Happy New Year! And more importantly, welcome to the second year of the ISCA Newsletter. We have left a strange year behind us. With the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, academic life has been turned upside down: research projects have been temporarily suspended, online teaching has become the norm, most have to work from home, and ICCA 2022 had to be postponed. And while there is light at the end of the tunnel, the immediate outlook is still pretty bleak, with many countries dealing with new and extended lockdown measures.
After a short summer hiatus, we are back with the third edition of the ISCA Newsletter. With the growing stress and anxiety many of us are experiencing due to a range of global issues, this seems an opportune time to share some positive developments, which show how we as a community can come together. While it will be a while before we get to see each other again in person, we manage to find ways to keep connected and indeed use this time to become even more of a global, inclusive community. And who knows, some of these innovations may be here to stay.
By Nils Klowait and Maria Erofeeva.
The embodied turn in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (EMCA) (Goodwin, 2000; Mondada, 2016; Nevile, 2015) in many ways coincided with the material turn: with a greater focus on the interactional ecology came a renewed interest in the role taken by the material environment (Nevile, Haddington, Heinemann, & Rauniomaa, 2014). The way non-human entities may come into play during human interaction currently evolves in multiple branches, some of which are further or closer to the general concerns of EMCA. Put on an ontological gradient, objects may play the role of context, props, resource spaces, parts of the public substrate (Goodwin, 2018), sets of discrete affordances (Hutchby, 2001) and, finally, as autonomous interactants (Cooren, 2004; Latour, 1996).
When we started the ISCA Forum newsletter in January, and even a few months ago, when we started preparing this second edition, few of us could have anticipated our strange new situation. As we write this, most of us the world is on lockdown, and academic life is moving almost entirely online. While this is a highly stressful time, there are some silver linings. One among them is that it is bringing our community closer together. Data sessions and working groups are no longer restricted by geographical distances. Moving meetings to online platforms means that everyone can join in from everywhere.
Over the past few weeks we’ve all been forced to move our research meetings online in an effort to progress our research, stay connected and have a semblance of what was normal. Holding data sessions remotely is not new — for the past 3 years we have been running the Remote Data Sessions (RDS) series to provide a space for people that may not have access to regular data sessions, or a CA community to practice doing CA and connect with others in the community. This report compiles our thoughts on the most accessible and data session friendly platform, how to access that platform through ISCA, our own procedures for hosting a remote data session (which are applicable for other platforms), and finally we invite discussion and comments on your own ways of remotely working.
Negotiation of poses in photography studio is an important process for photo taking. In order to produce a desirable photo, photographers and clients engage in artful practices in calibrating body postures (e.g. Tekin, 2017). Tekin showed that the skilful coordination between the photographer and the clients involves considerable interactional work, including linguistic and embodied resources as well as spatial adjustment in the studio. In fact, apart from posing, another important aspect in the photo-making process is to produce an appropriate facial expression (e.g. smiling face, serious face, joking face, excitement face). Perhaps because smile is often preserved as a positive expression of feelings, such as happiness (Nettle, 2005), affiliation and appreciation in interactions (Peräkylä & Sorjonen, 2012), a very frequent practice in a photographic studio is to instruct and help the client to “produce a smiling face”.
In this field report, I will explain my process for making a custom GoPro rig, in the hopes of encouraging others to try out making their own.
This ISCA member forum newsletter is part of a broader goal of ISCA to do more outreach to the EM/CA community by providing regular updates, providing members the opportunity to share their work and ideas, and to invite discussions on methodological developments and emerging theories. In this way we hope to cross borders both in the literal and metaphorical sense, by bringing together researchers from across the globe and making ISCA a truly international society.
By Stamatina Katsiveli-Siachou
Translation can be tricky in many ways and decisions are always consequential. Importantly, CA’s emic approach foregrounds the dataset over researcher’s assumptions. This means that every detail in how people design their turn can be consequential for what is going on, but might also not be treated as such; it all depends on interlocutors’ orientation.
By Emma Tennent
We all know how important it is to protect participants’ confidentiality, particularly when working with sensitive data. However, ethics committees are not always familiar with how interactional research works which can pose challenges for data collection. In this short commentary, we report on the challenges Fiona faced in negotiating with the ethics committee and how constraints imposed shaped the process of data collection. We highlight the need for researchers of social interaction to share our strategies for securing ethical approval.