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Scales of action: An example of driving and car talk in Germany and North America
Abstract
This article develops a new methodological tool, called scales of action, which allows the empirical investigation of ubiquitous actions such as driving on the one hand, and the highly complex relationships between (for example) drives and other actions in everyday life on the other hand. Through empirical analysis of ethnographic data of drives performed by a German artist and an American IT specialist, the article illustrates how talk and driving are embedded differently in different cultural contexts. Examining the actions of the two drivers before, during, and after a drive further demonstrates that chronologically performed actions are not necessarily sequential in nature. Using a mediated discourse theoretical approach and building upon multimodal (inter)action analysis, the article provides analysts with a tool that captures the inherent complexities of everyday actions. Through the notion of scales of action and their composition, this article sheds new light upon the complexity and cultural differences of drives and car talk in middle class Germany and North America.
... Since the original development, empirical enterprises employing Multimodal (Inter)action Analysis have generated a wealth of insights both theoretically in the ongoing development of Multimodal Mediated Theory (Geenen, 2013a(Geenen, , 2014Norris, 2013) and analytically with the development of various methodological tools. Multimodal (Inter)action Analysis as an integrated framework provides tools for analysing the attention/awareness of social actors in any specific site of engagement through modal density (Norris, 2004(Norris, , 2011, the production of modal configurations (Norris, 2016(Norris, , 2017Pirini, 2016Pirini, , 2017 which help analysts discern the salience of particular modes during any segment of interaction and methods for the analysis of actions as related across time and space to various scales of action (Norris, 2017). The concepts, methodological tools and protocols outlined herein should equip bourgeoning analysts as well as experienced researchers with the basic foundations to begin micro-analysis of realtime audio-video data. ...
... Since the original development, empirical enterprises employing Multimodal (Inter)action Analysis have generated a wealth of insights both theoretically in the ongoing development of Multimodal Mediated Theory (Geenen, 2013a(Geenen, , 2014Norris, 2013) and analytically with the development of various methodological tools. Multimodal (Inter)action Analysis as an integrated framework provides tools for analysing the attention/awareness of social actors in any specific site of engagement through modal density (Norris, 2004(Norris, , 2011, the production of modal configurations (Norris, 2016(Norris, , 2017Pirini, 2016Pirini, , 2017 which help analysts discern the salience of particular modes during any segment of interaction and methods for the analysis of actions as related across time and space to various scales of action (Norris, 2017). The concepts, methodological tools and protocols outlined herein should equip bourgeoning analysts as well as experienced researchers with the basic foundations to begin micro-analysis of realtime audio-video data. ...
Multimodal (Inter)action Analysis was developed to study social interaction based upon the theoretical notion of mediated action. Building on this core concept, Multimodal (Inter)action Analysis includes several theoretical/methodological tools. These tools facilitate analysis which moves flexibly between micro-level moments of interaction and macro-level practices and discourses. In this chapter, the application of mediated action to multimodal analysis is discussed, before the central theoretical/methodological tools are introduced. Tight links are made between the tools used in Multimodal (Inter)action Analysis and the core theoretical tenets, to support robust multimodal interaction research.
... The analysis and arguments regarding the developmental function of this co-produced interactional practice are framed within a consideration about how these one-time situated mediated actions and their developmental potentials intersect with and connect to larger Discourses (Gee 1990) and scales of action (Norris 2017). In addition, the particular site of engagement (Norris 2011;Scollon 2001) is critically considered to articulate how these actions and practices are mediated by and thus shaped by the intersection of social actors, practices and multiple cultural tools of varying materialities. ...
... The notion of scales of action (Norris 2017) acknowledges that although actions unfold sequentially in time and space, actions can and often do connect to various other historical or ongoing higher-level actions. For instance, the unfolding of a conversation in an automobile is mutually influenced by the scale of action definable as a drive to the supermarket. ...
