The Covid-19 pandemic has affected not only the health of populations but also their everyday social practices, transformed by orienting to risks of contagion and to health prevention discourses. This paper emanates from a project investigating the impact of Covid-19 on human sociality and more particularly the situated and embodied organization of social interactions. It discusses how Covid-19 impacts the design of ordinary actions in social interaction, how this is made publicly accountable by the participants orienting to the pandemic in formatting their actions and in responding to the actions of others. Adopting an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic perspective, the analyses focus on a particular social activity: paying. The organization of payments in shops and services has been affected by the pandemic, not only by official regulations, favoring some modes of payment over others, but also in how sellers and customers situatedly adapt their practices to imperatives of prevention. On the basis of a rich corpus of video-recorded data, which spans from the pandemic’s prodromes to and after its peak, we show how money transfer is methodically achieved – imposed, negotiated, and readjusted – while variously taking into account possible risks of contagion. Thus, we show not only how pandemics affect social interaction, and how prevention is incarnated in social actions, but also how, in turn, situated solutions implemented by people during the pandemic reveal fundamental features of human action.
Using multimodal conversation analysis this article examines embodied and tactile greetings in social interaction, documenting their change during the Covid‐19 pandemic. Recognizing social interaction as foundational for human sociality, we consider greetings as a crucial normative, organizational, and ritual practice for mutually engaging in intersubjective action. Analyses use video recordings made in Switzerland (featuring (Swiss‐)German and English as a lingua‐franca), focusing on embodied greetings of acquainted people in public spaces at the age of Covid19—a historical moment in which physical proximity and contact are targeted by official measures restricting social interactions. Studying a range of tactile embodied greetings, the paper shows how they change from routine greetings to hesitated, suspended yet still completed ones, and to projected but resisted and refused ones. Furthermore, it reveals some ‘new’ practices of greeting (elbow/feetbumps, hugs‐in‐the‐air) and their non‐straightforward and accountable character, as well as how they sediment and normalize during the pandemic.
This study examines the situated use of rules and the social practices people deploy to correct projectable rule violations in pétanque playing activities. Drawing on Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, and using naturally occurring video recordings, this article investigates socially organized occasions of rule use, and more particularly how rules for turn-taking at play are reflexively established in and through interaction. The alternation of players in pétanque is dependent on and consequential for the progressivity of the game and it is a practical problem for the players when a participant projects to break a rule of “who plays next”. The empirical analysis shows that formulating rules is a practice for indicating and correcting incipient violations of who plays next, which retrospectively invoke and establish the situated expectations that constitute the game as that particular game. Focusing on the anticipative corrections of projectable violations of turn-taking rules, this study revisits the concept of rules, as they are played into being, from a social and interactional perspective. We argue and demonstrate that rules are not prescriptions of game conduct, but resources that reflexively render the players’ conducts intelligible as playing the game they are engaging in.
This paper describes a particular form of professional touch, through which photographers taking photographs of their clients/models arrange their bodies and orchestrate their poses. Our analysis demonstrates that photographers adopt a professional touch-cum-vision, which combines professional vision and professional touch. The former is achieved by the photographers adopting a specific perspectival posture, allowing them to see the photographed persons from a distance, in a way that is analogous to the perspective of the photographic eye, that is, to the perspective of seeing through a camera. The latter involves a specific form and trajectory of arms and hands, accountably shaped in a way that enables a touch that is both precise, targeting specific details of the body, and delicate, orienting to the normativity of touching the other’s body. The clients/models can docilely align with the photographers’ touch but can also display more agency, initiating and preempting the arrangement of details of the pose, as well as some resistance, prompting the photographers to minimize their touching interventions and to ask for permission, apologize, and thank. Data are video recordings of photography sessions in professional studios, in which participants speak (Swiss) German and Turkish.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.