Space as resource and achievement
| Number: | P54 |
| Organizer: | Kesselheim, Wolfgang |
| Co-Organizer: | |
| Abstract: | |
| The recent interest in multimodality has led to a new concern with the role of space in verbal interaction. A considerable number of conversation analytic studies explore the role of space in interaction by focusing on embodied space-related modes like gesture, gaze, or body movement. At the same time, the interplay of verbal interaction and space in terms of places, buildings, or rooms, remains a largely neglected field of research inside CA. For CA these \"pre-structured spaces\" present a special methodical challenge: They are clearly not produced by the participants in the course of their interaction, but by builders, architects, interior designers, etc. - in many cases long before the analyzed interactions occur. CA studies have to reconstruct how these pre-structured spaces are made relevant and are interactively achieved by the participants\' ways of walking, orienting and positioning and all the different uses participants make of space and its \"presettings\": its shape and extension, the objects that are placed in it, etc. Although the problem of pre-structured spaces is especially prominent in institutional communication, it seems to be a general communicative problem, and it is well worthwhile to try to determine its scope in every-day interaction. The aim of the panel is to bring together researchers that work already on exactly this spatial aspect of interaction – e.g. on visitors\' interaction in museums or exhibitions, on class-room interaction, on the celebration of masses in churches, on driving through a city by car, etc. – and to discuss the methodical challenges the analysis of these structures entails for CA. |
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