Foregrounding Expansive Relations: Toward Methods of Assembly and Weaving in Longitudinal Interaction Analysis

• In Event: What's Next for Interaction Analysis of Learning? Aligning Analytical Approaches With Theoretical Turns

Abstract

We resist nature-culture divides (see Ceci & Williams, 1999) present in Conversation Analysis (CA)/Interaction Analysis (IA) traditions. Specifically, we resist this divide that leads researchers to see the interactional order as separate from past and possible changes to artifacts and routines (typically defined as cultural worlds) and the natural world in which interactions are embedded. Sacks et al.’s (1974) foundational CA/IA analyzed decontextualized recorded phone conversations separate from shifting lands/waters, place (collections of “stories so-far”; Massey, 2005), bodies (talk is prioritized over whole-body movements), time (excerpted from speakers’ histories, small scales of time in adjacency pairs), and cultural communities (e.g., universal claims about one “turn must always and exclusively be in progress,” p. 697). This decontextualization illustrates how mind-body connections in interaction become backgrounded and how cognition ends up represented as a mental activity understood through talk (Hutchins, 1995). Recognizing these limits, we push to re-entwine time, embodied experience, lands/waters, and more-than-humans (MTH) in analysis. We wonder: what methods support understanding multiple lived histories and futures as relevant within interactional moments?
We propose longitudinal IA methods of assembly and weaving support understanding the multi-temporal nature of interaction. In methods of assembly, researchers collect instances across time (and/or place) to trace interactional histories allowing for analysis of how prior-substrates (Goodwin, 2018) become relevant to ongoing activity. Observational-video records provide sufficient data for iterative analysis in which researchers identify moments of interest, trace moments forwards to understand their consequences or imagine new possible trajectories, and backwards to understand their origins/substrates.
Methods of weaving move towards understanding lived experience within situated activity systems in which lands, waters, and MTH are positioned as contributors to the creation of contexts. For instance, Author (2020a) analyzes participants’ discussion of shifting lands/waters during/after a flooding in a forest preserve, storying the experience of frogs who left behind prints, and thereby articulating histories of MTHs and lands/waters. We propose methods of weaving require additional relationships with participants beyond the collection of observational video: reflective interviews or co-research partnerships in which participants and researchers share embodied experiences and perspectives, embedding their understandings of interactions within their cultural knowledge systems, and reflecting on the futures they saw/see as possible from the perspective of particular moments.
Assembly and weaving are iterative and systematic across longitudinal video data (weeks, months, years). They also require a multi-temporal orientation to interaction that understands lived experience as lines knotted together (e.g., Ingold, 2007). By multi-temporal we mean every moment of interaction is embedded in a continuum of relations shaped by participants’ horizon of experience (Gadamer, 1975; Author, 2021a), socio-cultural/political histories (Philip et al., 2018; Collins & Bilge, 2020), and MTH-kinds. This orientation pushes back on the nature-culture and mind-body divides, leading us to recognize moments as entanglements between people, histories, places, materials, MTHs, lands/waters, memory traces, and embodied experience (e.g., Colleague & Author, 2015). In this way, multi-temporality is experienced in the interactions we examine as researchers and the research process itself.

Authors

• D. Teo Keifert, University of North Texas

• Ananda M. Marin, University of California - Los Angeles

• David DeLiema, University of Minnesota