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Research Projects
My research focuses on the practices human beings
use to construct in concert with each other the social, cultural and
cognitive worlds they inhabit. Central to this process are Language,
structures for the organization of action-in-interaction, and an ecology
of sign systems that includes not only talk, but also a range of different
kinds of displays made by the body, and structure in the environment.
My
projects include:
The Interactive Construction of Talk
Using as data
videotapes recorded in range of natural settings I have investigated
how utterances,
sentences, and stories emerge not from a speaker alone, but rather
through processes of interaction in which hearers of various types
play a crucial
role. Thus speakers who discover that they do have the gaze of a
hearer, will produce restarts in their talk, an action that simultaneously
functions as a request for the gaze of the hearer. Though typically
dismissed as
performance errors such actions both demonstrate the work that speakers
do to construct coherent, grammatical sentences, not into the air,
but for hearers who are actually attending them, and provide, within
the stream
of speech itself, crucial insights into language structure and grammatical
organization. Speakers also reconstruct utterances, and the sentences
emerging within them, as gaze is moved from one types of hearer to
another so that the action in progress remains appropriate to its
addressee
of
the moment.
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Story Structure
Stories are organized as multi-party
interactive fields, in which not only the talk of the speaker,
but also the stance
and embodied actions of hearers, characters cited in the talk who
are present, etc. play a crucial role. The visible analysis that
hearers are performing sheds new light on how participants differentiate
alternative structural units within stories and make projections about upcoming events.
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Participation
I investigate Participation as a temporally unfolding
process through which separate parties demonstrate to each other
their ongoing understanding of the events they are engaged in by
building
actions that contribute to the further progression of these very
same events.
Thus a hearer is not just a structural category, an addressee, but
someone who displays detailed analysis of, and stance toward, the
unfolding structure
of the talk in progress through visible embodied displays. Speakers
take such displays into account as they organize their own actions.
Moreover,
parties in interaction build action from the social positions they
occupy. This approach to participation, with its focus on analysis
displayed through
temporally unfolding action, differs from approaches that proceed
by constructing typologies of different kinds of participants.
Scientific and Workplace Practice
Fieldwork in a number of scientific
and workplace settings, including archaeological excavations, a chemistry
lab, an oceanographic ship in the mouth of the Amazon, and the ramp
and operations room of an airport, has led to analysis of how particular
social
groups construct the objects and ways of knowing that define their
professional worlds through systematic interactive practices. Such
settings constitute
a perspicuous site for developing ways of analyzing human action that
integrate the details of language use with participants’ orientation
to an historically shaped material world. I was part of the Workplace
Project, organized by Lucy Suchman at Xerox PARC in the early 1990's.
Human Vision as Social Practice
The social articulation of human
vision is central to the organization of face-to-face interaction.
As noted above speakers use gaze to make inferences about their hearers’ attention
and orientation, and modify the talk that is emerging in terms of what
they see. Central to many professions, such as archaeology, are practices
for seeing and constituting in a complex perceptual environment the
distinctive objects of knowledge, such as the traces of ancient societies
visible
in dirt being excavated, that define the expertise of a profession.
Both scientific work environments, and the ways in which findings
are organized
and presented at meetings and in journals, make extensive use of historically
shaped tools that structure vision and knowledge. Such tools are frequently
articulated within interaction and contribute to the multimodal organization
of action. The social organization of vision is crucial to the organization
of action in many settings. The way in which the lawyers defending
the policemen who beat Rodney King structured the jury’s perception
of the videotape of the beating demonstrates the crucial importance
of practices for shaping how others see consequential phenomena.
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Gesture and Embodiment
I have investigated the organization
of gesture in face-to-face interaction and in the discourse of a
man
with severe aphasia. Some of my current research focuses on the organization
of environmentally coupled gestures, which bring together talk, gesture
and structure in the environment, in both scientific settings, and
in
children’s games such as hopscotch.
Situated Temporalities and Projection
Much of my work has focused
organization of units, such as utterances, sentences and stories
in interaction, and on the resources used by participants to project
upcoming events so
that coordinated action can be accomplished.
Family Interaction
Since the early 1970's I have recorded, and
used as data, family interaction in range of settings (family dinners,
picnics, family life in the home of a man with severe aphasia, etc.).
In the early 1970's I made films about family therapy at the Philadelphia
Child Guidance clinic. I am currently a member of a multi-disciplinary
research project research investigating the lives of middle class families.
Aphasia in Discourse
For many years I videotaped daily life in
the home of a man who could speak only three words Yes, No, and And
because of a stroke in the left hemisphere of his brain. Despite the severity
of his language impairment this man was able to function as a powerful
actor in conversation by getting others to produce the talk that he
needed.
His situation demonstrates the usefulness of complementing research
on aphasia that focuses on structures within the brain with analysis of the
practices used by persons with aphasia to build meaning and action
in
concert with others. I have pursed aspects of this research in a number
of articles. I also recently edited Conversation and Brain Damage which
is one of the first volumes to bring together the work of a number
of scholars in both the United States and Europe who are analyzing aphasia
in discourse.
Despite the diversity of settings examined all of my research
focuses on how action is built within human interaction as
participants attend to each other, the detailed organization of the talk
in
progress, and historically shaped structure within their
environment.
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