Gesture's community: Social organization in multimodal conduct

Abstract

A B S T R A C TThis article analyzes the multimodal integration of gesture, talk, and sociocultural context. More specifically, I investigate how forms of Gemeinschaft/ Gesellshaft community are embodied in the concrete details of multimodal form-in the iconic interplay of multimodal practice and symbolic forms of social organization. Using a focus group interview of community policing training, I show how criss-crossing laminations of participation emerge through novel gestural configurations like multimodal quotation and pragmatic beats to not only pace the rhythm of speech but simultaneously plot the spatial coordinates of social organization. In the course of events, we see how speakers integrate gesture, gaze, and postural orientation into the stream of their utterances to project rhythmically infused meanings of communal identity, social solidarity, and cultural opposition. (Multimodality, community, legal discourse)*

Policing evaluation: Focus group interviews as an embodied speech event

“…As Briggs (1986: 3) recognizes, researchers often take what is said as a reflection of what is ‘out there’, information to be harvested and domesticated into the aims of the researcher rather than a joint interaction between the interviewer and respondent(s). 5 In the orthodox interview, the interviewer’s contributions are ‘bleached’ from the final interview product along with any traces of bodily conduct, an erasure with immense consequences for understanding focus group evaluation (see Matoesian, 2005, 2012; Matoesian and Coldren, 2002). 6…”