Language acquisition involves more than learning how to produce words in complex strings. It involves a diversity of aptitudes about how, when, with whom and in what way to use language abilities. While it is acknowledged that these skills are learned through social interaction (Blum-Kulka, S. (1997). Dinner talk: cultural patterns of sociability and socialization in family discourse . Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc, Mahwah, NJ; Rogoff, B. (2003). The cultural nature of human development . Oxford University Press, Oxford), our understanding about precisely how they emerge and how they are taught and learned remains preliminary at best. Additionally, much of our understanding is strictly limited to spoken language. The analysis and arguments herein detail the consequentiality of child directed interaction strategies (CDIS) which facilitate non-verbal actions and motivate episodic retrospection, making a tangible link between the current interaction and past experiences. Through a multimodal interaction analysis (Author and Pirini, J. (2020). Multimodal (Inter)action Analysis. In McKinley, J. and Rose, H. (Eds.) The Routledge handbook of research methods in applied linguistics . Rouledge, London, pp. 488–499; Norris, S. (2004). Analyzing multimodal interaction: a methodological framework . Routledge, London. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203379493 ; Norris, S. (2011). Identity in (inter)action: introducing Multimodal (Inter)action Analysis . de Gruyter Mouton, Berlin & New York. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781934078280 ; Norris, S. (2019). Systematically working with multimodal data: research methods in multimodal discourse analysis . Wiley Blackwell, Hoboken, NJ; Pirini, J. (2014). Introduction to Multimodal (Inter)action Analysis. In: Norris, S. and Maier, C. (Eds.). Interactions, texts and images: a reader in multimodality . Mouton de Gruyter, New York. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781614511175.77 ) of the practice of showing material objects during interaction, I show that non-verbal action, material culture and the physical world are crucial to developing a certain socio-cognitive pragmatic aptitude. CDIS motivating ‘showing’ of tangible objects of personal significance may be the non-verbal antecedent of selecting and introducing new topics during interaction. These CDIS defer interactional agency and motivate non-verbal communicative actions more comfortably within the zone of proximal development. Importantly, the materiality of the objects themselves are of fleeting interactional priority. Instead, the objects provide a bridge between materiality in the here-and-now to past experiences in the there-and-then. Facilitating non-verbal actions of showing help motivate explorations of episodic memory by creating a tangible and immediate link within the unfolding interaction.
... having a meeting. Higher-level actions can in turn be embedded and chained together in scales, which Norris (2017) shows in her study of driving and car talk. Norris (2017) finds that the action of talking in the car is surrounded by the larger action of driving the car, which itself can be surrounded by the larger action of, e.g. ...
... Higher-level actions can in turn be embedded and chained together in scales, which Norris (2017) shows in her study of driving and car talk. Norris (2017) finds that the action of talking in the car is surrounded by the larger action of driving the car, which itself can be surrounded by the larger action of, e.g. going to the store for shopping. ...
By testing a model for analysing identity in interaction, the present article explores how a history student teacher produces social identity in relation to his future profession as a teacher, with an important point of departure being the relationship between the academic and professional aspects of teacher education. This is addressed through an empirical analysis of a student teacher’s identity production in a specific academic setting: a bachelor thesis course. The main body of data consists of audio recordings and video recordings from a group of three student teachers giving feedback on each other’s theses. With respect to methodology, the article employs a model from multimodal (inter)action analysis that focuses on the concept of vertical identity – the notion that identity in interaction is produced in three layers of discourse simultaneously. The results show that the main participant produces the identity of history teacher in an academic setting where such identity production is not encouraged, e.g. by resemiotisising curricula: thus, policy documents can work as a tool when producing teacher identity. This production of identity is done by employing strong agency, which consequently points to the need of a more elaborated discussion on agency in the tested model.
