Embodied Experience: Representing Risk in Speech and Gesture

Abstract

This article investigates the ways in which individuals assume two distinct viewpoints in both speech and gesture - both simultaneously and sequentially - when they represent the uncertain knowledge that characterizes risk. In the mimetic viewpoint, individuals represent events as characters in their own narrative or mimic the character viewpoint of an Other. In the analytic viewpoint, individuals move outside of embodied experience to analyze events from a distance. As part of a larger study investigating viewpoint in discourses of risk, this study suggests the important role of viewpoint in understanding individual accounts of risk. Together, speech and gesture provide a richer representation of risk than either speech or gesture alone. But viewpoints represented in gesture may be rendered invisible in written accident reports and investigations (Collins, 1990; Sauer, 1994). This study suggests that individual accounts of risk ultimately reflect highly local sensory experiences that are situated - literally and physically - by an individual's position in institutional and material sites. Within these institutions, individuals can access a range of analytic and mimetic viewpoints in both speech and gesture in order to represent their experiences. This research has important implications for rhetorical theory and risk and decision science.

Dialogic Embodied Action: Using Gesture to Organize Sequence and Participation in Instructional Interaction

“…This context is a crucial site for the study of the socially organizing function of gesture, since the symbolic gestural practices used for communication in such environments are closely tied to the instrumental work performed there (Sauer, 1999;Streeck, 2002Streeck, , 2009. Hence, the embodied knowledge that individual hands and bodies gain through their work shapes the way that these same bodies use gesture to communicate about their work.…”

Pit sense: Appropriation of practice-based knowledge in a UK coalmine

“…Yet, as a mode of risk assessment, it has relevance for the health and safety literature that treats safety as 'socially-constructed' (Turner and Gray, 2009), and is related to discourse and social identity (Sauer, 1999), and learning/sense-making in highly uncertain work environments (Barton and Sutcliffe, 2009;Carroll, 1998;Gherardi and Nicolini, 2002;Turner and Tennant, 2009;Weick and Roberts, 1993).…”

Gesture and Collaborative Planning

“…The qualitative analysis continued using grounded theory techniques to constantly compare, analyze, and refine categories, properties, and dimensions until the primary conceptual category of the conversational interaction space as group document was reached. Although the development of this category was aided by previous research describing how speakers use gestures to create a shared interaction space that helps establish common conceptual points of reference (McNeill, 1992;Sauer, 1999), the observation that this space was often treated like the physical documents at the group's disposal is unique to this qualitative analysis. This conceptual category is further unpacked and developed in part two of the analysis.…”

“…Whereas speech can be translated word for word into written form, gestures are often abstract and physical representations of language. This point has most notably been made by Beverly Sauer (1998Sauer ( , 1999 in her research on miners. Sauer shows how miners use gesture to represent embodied sensory information located outside written and spoken texts.…”

“…When speakers converse, their gestures shape a physical interaction space between them. Speakers use this interaction space to negotiate multiple viewpoints and draw relationships between both abstract and concrete ideas (McNeill, 1992;Sauer, 1999). The writers here used the conversational interaction space much as they did the physical documents at their disposal: They pointed to the interaction space to show how individual sections would be integrated in the final document, used gestures to physically signal their "place" in the conversation, mimed moving the interaction space as if it were a physical document, and most notably, "wrote" on this space.…”