Agnes Löfgren
Linköping University
My name is Agnes Löfgren and I am a PhD student at Linköping University, Sweden. I won’t be for long though. While I hope I will still be Agnes Löfgren when this is all over, in about two months, I will no longer be a PhD candidate. It has taken me six years, including partial maternity leave and teaching duties, but now it is coming to an end. In this essay, I share some reflections on my PhD journey, attempt to summarize my thesis and look towards the future.
Becoming a PhD and finding a topic
In late 2017 I was employed as a speech language pathologist in the hospital of the small town of Södertälje, Sweden. I was working long days at the hospital while reading scientific papers from fields that interested me at night. I kept my eyes open for PhD positions, and one day an advertisement for a project on the interesting phenomenon “Non-lexical vocalizations” (www.nonlexicalvocalizations.com) caught my eye. Though it was not speech and language pathology, the project seemed to target my interests, namely the boundaries of language, and the relationship to bodily communication. I kept glancing at the advertisement for weeks in between sessions with my patients. Suddenly, it was two weeks from the application deadline, and I decided to call the professor in question, a certain Leelo Keevallik, to inquire about the position. I remember her explaining that she was committed to investigating language as a phenomenon that is situated in encounters between people in real-life and that it should therefore be investigated in video-recorded, naturally occurring data. Coming from a background that would be characterized as psycho-, or even neurolinguistic, this intrigued me. I spent the next couple of evenings discovering Charles Goodwin’s work, and I finally wrote that application, got called for an interview, and discovered, to my great pleasure, a grey November morning in my office in the basement of Södertälje hospital, that I had been accepted.
I quickly discovered that the research environment in which my PhD was to be conducted was characterized by a genuine care for PhD students and their development combined with scientific rigor. The research school gathers literary and linguistics scholars. On the linguistic side, many researchers are indeed specialized in EMCA, but there are other fields represented as well, for instance critical discourse analysis. In our weekly seminars, I learned about interesting fields such as post-humanism and eco-criticism while at the same time discovering the rigorous method of EMCA analysis. I took many courses, notably one on the foundations of conversation analysis with Anna Lindström at Uppsala University during which I became very inspired by the possibilities of the method. At the same time, I took a course in semiotics and became fascinated by theories of meaning. Although it seemed difficult to combine methodologies with different epistemological tradition, I was fascinated with how both methods dealt with sense-making, and I wondered whether some of the semiotic concepts could be of relevance for CA. But how would I study this? I knew I wanted to investigate a setting where performance art was created (to the great interest of the literary scholars in our research school, who are dealing with questions of aesthetics in general, beyond literary art). Further, I was particularly interested in non-verbal communication and had written my master’s thesis on pragmatic deficits following right hemisphere brain damage. I wanted to investigate the role of language when creating a non-verbal form of (artistic) communication.
After many conversations with Leelo, I decided on opera rehearsals. Why? Because opera as an artform relies on the combination of embodied and vocal expression beyond words. Further, opera seemed to have received no previous attention from CA scholars, and it seemed tempting to discover unknown territories. I spent a little over a month following a Swedish opera company that rehearsed an Italian tragedy. I returned to the office with 20 hours of video-recorded rehearsals in Swedish and English that in time turned into three articles on depictions in opera rehearsals, in which I used multimodal interaction analysis (Broth & Keevallik 2020; see also Sidnell & Stivers, 2013), at times informed by concepts from semiotic theory (Jakobson, 1971; Agawu, 1991, Clark, 2016).
Bodies to suit the music: Depictions in opera rehearsals
The rehearsals that I video-recorded are scenic opera rehearsals, rehearsals in which the director, assistant director and performers create the scenic aspects of an opera production. In the production I studied, this process was characterized by joint decision-making (see previous research by for instance Stevanovic, 2012, 2015, 2021). What became the title of the thesis is based on a quote from the director when she defines the shared goal of the rehearsals – to find bodies to suit the music. I call these ‘performance bodies’. Essentially, I view them as artistic correlates of multimodal gestalts (cf. Mondada, 2014). To create them, the ensemble draws on their intuitive knowledge on how people interact (see also Lefebvre, 2018; Hazel, 2018) and on their understandings of the aesthetics of the production that they are underway creating.
The aesthetics is continuously negotiated in the interaction through depictions and descriptions. This terminology stems from Herbert Clark’s (2016) work which I discovered in relation to the course in semiotics, and it seemed to capture differences in how the participants in opera rehearsals communicated about what to do on stage. I also found that it reflects distinctions in EMCAIL literature such as that between enactments and explanations (Stukenbrock, 2017), ‘narrated’ and ‘enacted’ parts of stories (Thompson & Suzuki, 2014) or iconic gestures and their lexical affiliates (Schegloff, 1984). When depicting, participants show, and when describing, they tell. In opera rehearsals, this distinction may look like the following. To describe an idea for a performance body, a performer may say “If I choose to remain on stage I can walk away much later”. To depict that same idea, the performer simply walks away while adopting a limping walking style of his character, thus depicting the idea to walk away as his character would do it.
