Everyday Interaction Analysis: Public Forms and Public Forums for Making Sense of Video

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

Abstract

As Childish Gambino’s music video “This is America” (2018) alludes to (“this a celly, that’s a tool…”), the people (children, parents, students, teachers, etc.) with whom we partner to generate “research data” have developed their own ways to record, edit, share, and publicly analyze video, relatively new practices that shape how society learns about itself. We characterize the video analysis people practice in their everyday lives as “Everyday Interaction Analysis” (Everyday IA). As education researchers who deploy Interaction Analysis, we believe thinking with the public practices of video analysis offers 1) a critical check on the embedded assumptions about social practices layered in the academic tradition of IA and 2) practices for understanding what video analysis can lead to off the page of the journal article and outside the walls of academia.
Foundational to IA, we have drawn on Goodwin’s notion of professional vision (1994), both as a framework for understanding how interaction analysts have learned the trade and as an example of the use of public video to promote anti-racist and socially just ends. Our aim is neither to harden the division between researcher and participant, nor ratify everyday practices as disciplinarily valid forms of research, but to open boundaries between professional and public forms of sensemaking through video. This approach takes seriously the cultural nature of all kinds of IA.
As a framework for understanding our methods, professional vision has helped our collective re-envisioning of important precepts set forward in foundational texts (Author & Colleague, 2016; Authors & Colleague, 2016; Jordan & Henderson, 1995). For example, learning from Everyday IA requires challenging the sedimented assumptions about “verifiable observations” and “social action” (Jordan & Henderson, 1995) in IA traditions. Not being bound to such commitments, people engaging in Everyday IA can and explicitly bring their lived experience as well as racialized, gendered, (de)colonized, and classed perspectives on the world to analysis of interactions in video clips. In other words, in contrast to the methodological tradition of IA based on academic claims of objectivity, Everyday IA is often explicitly value laden. People bring political motives, historical understandings of place, and cultural understandings to analysis (Warren & Roseberry 2011) grounded in axiological values and epistemological positionings (Colleagues & Author, 2016).
In our collective inquiry, we are interested in Everyday IA practices that forward movements for justice with material, political, and social consequences. We have centered our inquiries on collective analyses of videos of structural violence -- like the recording of police officer Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd. Recorded by Darnella Fraizer, this video and collective analyses helped fuel a national movement against police violence and structural racism in addition to helping to convict Chauvin. We also look to publicly shared analyses of joy as resistance to colonial structures, structural racism, and sexism. We do so to reject claims of objectivity which require analysts to bracket off powered hierarchies (e.g. race, gender, class) as not available for analysis and to embrace forms of analysis that catalyze justice-oriented action.

Authors

• Ananda Marin, University of California - Los Angeles

• Ben Shapiro, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Colin Hennessy Elliott, University of Colorado - Boulder

• David DeLiema, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

• Deborah Silvis, Utah State University

• Lauren Vogelstein, Vanderbilt University

• Sarah C. Radke, The Town School