About the Book
Objects are essential for how, together, people create and experience social life and relate to the physical environment around them. Interacting with Objects: Language, materiality, and social activity presents studies which use video recordings of real-life settings to explore how objects feature in social interaction and activity. The studies consider many objects (e.g. paper documents, food, a camera, art, furniture, and even the human body), across various situations, such as shopping, visiting the doctor, interviews and meetings, surgery, and instruction in dance, craft, or cooking. Analyses reveal in precise detail how, as people interact, objects are seen, touched and handled, heard, created, transformed, planned, imagined, shared, discussed, or appreciated. With the companion collection Multiactivity in Social Interaction: Beyond multitasking, the book advances understanding of the complex organisation and accomplishment of social interaction, especially the significance of embodiment, materiality, participation and temporality. By focussing on objects in and for actual occasions of human action, Interacting with Objects: Language, materiality, and social activity will interest many researchers and practitioners in language and social interaction, communication and discourse, design, and also more widely within anthropology, sociology, psychology, and related disciplines.
Table of Contents:
1. Acknowledgements; 2. Introduction; 3. On the interactional ecology of objects (by Nevile, Maurice); 4. Part A. Objects as situated resources; 5. Organising and sequencing; 6. The order of ordering: Objects, requests and embodied conduct in a public bar (by Richardson, Emma); 7. Initiating activity shifts through use of appraisal forms as material objects during performance appraisal interviews (by Mikkola, Piia); 8. "I'll just see what you had before": Making computer use relevant while patients present their problems (by Beck Nielsen, Soren); 9. Participating and involving; 10. Objects as tools for talk (by Day, Dennis); 11. Photo sharing as a joint activity between an aphasic speaker and others (by Aaltonen, Tarja); 12. Organising the soundscape: Participants' orientation to impending sound when turning on auditory objects in interaction (by Rauniomaa, Mirka); 13. Cultivating objects in interaction: Visual motifs as meaning making practices (by Hazel, Spencer); 14. Part B. Objects as practical accomplishments; 15. Shaping and creating; 16. Cooking instructions and the shaping of things in the kitchen (by Mondada, Lorenza); 17. To follow the materials: The detection, diagnosis and correction of mistakes in craft education (by Ekstrom, Anna); 18. Having a ball: Immaterial objects in dance instruction (by Keevallik, Leelo); 19. Experiencing and identifying; 20. Establishing joint orientation towards commercial objects in a self-service store: How practices of categorisation matter (by De Stefani, Elwys); 21. Artworks as touchable objects: Guiding perception in a museum tour for blind people (by Kreplak, Yael); 22. Incidental and essential objects in interaction: Paper documents in journalistic work (by Weilenmann, Alexandra); 23. Envisioning the plan in interaction: Configuring pipes during a plumbers' meeting (by Sakai, Shinichiro); 24. Instructed objects (by Koschmann, Timothy); 25. Epilogue; 26. Trajectories of the object in interaction (by Matthews, Ben); 27. Person index; 28. Subject index