Over time, I became particularly interested in depictions, how they are multimodally constructed and responded to, which social actions they support, how they function as a semiotic resource, but also their relationship to descriptions, and thereby ultimately the relationship between language and the body in social interaction. I hope to contribute to previous EMCAIL literature on the multimodality of depictions (cf. Sidnell, 2006; Holt & Clift, 2007; Cantarutti, 2021, 2022; Ehmer & Mandel, 2021), to literature on joint decision-making and proposals (Asmuß & Oshima, 2012; Couper-Kuhlen, 2014, Lindström, 2017; Stevanovic, 2012, 2015, 2021) and research on interactional histories and longitudinal CA (Broth et al., 2017; Deppermann, 2018, Deppermann & Pekarek Doehler, 2021), particularly those investigating how performing arts come into being over time (Hazel, 2018; Lefebvre, 2018; Norrthon, 2019; Savijärvi & Ihalainen, 2021; Norrthon & Schmidt, 2023).
The thesis comprises three individual articles and a cover essay. In article 1, my co-supervisor Emily Hofstetter and I show how multimodal depictions accomplish proposals on performance bodies and allow for aesthetic negotiations during the rehearsals. We discuss the depictions in terms of semiotic resources and conclude that they refer to themselves as the current manifestations of the production and to prototypes of mundane behavior (see also Lefebvre, 2018). In Jakobson’s (1971) terms, they signify through both extroversive and introversive semiosis. The artistic labor in opera rehearsals requires balancing of these two different kinds of semiosis. This is achieved as the participants tie back to previous depictions during the rehearsal procedures, but also to aesthetics of other performances and to discussions on opera as an artform. Ultimately, it is argued that introversive semiosis is analogous to accumulated shared knowledge in social interaction.
Article 2 focuses on how the performers initiate depictions as part of proposals on performance bodies, and thereby claim their rights to influence the local interactional agenda. I specifically look at how performers relocate in space to initiate depictions, and thereby break the F-formation (Kendon, 1990) of the conversation. If the director aligns with this change in participation framework and relocates into a spectator position, a performance-audience-formation is accomplished in which a fragment of a performance, a scene (cf. Clark, 2016) is introduced during discussions on the production. The article shows how deontic rights can be negotiated in micro-sequences with visuospatial resources, to facilitate the macro-sequence of proposal + uptake. A successful depiction of a performance body that becomes evaluated for its suitability for the production requires collaboration from all participants co-present.
In article 3, I look at how proposal sequences and depictions develop over ‘joint decision-making micro-histories’ (cf. Schmidt & Deppermann, 2023 on ‘interactional micro-histories’). The article shows how performer proposals reach increasingly depictive states as the decision-making process progresses. It is argued that the performers strive to achieve preliminary intersubjectivity and check whether the other participants agree with ideas, before they depict them in complex ways using both visuospatial and vocal/aural resources. In fact, ideas that result from previous ideas and arrangements become depicted earlier in the process, when access to ideas and agreement with them can be inferred. The article demonstrates how language facilitates the joint decision-making process and how ideas in a dialogical process become paradoxically individual and collective.
In sum, the thesis came to show that depictions are multimodal interpersonal achievements (cf. Deppermann, 2014 on intra vs. interpersonal coordination). Depictions become more complex over time, both over the milliseconds that they are deployed in sequences to achieve social actions and over interactional micro-histories spanning from 10-20 minutes. Their multimodal construction may serve as locus for the negotiations of deontic rights and reveals the dialogical process of this opera ensemble. Further, depictions in rehearsals in general are both an interactional practice, and the outcome of the interaction (see also Norrthon & Schmidt, 2023). In that sense, they are the performance bodies that they are a tool to create. Each depiction shows an understanding of the developing aesthetics of the production, while it at the same time renews that production (cf. Heritage, 1984). Finally, language figures in different ways in relation to the depictions. While lexical semantics helps to disambiguate and mutually elaborate the depictions, grammar projects them and sequence design makes replies to them conditionally relevant, which further secures the jointness of the creative process.
As much as I have attempted to summarize my thesis here, there is more to it than 1000 words allow for. A reader who is interested might want to have a look at article 1 (Löfgren & Hofstetter, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2021.1907180) and article 2 (Löfgren, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2023.2235968) of the thesis. Article 3 (Löfren, under review) is still under review, and the thesis as a whole will be available (here: https://doi.org/10.3384/9789180754026) by November 1st this year.
The end and a new beginning
It has been quite some years. Was it like I imagined it to be while I thought about it in between speech therapy sessions? Yes and no. Did I hope that I would have more time to read and write? Yes. Do I regret all the conferences, workshops, travels, and teaching duties? No, I don’t. Did I answer all my initial questions? Absolutely not and I realize I might never do and that that’s the exciting part. Did I always know what I was looking for? At times I felt completely lost. Was it difficult to combine a PhD with being a mother, daughter, partner, and friend? Yes, it sometimes was. Would I do it again? It seems so, as I applied for a four-year postdoc that I will commence in early December. It won’t be in Sweden, and I will have come a long way from from Södertälje, both in terms of geography and topic. There is a speech pathology program at the university, however, and maybe the ends will somehow meet soon? I any case, I can’t tell you how excited I am. But first things first. Before that I will have to make sure that the text is in the condition I want it to be, and of course, I will have to survive my defense. Currently, I am juggling proofreading and defense party planning. I have the impression that my whole life revolves around the thesis these months. I am somewhat exhausted, unsurprisingly perhaps, but I’m beginning to perceive the end. As I write this, I am taking a deep breath in. Six years of work to be finalized and publically defended. After November 24th I will know what it means to be a PhD.
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