Revisiting Participation
Language and Bodies in Interaction
Basel 24-27 June
2015
This conference welcomes contributions from scholars in the field of social interaction, conversation analysis, interactional linguistics and ethnomethodology discussing issues of participation in social interaction. The conference invites papers tackling participation as an interactional achievement, involving various levels of organization, e.g. turn-taking, turn formatting, action formation and sequence organization. It also welcomes analyses and discussions taking into consideration a diversity of linguistic and embodied resources involved in shaping, enabling, or hindering participation.
Thematic areas
i) How different modes of organization of turn-taking (concerning both turn allocation and turn formatting) in multi-party interaction configure opportunities to participate;
ii) How action formation and the specific organization of sequential environments shape participation, for example enabling and crafting it, as well as constraining and reducing it;
iii) How participation issues emerge in particular contexts of activity, shaping and being shaped by a reflexive orientation towards specific contexts and locally relevant membership categorization devices.
Keynote speakers
Galina Bolden (Rutgers University, new Jersey)
Charles Goodwin (UCLA)
Marjorie H. Goodwin (UCLA)
Christian Heath (King’s College London)
Ray Wilkinson (University of Sheffield)
Conference homepage: https://participation2015.unibas.ch
Participation Revisited
June 24, 2015
Conference theme
The notion of participation has been largely used through several disciplines inspired by the concept of participation framework proposed by Goffman (1981). Within conversation analysis, the issue of participation has been discussed early on (see for example Drew & Wootton, 1988). More recently, it has been revisited within an embodied perspective (see Goodwin & Goodwin, 2004), revealing its dynamic, changing and complex organization, as well as the importance for its organization of multimodal resources, specific formats, and changing configurations. Studies of phenomena related to the organization of turn-taking in multi-party interactions have raised issues of how recipient-design and orientation to the co-participants are organized and change moment by moment along the sequentiality of talk and action. Studies of phenomena related to sequence organization and action formatting have raised issues concerning formats that enable, craft, afford specific forms of participation in various activities and settings.