| Driving is a central feature of our everyday lives. We spend much of our lives in cars, and very often we share this time with others. The panel explores features of interaction in cars. Papers explore participants’ communicative activities and embodied conduct while travelling in a car. They consider how the material and spatial configuration of the car, and its mobility through a physical and semiotic environment, can constrain or afford particular social activities and understandings, and impact upon language and processes of interaction in particular ways. The panel therefore attends to participants’ social and multimodal meaning-making practices within a setting that is itself mobile. For example, what kinds of social activities occur in cars? How is interaction in cars organised, especially relative to the demands of driving? How do participants within cars organize multiple and overlapping activities? How do people participate as either driver or passenger, and how might passengers participate in driving activities, e.g. to negotiate a route? How do in-car technologies (mobile phones, navigation, entertainment systems) feature in interaction? Apart from few exceptions, research in conversation analysis has not typically focused on interactions in which one or more participants are themselves moving from place to place. The panel is therefore timely because it is motivated by very recent studies of driving as a socially situated activity. The panel also highlights how conversation analysis might inform and enrich driving research which is dominated by psychological studies using experiments, reported accounts, and statistical data, to examine the cognitive demands on individuals of various driving activities (e.g. talking on mobile phones) and their impact upon driving. In addition, CA research can also complement recent sociological (non-CA) research by showing that driving is highly interactional and that mobility impacts situated interactional practices. |