... Multimodal (Inter)action Analysis takes Scollon's (2001) mediated action as the departure point and unit of analysis. Taking on this idea, Norris (2004) suggests two main types of action: lower-level actions, seen as the smallest interactional unit with meaning, such as a gesture or an utterance, and which are marked with a beginning and an end; and higher-level actions, which include series of lower-level actions, also marked with a beginning and an end, and which can be grouped into larger sequences of higher-level actions named scales of action (Norris 2017). In addition, higher-level actions can be defined as having specific modal configurations, i.e. modes that co-occur in a particular way towards the realization of such actions. ...
This paper offers a Multimodal (Inter)action Analysis study of how metadiscourse is used in university lectures. Metadiscourse is frequently employed in spoken academic discourse to guide the audience through the contents of the speech, thus becoming an essential element to foster comprehension in lectures. Although lectures have been largely researched under a multimodal eye, studies looking at the multimodal nature of metadiscourse are still scarce. In fact, previous multimodal explorations of metadiscourse in lectures point towards discrepancies in the attention given by lecturers to metadiscursive instances. In this study, six face-to-face lectures in fields within Humanities were analyzed to spot all instances of organizational metadiscourse. Next, the fragments containing such metadiscourse were further explored through a Multimodal (Inter)action Analysis to identify the structure of higher-level actions and the ways in which metadiscourse was integrated as part of the modal configurations of the actions. The analysis of higher-level actions using the foreground-background continuum reveals two main roles in the use of metadiscourse: an active one, in which metadiscourse is explicitly used to guide and engage the audience, as expected; and a passive one, in which metadiscourse is rather used as a filler in the background. These results contribute to reflecting on teaching practices and raising awareness on the importance of multimodal literacy for teacher training.
... Norris (2004) utilizes the framework of multimodal interaction analysis to illustrate how a teacher utilized an interactive means in a language instruction classroom discourse to shift students' attention to a new higher-level action. Norris (2011Norris ( , 2017 has illustrated the efficacy of the framework for constructing a social actor's social world in everyday interactions, like identity production, complexity, and cultural differences in different nations. Lotherington et al. (2019) analyzed how language and images interact as meaningmaking resources in constructing a plurilingual talking book from the multimodal interaction perspective. ...
Classroom lead-in is the initial stage for motivating students to become engaged in-class interaction. However, little research, to our knowledge, has analyzed the role of teachers’ multimodal competence reflected through their multimodal pedagogic discourse in the realization of the ultimate goals of classroom lead-ins. Based on the data collected from a teaching contest in China, this paper explores how two-winner teachers utilize their multimodal ensembles of communicative modes to engage students during classroom lead-ins. The analysis shows that different communicative modes construct the higher-level action of lead-in, and they are orchestrated into multimodal ensembles for the specific function of each lead-in move. The findings indicate that EFL teachers’ high multimodal competence plays a decisive role in performing classroom lead-ins, and different lead-ins strategies influence the different orchestration of communicative modes. In constructing multimodal pedagogic discourse, teachers build up their professional image and display their personal charm as well. Future research for multimodal discourse analysis and pedagogic research is suggested in the paper.
... Norris (2004) described lower-level mediated actions, which are the smallest units of meaning, such as a hand gesture or an utterance; and higher-level mediated actions, which are demarcated by an opening and a closing, and are conformed by chains of lower-level mediated actions. In line with this, the concept of scales of actions (Pirini 2015;Norris 2017) is paramount when investigating social interaction with multiple higherlevel mediated actions. Scales of actions show the interrelation between various lower-level mediated actions, as each one is also part of a larger higher-level mediated action. ...
This paper examines the evolving genre of university lectures. It focuses on synchronous online lectures. The aim of the study is to shed some light on how interaction between teacher and students unfolds in large English-medium instruction (EMI) lectures in the digital context. A qualitative multimodal microanalysis of an episode of interaction was performed from an (inter)action multimodal analysis framework. This preliminary exploratory study reveals the structural and multimodal complexity of interaction in live online lectures. EMI teacher's semiotic resources combine to make meaning comprehensible in a lingua franca and to engage learners in a virtual context where there is not eye-contact with them. Suggestions are made to undertake contractive studies on interaction in online and face-to-face lectures that may respond to the need of EMI teacher training. This paper aims to contribute to the literature of this still unexplored academic instructional digital genre.
