Despite recommendations for a more reflexive and theoretical turn to interviewing, the analysis of language and speech still occupies center stage. This study attempts to advance our understanding of the interview by including the use of gesture, gaze, and other embodied resources in concert with speech. Looking at a focus group interview evaluating community policing policy, I show how inclusion of embodied conduct offers a more robust approach to co-constructed meaning in the interview than looking at language practices alone. More explicitly, I investigate how an interviewee’s narrative includes gestures to solicit an affiliative stance from other interviewees and how ambiguous metacommunicative norms in the focus group influence the contributions of other police participants. I show how jurisdictional boundary and professional identity emerge in and through the integration of embodied conduct and sociocultural solidarity.

This study examines a participant’s narrative in a focus group interview dealing with the evaluation of criminal justice policy – the impact of community policing training. However, rather than look at the narrative solely in the speech of the interviewee, I analyze the integration of speech and embodied conduct like gesture, gaze, and posture in the production and negotiation of professional identities. I demonstrate the applied merits of a multimodal approach to criminal justice evaluation in the mapping between denotational text and interactional positioning, a mapping that inheres in embodied stance and broader sociocultural context.

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This study examines how collective memory and cultural trauma inhere in the multimodal interplay between macro structures of space-time and microcosmic action. Using a criminal trial as data, we show how collective memories and cultural sentiments function in the multimodal details of poetic oratory and emotionally charged speech to frame evidence, construct legal identity and shape the interpretation of testimony. Legal actors integrate language, gesture and gaze to shift the plane of legal reality into a sacred performance, a solemn and co-operative ritual that contains thoroughly unveiled allusions to the assassinations of President John F Kennedy and Senator Robert F Kennedy. In so doing, lawyers and witness co-construct an emergent space for jurors to step into history and connect to national tragedy as a socio-legal strategy.

Closing argument represents the most crucial part of the adversarial system of justice. For attorneys, it provides an opportunity to showcase their persuasive skills through the full range of semiotic resources at their disposal. While studies of legal discourse have examined speech performance, few studies, if any, have analyzed how speech integrates with gesture and material conduct in the production of persuasive oratory. This work demonstrates the role of multimodal and material action in concert with speech and how an attorney employs hand movements, material objects, and speech to reinforce significant points of evidence for the jury. More theoretically, we demonstrate how beat gestures and material objects synchronize with speech to not only accentuate rhythm and foreground points of evidential significance but, at certain moments, invoke semantic imagery as well.