• Orders of Interaction in Mediated Settings
• Time as a resource, Time as an accomplishment PDF
• Knowledge management in institutional interaction

Chaired by:

• Ilkka Arminen (University of Helsinki, Finland)
• Christian Licoppe (Telecom ParisTech, France)
• Anna Spagnolli (University of Padova, Italy)

Panel theme:

The panel invites CA contributions that address the way in which interaction is organized in these settings, and that account for such organization by adopting both an internal and a comparative perspective: on the one side, the structure of a certain mode of mediated interaction can be described in its own terms, for the sequential and interactional consequences that an observed practice has on the rest of the interaction for its participants in that environment; on the other, to avoid the treatment of mediated settings as a secluded, independent locus of interaction, the structure of mediated interaction can be related with the bulk of practices and organizational issues already unveiled in other conversational settings, which represent a relevant alternative for the participant.

In addition, a multimodal approach is welcome, addressing both verbal and non-verbal composition of activities to provide a full view of action and interaction that becomes all the more salient in the analysis of mediated settings where unprecedented communication cues, temporal and spatial coordinates and interactional features are available.

Issues to address include but are not limited to:

• intertwining of mediated and ‘natural’ interaction
• known conversational phenomena/practices (turn-taking system, repair, overlaps, adjacency pairs, expansions, …) in new environments
• new interactional phenomena in mediated environments
• interactional practices and medium affordances
• process through which new practices emerge and establish in new media (including prototypes)
• observable social value and interactional upshot of mediated interaction in formal and informal settings
• interplay between verbal and non verbal resources in mediated multimodal interaction

Panel Format

Conference organizers are making arrangements for a special issue of a journal on the panel topic to be prepared after the conference.

Submission

Panel organizers:

• Marco Pino (University of Verona, Italy)
• Alessandra Fasulo (University of Portsmouth, UK)

Epistemics – conceived as “the study of the expression of and roles played by knowledge and knowledge claims in interaction” (Drew 2012) – is a key aspect of the organization of conduct in interaction, particularly with reference to the management of congruency of epistemic stances between participants (Heritage 2013), action formation (Heritage 2012a) and sequence organization (Heritage 2012b).

As regards institutional interactions, two related dimensions of epistemics play a key role in the organization of both institutional representatives’ and  lay members’ conduct. First, the practices of knowledge management that are determinant in establishing the knowledge base on which service provision is to be grounded. For instance, in service encounters professionals rely on clients’ willingness to disclose aspects of their knowledge and experience in order to design a service or response appropriate  to the clients’ problems. A number of conversational practices have been identified to this effect, such as different question-formats in medical interaction (Heritage 2010); ‘circular questioning’ (Peräkylä 1991), noticings (Vehvilainen 2008) and solicitations or incitements to talk in psychotherapeutic interactions (Hutchby 2002). Moreover, specific sequence-types can be devoted to elicit information from the clients, such as pre-sequences (Maynard 1992) and insertion sequences (Whalen and Zimmerman 1990).

A second aspect is the work professionals put in to ensure that the provided information is manageable within institutionally relevant interpretive frameworks and is compatible with the interactional agendas they pursue. Professionals are selective with respect to the information that they are willing to treat as relevant and meaningful in the situated, turn-by-turn construction of the clients’ problems-to-be-solved. For instance, psychotherapists can actively work to disattend (Antaki 2010) specific types of information provided by the clients. Psychotherapists can exploit the sequential position of the third turn in interpretative sequences to modify the tenor of the clients’ descriptions (Peräkylä 2011). Questions, with their embedded presuppositions (Heritage 2010), can be employed to scaffold clients’ information-provision in specific directions. An example is that of optimistic questions in psychotherapy (MacMartin 2008). All these resources can be deployed to shape clients’ ongoing descriptions and accounts so as to make them compatible with professionals’ agendas or interactional projects.

Knowledge management can become a matter of struggle in institutional encounters on both levels. For instance, clients can withhold information, inhibiting the professionals’ access to their experience and hence hampering the progressivity of the ongoing activity (Hutchby 2002). Clients can also resist professionals’ attempts at selecting specifics bits of information as the salient aspects of their problems (Antaki 2004) or resist aligning to the presuppositions of a question (MacMartin 2008).

Finally, professionals can employ practices to manage clients’ resistance and hence pursue a favored epistemic outcome in the interaction. For instance, professionals can seek to focus away from the information given by the clients by reformulating or ‘converting’ it (Maynard 1992) or by drawing on alternative and independently accessible information, such as the surrounding physical environment (Mondada 2011), test results (Maynard 2004), clients’ prior talk or conduct as a source of evidence (Vehvilainen 2008) or more general or universal knowledge that can be readily available to anyone (Antaki 2004). By so doing, professionals can seek to reshape the epistemic scenario in the encounter so as to make it more compatible with the institutional agenda and claim back epistemic authority.

This panel contributes to this strand of research by explicitly focusing on how professionals and clients manage epistemic aspects of the interaction, such as their relative distribution of knowledge, and their entitlement to claim access and to invoke specific types of knowledge as relevant for the business at hand. Contributions are welcome that address the following questions.

• - How do the participants orient to the knowledge distribution between them as procedurally consequential for the business at hand?
• - How is the progressivity of the encounter made contingent on the ways in which information is elicited and produced?
• - How is the institutional character of the encounter reflected in and implemented by specific practices of knowledge management?

Abstract Submission:

• - the authors' names, affiliation, and email address,
• - the contribution title,
• - a clear statement of the main point or argument of the paper,
• - a brief discussion of the problem or research question with reference to previous research and the work's relevance to the area of study,
• - information on the theoretical background and methodology used,
• - a description of the data on which the study is based,
• - (first) results and/or conclusions to be drawn from the study.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us:
Marco Pino (marco.pino75[at]gmail.com)
Alessandra Fasulo (alessandra.fasulo[at]port.ac.uk)

References