Speaking in public:
Social interactions within large groups. Contributions from a conversation analytical multimodal perspective
2013-2017 (SNF)
Team: Lorenza Mondada, Hanna Svensson, Nynke van Schepen
This SNF project was aiming at providing new insights into participation in social interactions within larger groups of persons. Although conversation analysis has insisted on the importance of multi-party interactions, the organization of larger groups of participants – including dozens and even hundreds of people – remains understudied. This project tackled this issue and showed the importance of multimodal resources in the organization of turn-taking and other interactional practices in larger groups, and the way this revisits the notion of participation, both in an interactional sense and in a political sense. Empirically, the project focused on a video-recorded corpus of political grassroots meetings, within a participatory democracy urban planning program, which has been systematically documented across 8 years.