... Once we have produced transcripts of pertinent excerpts from our video data, we engage with methodological tools that are relevant for the data pieces such as modal density (Norris 2004a), modal configuration (Norris 2009a), the foregroundbackground continuum of attention/awareness (Norris 2004a;2008), semantic/pragmatic means (Norris 2004a), levels of action (Norris 2009b), scales of action (Norris 2017b), agency (Norris 2005;Pirini, 2017), or the site of engagement (Scollon 1998(Scollon , 2001Norris, 2004aNorris, , 2019Norris, , 2020Norris and Jones 2005). Here again, we rely on audio-visual technology without, however, favouring any one kind. ...
This paper presents a concise introduction to Multimodal (inter)action analysis (MIA), which began to be developed in the early 2000s in tandem with technological advances for visual qualitative research. By now, MIA has grown into a fully-fledged research framework, including multimodal philosophy, theory, method and methodology for the study of human action, interaction and identity. With systematic phases from data collection to transcription (including transcription conventions) and data analysis, this framework allows researchers to work in a data-driven and replicable manner moving past common interpretive paradigms (Norris 2019, 2020).
... Lower-level actions are chained together forming higherlevel actions, which are larger actions on a wider time scale, such as having a meeting, or writing a thesis. In turn, higher-level actions may be embedded in each other (see Norris 2017), where having a meeting may embed actions of, e.g., drinking a cup of coffee, presenting information and summarizing the meeting. Furthermore, they can be embedded in even larger actions, such as undertaking an education. ...
This thesis comprises three separate studies that together explore how Swedish student teachers construct or produce professional identity in interaction while navigating different institutional and professional instances of teacher education. As a discourse analytical contribution to research on teacher identity, the main theoretical framework is mediated discourse theory (e.g. Scollon 2001a). For data construction and analysis in the studies, different parts of the two related methodologies of nexus analysis (Scollon & Scollon 2004) and multimodal (inter)action analysis (Norris 2011) are employed. Constructed through an ethnographic approach, the interactional data consist of audio and video recordings of interaction in instances from three different components of a Swedish teacher education program: a rhetoric course, a bachelor thesis course in history and teaching placement. Furthermore, the data include observational field notes and interviews, as well as resources used by the participants, primarily written texts.
Taking place early on in teacher education, Study I focuses on student teachers performing oral presentations under the fictitious presumption that they are speaking as teachers. Employing the notion of communicative project (Linell 1998), the empirical aim of the study is to shed light on how student teachers manage institutional affordances and constraints affecting interactional role shifts from student teacher to teacher. In Study II, three student teachers are writing their bachelor theses in the subject of history, and the study focuses on the interactional production of teacher identity of one of the students during seminars. While partly being a methodological study, Study II empirically explores how student teachers interactionally relate to their future profession in an academic disciplinary setting, highlighting which actors and institutions are involved in the production of professional identity. Finally, Study III concentrates on a student teacher during his final teaching placement. Focusing on previous experiences resemiotized as stories, Study III highlights how discourse re-emerging from the historical body (Nishida 1958) can be used in interaction in producing identity.
The results suggest that the production of teacher identity by the student teachers is a co-operative and communicative task, where previous experiences as well as an anticipatory perspective on the teaching profession are important features. The three studies identify different resources that can be used and adapted by students to suit different purposes in professional identity production, described as textual resources, embodied resources, and narrative resources. In turn, the different uses of such resources motivate the need for studying identity in interaction with an approach where ethnographic and sociocultural knowledge is part of the analysis. The creative use of resources in identity production highlights that students use knowledge and experience linked to academic and professional as well as everyday discourse in producing professional identity. Presuming an interest in opportunities for student teachers to develop professional identity during their education, it appears fruitful to reflect upon how potential resources are designed and implemented in teacher education, and how institutional affordances and constraints affect the possibilities of using them.
