Household objects as interactional tools
| Panel: | P83 - Objects in Interaction. Material Objects as Conversational Resources in Everyday Interaction |
| Author: | Heinemann, Trine |
| Abstract: | |
| This paper investigates how ordinary household objects are implicated as third participants in interactions between senior citizens and their home helps. Research on home help shows that interaction in this setting is a hybrid between everyday and institutionally organized talk, with the participants for instance moving between the two types of talk or engaging in everyday talk while performing institutional tasks (Lindström, 2005). In the current paper, based on nine hours of video recorded interaction between senior citizens and home helps, I demonstrate how everyday objects (vacuum cleaners, brooms, electrical cords etc) are implicated and oriented to as third participants in these interactions. This means, that home helps manage and use household tools in relation to the sequential structure of the ongoing interaction, so that (re)-engagement with a household tool is only initiated at points of sequential closure (Schegloff, 2007). Vice versa, when a home help engages with a household tool, this activity is treated as a type of schism (Egbert, 1997), excluding the senior citizen from interacting with the home help in the same way as when the home help engages in interaction with another human being (Heinemann, in press). |
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