Touch in Social Interaction

Rooted in multimodal conversation analysis and based on video recordings of naturally occurring social interactions, this book presents a novel analytical perspective for the study of touch. The authors focus on how different forms of touch are interactionally organized in everyday, institutional, and professional practices, showing how touch is multimodally achieved in social interaction, how it acquires its significance, how it is embedded in the current activity and in its social context, and how it is systematically intertwined with talk, facial expressions, and body posture.

Including work by a wide range of renowned researchers, this volume provides rich visual illustrations of situations featuring touch as a social and intersubjective practice. The studies make a compelling contribution to the field by clearly examining and demonstrating the social meaning of touch for the participants in social interaction in a broad range of contexts.

Presenting a new methodology for the study of touch, this is key reading for all researchers and scholars working in conversation analysis, multimodality, and related areas.

Asta Cekaite is a professor in Child Studies at Linköping University. Her research involves an interdisciplinary approach to language, culture, and social interaction. Specific foci include social perspectives on embodiment, touch, emotion, and moral socialization. Empirical fields cover adult–child and children’s peer group interactions in educational settings, and family. With M. Goodwin, she has co-authored Embodied Family Choreography: Practices of Control, Care and Mundane Creativity (2018).

Lorenza Mondada is a professor of Linguistics at the University of Basel. Her research deals with social interaction in ordinary, professional, and institutional settings, within an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic perspective (EMCA). Her focus is on video analysis and multimodality, integrating language, and embodiment in the study of human action. Currently she works on how interactants engage not only in coordinating their joint actions in publicly accountable manners, but also in sensing the material world together – within an EMCA perspective on sensoriality in interaction.