... Norris (2004) also defines frozen actions as usually higher-level actions, which have been performed before the real-time interaction that is analysed; for example, the design of the electronic presentation that is used during a lecture. More recently, Pirini (2015) and Norris (2017) introduce the concept of scales of actions when investigating social interactions with numerous levels of higher-level actions: "[e]ach higher-level action is linked to other higher-level actions; each higher-level action is also a part of larger scale higher-level action" (Norris & Pirini, 2017, p. 24). The notion of scales of action serves the needs of the present study where, for example, inside the largest scale of action of participating in the construction of a lecture, teacher and learners are engaged in other higher-level actions that are embedded in this one, and that can be sequential or simultaneous. ...
Virtual learning environments are increasingly important in higher education. These instructional settings render a view of academic genres that have evolved towards the development of technology-mediated communication. This chapter focuses on the digital academic genre of synchronous videoconferencing lecture to find out how a multimodal-in-context approach can be applied to examine the constraints and affordances of interaction in this digital environment. It begins by positioning genre analysis from a multimodal perspective and outlining the main features that characterise interaction in live lectures. Then, the theoretical and methodological research framework is introduced, which integrates concepts central to multimodality that belong to different perspectives: meaning functions (systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis), modal affordance and multimodal ensemble (social semiotics), modal density and higher-level actions (multimodal interaction analysis), and sequential and simultaneous actions (multimodal conversation analysis). Drawing on this eclectic framework, the analysis of interaction in this digital genre is illustrated with examples taken from a synchronous videoconferencing lecture given in an English-medium master’s degree programme. The chapter contributes to the study of spoken interactive genres. This methodology facilitates multimodal analysis of the considerable number of communicative modes that interplay in social interaction. Its application is limited to neither instructional nor to virtual settings.
... Psychologists (Pashler 1998) are primarily interested in mechanisms and processes of attention. Whereas multimodal (inter) action analysts combine all of these interests and concentrate upon the overt multimodal display of attention by one interlocutor and the produced multimodal reaction by another interlocutor, which in other work (Norris , b, 2006(Norris , 2016(Norris , 2017 has been shown to be a part of a phenomenal conception of attention. ...
This concise guide outlines core theoretical and methodological developments of the growing field of Multimodal (Inter)action Analysis.
The volume unpacks the foundational relationship between multimodality and language and the key concepts which underpin the analysis of multimodal action and interaction and the study of multimodal identity. A focused overview of each concept charts its historical development, reviews the essential literature, and outlines its underlying theoretical frameworks and how it links to analytical tools. Norris illustrates the concept in practice via the inclusion of examples and an image-based transcript, table, or graph.
The book provides a succinct overview of the latest research developments in the field of Multimodal (Inter)action Analysis for early career scholars in the field as well as established researchers looking to stay up-to-date on core developments.
... In Norris (2016, 154f), it is shown that the participant shifts his focus to the Skype call between minute 3:54 and 3:57. Thus, rather than as argued in Norris (2011) that we need to employ a multimodal lens in order to gain greater insight into everyday interaction, this article demonstrates that it is also the scale of a data piece chosen (Norris 2017) that reveals lesser or greater insight into everyday interaction. ...
This article problematizes the notion of selecting micro-data pieces to shed light upon the focus of participants. The issue presented is two-fold: 1. The article shows that selecting micro-analytical data pieces does not allow a researcher to determine the focus of a participant; and 2. The article demonstrates that language use of a participant does not necessarily mean that the participant is focused upon a conversation. Both, purely working with micro-analytical data pieces and the presumption that language use indicates focus of the speaker, are problematized and it is shown with an example from a relatively large study of family Skype conversation that includes 82 participants that:
1. Focused attention can only be analyzed correctly when crossing micro-analytical boundaries; and
2. A participant can utilize language without paying focused attention to an interaction.
... Higher-level actions can also be delineated by scale (Norris 2017). For example, the higher-level action of tutoring has many higher-level actions nested within it. ...
