Intersensoriality
Achieving the intelligibility of multimodal resources in and for social interacion
2024-2028 (SNF)
Rooted in conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, this project intends to complexify multimodal analysis by highlighting the role of the senses in the organization of social interaction. Hence it focuses not only what participants to social interaction do, but also how what they do is seen, heard, and more generally perceived by others. Multimodal resources don’t have an ‘intrinsic’ public accountability per se, they have to be perceived (even in a tacit way) by the coparticipants in order to make sense for them, and to be relevantly oriented to and addressed by them in their next responsive actions/turns. The project focuses in particular on body conduct, and on how the mobilization of various parts of the body in meaningful and relevant ways becomes of consequence when being actually sensorially accessed by the co-participants. More radically, the project develops a necessary complement to multimodal analysis—often focused on the production of the action—by considering multisensoriality—the way in which co-participants perceive each other with different senses. In this way it considers intersubjectivity as grounded on intersensoriality.
For doing so, the project provides analyses of talk and other forms of action in interaction within various sensorial configurations: it compares and discusses situations in which mutual sensorial access is either maximal or minimal and the consequences of this for the intelligibility of action. These variations in sensorial access depend on practical and interactional contingencies and largely on the dynamic spatial arrangements of the participants’ bodies, more proximate (favoring ‘close’ senses like touch) or more distant (favoring ‘distant’ senses like gaze). In each case, both the mobilization of multimodal resources by speakers/doers and the orientation and responses of the co-participants will be systematically taken into consideration.
Team: Lorenza Mondada (PI), Sofian Bouaouina (Post-Doc), Guillaume Gauthier (Post-Doc), 2 CandDoc research assistants ; Hanna Svensson Univ. of Göteborg (external collaborator), Burak Tekin Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University (external collaborator), David Monteiro Univ. Lusíada de Lisboa (external collaborator)