondada was awarded an honorary doctorate of the University of Southern Denmark in 2013.

Interacting bodies in material environments: challenges for reconsidering temporality and sequentiality
This paper deals with issues raised by multimodal studies in conversation analysis and ethnomethodology. More particularly, it focuses on the way participants mobilize a diversity of relevant resources (which might be locally defined and circumscribed, depending on the ecology of the activity) to achieve the accountable organization of their actions. This shows the importance for the analyst of not only focusing on a well known subset of resources – such as language, gesture and gaze – but to consider what members do within the embodied organization of their conduct, possibly mobilizing the entire body, as well as its position in the environment and its manipulation of objects, artifacts, and tools. Thinking about multimodal resources in a holistic way – namely including a multiplicity of details concerning different parts of the body and their coordination within and among co-participants – raises interesting challenges for sequential analysis. It implies a conceptualization of time, including simultaneously and successively ordered practices, and more specifically emergent not-isochronic but yet finely coordinated simultaneous modalities and actions. It implies also a fine analysis of the co-participants’ mutual orientations taking into account, often in a seen but unnoticed way, but sometimes also in a clearly perceived and even explicitely displayed manner, each other’s detailed embodied actions. The talk addresses these issues by analyzing various activities that mobilize the entire body, with special attention for mobility settings, implying walking and other movements of the bodies within space.

Invited Symposium: Convenor Douglas Macbeth | Ohio State University

Doug Macbeth is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at Ohio State University. His studies take up Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology and sequential analysis through Sacks and Schegloff, and his focus over the last 20 years has been classroom studies of order and instruction as grammars of action. The early grades, especially, are a window onto novitiate instruction wherever we might find it, and thus the instructed character of competent worlds. The aim is to write an alternate praxeology of instruction as it is played out in fine durations of material detail, and to address the conceptual confusions that continue to haunt studies of ‘teaching and learning’.

The epistemics of Epistemics: a Panel and Symposium
This invited symposium provides a focused discussion of what is surely the single greatest conceptual innovation in our shared community of study in this new century. It aims to discuss and take the measure of the wealth of literature written by John Heritage, Geoffrey Raymond and their colleagues and collaborators under the heading of “Epistemics”. It is a thick literature, assembled across a remarkable series of publications, remarkable for their pace, their proposals and their vision for sequential analysis within a new ensemble of studies devoted to the interactional distribution of knowledge, through natural language.

These are themselves epistemic matters. Through a panel of papers, the symposium offers a close examination of the Epistemic Program (henceforth EP), for its intellectual history, its emergence as a recognizable program that is marked, as all recognizable programs are marked, by programmatic claims, distinctions, tasks and ambitions. The papers address how the EP positions its arguments and materials to speak on behalf of the epistemic endowments of speakers and recipients. They address the corpus status of the collections recurrently used in the EP, and examine how exemplary materials can be read in light of that corpus. The panel is especially interested in the EP’s ties to the corpus of studies received through Garfinkel, Sacks, Schegloff, and their colleagues and students in what Sacks referred to as “ethnomethodology/conversation analysis,” and concludes with reflections on the conceptual landscape the EP recommends to our community, and the measures in which it may both extend and depart from those earlier and radical–conceptual initiatives. We think this is a propitious time for such a sustained address and inquiry. And we can think of no better occasion for it.

The panel
Douglas Macbeth (Convener), Ohio State University
Jonas Ivarsson, University of Gothenburg
Oskar Lindwall, University of Gothenburg
Gustav Lymer, Uppsala University
Michael Lynch, Cornell University
Wendy Sherman–Heckler, Otterbein University
Jean Wong, The College of New Jersey

The papers

1. Introduction to the Symposium, its history and aims
2. The Epistemic Program and the recognizability of action
   Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (CA) share an interest in the methodic practices through which actions are (recognizably) produced. Action formation joins turn organization, sequence organization, preference structure, recipient design, and repair as among the fundamental structures of talk-in-interaction. However, in the EP literature a fundamental concern has been raised that “CA has not progressed very far in developing a systematic analysis of ‘action formation’” (Heritage, 2012). The EP sets out to address this lacuna by proposing a set of analytic assumptions about the recognizability of social actions: that the recognition of an action is fundamentally tied to determining whether an utterance is delivering or requesting information; that interactants continually monitor their relative epistemic status on a turn-by-turn basis; and that epistemic status is an omnirelevant feature of both action formation and its recognition. This paper reviews what has become a thirty-year project on behalf of these topics, and locates their main inflection points while critically examining their underlying assumptions.
3. Indexing ‘Oh’, animating transcript
   The expression ‘Oh’ in natural conversation has become a signal topic and interest in the development of the EP. This paper attempts to bring into view both the complexity of its treatments, and a sense of place for this simple expression in the EP. The paper begins with the early discussion of ‘Oh’ as a “change–of–state token”, and continues with an interest in two aligned developments: one is the rendering of ‘Oh’ as a “particle”, rather than a turn, or an expression in turn-initial position. The other is how as of this rendering, a new, underlying structure is indexed for leveraging the work of “animating transcript”, or how we portray talk as social action. We think these two moves are closely connected within the EP. And we think they yield a very different vocabulary of motives for the EP, different from the vocabulary we find in the natural language studies of sequential analysis.
4. The turn to information and cognition in the EP
   “Epistemics” was the name for a cognitivist philosophy in the late 1960s. Although the Epistemic Program in CA has no direct relation to this earlier development, it does exhibit a turn toward cognitive linguistics. In its long engagement with linguistics, CA pursued a rival and incommensurable understanding of how formal sentence grammar enters into the organization of interaction. Proponents of CA sought to ground the analysis of talk in the intelligibility of communicative actions. Interactional organization was fundamental, and irreducible to minds, brains, motives, or other properties of a biological and/or psychological subject. Nor were the achievements of talk–in–interaction—common understanding, progressivity and the sociality of worlds in common—leveraged from the metaphor of information or its transfer. In many places the EP explicitly affirms CA’s distinctive conception of communicative actions. However, in both argument and analytical practice, it also turns to informationalism and a cognitivist conception of speech production and reception. To demonstrate how these moves matter for CA, this presentation will examine how transcripts are presented and analyzed in several key EP publications.
5. Data session: On collections
   This session takes up a collection of transcripts that are recurrently used in the EP. Key publications occasionally refer to large collections of interrogatives, declaratives, and assessments. More commonly, however, dozens of transcribed fragments are mobilized to document epistemic structure, and it is from these that a core collection recurs across its publications. Many of them are drawn from prior CA studies, and in this way EP collections provide insight onto how the Epistemic Program proceeds with familiar materials, differently. These differences include an apparent shift from a treatment of the local production of talk-in-interaction to a focus on epistemic structure as the engine of talk-in-interaction. The discussion will be developed through readings of transcribed sequences and their analyses.
6. Conclusion: From occasioned productions to formal structure
7. Discussion