Building on multimodal (inter)action analysis as a theoretical and methodological framework, this article introduces and develops the theoretical/methodological tool called primary agency. Taking the mediated action as a unit of analysis, agency can be analysed as a feature of action. However, there is a lack of empirical approaches for the study of agency, and an overemphasis on language as the most important site for identifying agentive action. I develop primary agency through an analysis of three co-produced higher-level actions from a research project into high school tutoring. These are the higher-level actions of conducting research, tutoring and reading a text. Applying co-production and the modal density foreground/background continuum I explore how the researcher, the tutor and the student co-produce these higher-level actions. Through this analysis, I identify the most significant mediational means for each higher-level action, and the social actor with ownership or agency over these mediational means. I define this social actor as the one with primary agency over the co-produced higher-level action. Finally, my analysis outlines the implications of primary agency for co-produced higher-level actions, including the role of the researcher, the attention/awareness participants pay to overarching research projects, and links between primary agency and successful learning.
... Thus, the higher level action of talking about the weather might be divided into smaller actions like discussing temperature and discussing the latest heavy rains; and it could be embedded within a hypothetical supra higher-level action of meeting with friends. Norris (2017) refers to this hierarchy of actions as scales of actions. ...
This paper is part of a larger scale project where I explore the structure of academic lecture. The focus of the study here presented is to investigate the structure and organization of a university lecture through the introduction of new topics. One of the tools traditionally referred to as an organizer of discourse is metadiscourse (Crismore et al. 1993. Metadiscourse in persuasive writing: A study of texts written by American and Finnish university students. Written Communication, 10:39–71; Vande Kopple. 1985. Some exploratory discourse on metadiscourse. College Composition and Communication, 36(1):82–93). Although metadiscourse has been studied from a wide range of perspectives (Hyland. 2005. Metadiscourse: exploring interaction in writing. London, England: Continuum), these analyses have most of the time been conducted from a purely linguistic point of view and neither the speaker as a social actor nor metadiscourse as part of a multimodal interaction are taken into account. That being so, the aim of this study is to explore the role played by
Dooly (2017, p. 169) defines telecollaboration in education as “the use of computer and/or digital communication tools to promote learning through social interaction and collaboration, thus moving the learning process beyond the physical boundaries of classrooms.” As digital communication technologies advance, newer and more sophisticated cutting-edge ICT tools are being used for telecollaboration, including virtual reality (VR). Researchers have applied different models and approaches of multimodal analysis to understand the specific features of VR on students' language learning (Dubovi, 2022; Friend & Mills, 2021) and intercultural communication (Rustam, et al., 2020). Nevertheless, very little has been done to look into language teacher telecollaboration via VR technologies. This present study recruited student teachers of an additional language (LX) (Dewaele, 2017) from different geographical locations and cultural backgrounds to participate in a project aiming at cultivating the participants' critical views on LX teaching and intercultural communication skills. The participants interacted and discussed LX teaching/learning issues in VR environments. Their interactions were video recorded and analyzed. By applying Multimodal (inter)action Analysis (MIA) (Norris, 2014) as the analytical framework, this study systematically unpacked the thematical saliencies and significant moments of the participants' intercultural interaction in the three VR meetings. Based on the findings, suggestions and caveats for future designing and researching intercultural telecollaboration in VR environments are provided.
The construction of Samoan identity in New Zealand is shaped by complex historical and contemporary social, economic, cultural and political factors. In addition, New Zealand-born Samoans are negotiating an ethnic and identity that incorporates their experience with the intergenerational stories and cultural knowledge of their ancestors. Such cultural and identity negotiations are occurring through the practice of Siva Samoa, Samoan dance. Using Multimodal (Inter)action Analysis we conduct a micro analysis of two excerpts of video data involving female Samoan dancers rehearsing for a dance showcase. Vertical identity production (Norris, S. (2011). Identity in (inter)action: introducing multimodal (inter)action analysis. Berlin and Boston: Mouton: 179, 2020:85) is used as a framework to analyze the multiple layers of discourse within each site of engagement that shape the construction of Samoan Identity for the participants involved.
Focusing on Swedish student teachers' oral presentations in a rhetoric class, this article studies interactional role shift as a multimodal practice. The role shifts under scrutiny concern shifting from student teacher to teacher, thus anticipating the students' future profession. A central feature of the article is a discussion of how role shift may be conceptualised as a communicative project, thus highlighting the different modes of communication used by the students, and consequently to examine its potential as a facilitator of students' professional and academic development. The data was collected using an ethnographical approach, resulting in a collection of 21 video-recorded oral presentations, together with other relevant semiotic resources. The data is analysed by the employment of concepts from nexus analysis and the notion of communicative projects. Through a discourse analytical approach to social action in interaction, the analysis shows how role shifts are constructed of patterns of smaller actions that add up to three primary actions: setting the scene, changing perspective, and performing the new role. These primary actions are multimodally chained together, and the results demonstrate how social actors use instructional texts in combination with multimodal recourses in order to perform their role shifts.
Multimodal interaction analysis is a holistic methodological framework that allows the analyst to integrate the verbal with the nonverbal, and to integrate these with material objects and the environment as they are being used by individuals acting and interacting in the world. In short, multimodal interaction analysis allows a researcher to study real people interacting with others, with technology, and with the environment. The point of view taken in multimodal interaction analysis is that all actions in fact are interactions and that all of these (inter)actions are linked to people (referred to as “social actors” in multimodal interaction analysis)—no matter whether you are investigating the real or the virtual world, someone buying ice cream, or using a software program. Multimodal interaction analysis is carried out through a series of analytical phases and steps. Researchers utilize multimodal transcription conventions and analytical tools, which are theoretically founded, allowing for replicability of analyses and reliability of findings. Multimodal interaction analysis allows the integration of all communicative modes, where communicative modes are defined as systems of mediated actions. In this view, all modes of communication together build one system of communication, which comes about through actions and interactions that people produce. This coherent framework and process of analysis can be taught and learned and is proving useful for research examining what people do, how they communicate, and how they interact.
This article takes a multimodal approach to examine how two young men communicate knowledge, shift attention, and negotiate a disagreement via videoconferencing technology. The data for the study comes from a larger ongoing project of participants engaging in various tasks together. Linking micro, intermediate and macro analyses through the various methodological tools employed, the article presents multimodal (inter)action analysis (Norris, 2004, 2011, 2013a, 2013b) as a methodology to gain new insight into the complexity of knowledge communication via videoconferencing technology, which is relevant to many settings from education to employment, from organizations to gaming.
Inspired by recent advances in the field of automobility, this article explores how families inhabit cars, and how daily automobilized family routines are accomplished interactionally in and through cars' uniquely structured inner space(s). Following Urry's (2006) notion of the "socially inhabited car," the article assumes sociological and ethnomethodological sensibilities and sensitivities in researching in-car interactions. Specifically, a single strip of a familial dispute that takes place in the car on a routine trip to school is studied. The audiovisual data was taken from recordings of five urban families living in Jerusalem, Israel, during daily trips to school. A camcorder was supplied to the passengers - children of elementary school age - which served as a mobile recording device that captured the car's interior spaces and the interactions therein. Studying up-close verbal and gestural interactions reveals how family members, including driver (in the front seat) and passengers (in both the front and back seats), make use of the unique material design of the car's inner spaces as semiotic resources for communication and for affiliating and disaffiliating with the overall argumentative interaction. The article illuminates how an immediate physical context, in the shape of the car's interior, acts simultaneously as a material given and as a socially emergent or accomplished semiotic environment.
Making use of videotaped recordings of interaction in cars filmed as middle class families pursue their daily activities, we examine some of the ways in which talk while driving includes as parts of its intrinsic organization ongoing attention to phenomena beyond the stream of speech. Important consideration is given to issues posed by the task of driving while talking about a seeable field in either the unfolding landscape or a textual artifact within the car itself. Of particular interest to our analysis is how such phenomena are attended to, collaboratively recognized, and incorporated into the ongoing organization of talk. This process involves making use of a range of resources including deictics, perceptual directives, address terms, pointings (C. Goodwin 2003), etc., to locate for others these phenomena, as well as forms of stance display that inform how the speaker aligns towards the event. Through their gaze direction, questions, and displays of understandings recipients can display their response to a noticing or reporting.
article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/). Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of WCLTA 2013. Abstract This article examines tacit participation in an adult art class. Drawing on video excerpts from an extensive 4 month video ethnographic study of an art school, I elucidate how a new student tacitly learns to participate in the group dynamics of the art school. Through video analysis, and using a mediated discourse theoretical (Scollon, 1998, 2011) and multimodal (inter)action analytical lens (Norris, 2004, 2011), I illustrate how the learning of tacit practices is accomplished. I show how successful participation for a novice depends on the following three tenets: 1. the ability to gain focused attention (by the novice); 2. the ability to grant the novice access to shared focused attention (by expert participants); and 3. the ability and willingness of expert participants to relinquish their own focused interaction at times in order to allow the novice to learn successful participation. When these three abilities are present, a new student integrates successfully into a new classroom setting, even if the student is mediocre at art. While, if these abilities are missing, a new student will drop out of the class (in this art school), even if they are very good at art.
This article is concerned with how to conceptualize and theorize the nature of the ‘car system’ that is a particularly key, if surprisingly neglected, element in ‘globalization’. The article deploys the notion of systems as self-reproducing or autopoietic. This notion is used to understand the origins of the 20th-century car system and especially how its awesome pattern of path dependency was established and exerted a particularly powerful and self-expanding pattern of domination across the globe. The article further considers whether and how the 20th-century car system may be transcended. It elaborates a number of small changes that are now occurring in various test sites, factories, ITC sites, cities and societies. The article briefly considers whether these small changes may in their contingent ordering end this current car system. The article assesses whether such a new system could emerge well before the end of this century, whether in other words some small changes now may produce the very large effect of a new post-car system that would have great implications for urban life, for mobility and for limiting projected climate change.
We spend ever‐increasing periods of our lives travelling in cars, yet quite what it is we do while travelling, aside from driving the vehicle itself, is largely overlooked. Drawing on analyses of video records of a series of quite ordinary episodes of car travel, in this paper we begin to document what happens during car journeys. The material concentrates on situations where people are travelling together in order to examine how social units such as families or relationships such as colleagues or friends are re‐assembled and re‐organised in the small‐scale spaces that are car interiors. Particular attention is paid to the forms of conversation occurring during car journeys and the manner in which they are complicated by seating and visibility arrangements. Finally, the paper touches upon the unusual form of hospitality which emerges in car‐sharing.
Multimodal discourse analysis is an emergent field that began around the verge of the millennium with books such as Reading Images: A Grammar of Visual Design (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996/2006), Mediated Discourse as Social Interaction (Scollon, 1998), Multimodal Discourse (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001), and Analyzing Multimodal Interaction: A Methodological Framework (Norris, 2004). Initially, multimodal discourse analysis was primarily the domain of mediated discourse analysts, social semioticians, and systemic functional linguists. While early developments were somewhat overlapping in time, these works resulted from, and aligned with, two separate major paradigm shifts stemming from previous work in discourse analysis...
This general introduction presents a historical overview of the areas of thought as they arose in Europe, the UK, North America, and Austral-Asia beginning from the 1930s which developed into what today is called Multimodality. Then, the chapter offers a historical account of the evolving primary strands of Multimodality, explicating two particular paradigm shifts that occurred in the late 1990s due to these developments.
This chapter introduces the primary notions of multimodal (inter)action analysis (MIA) and demonstrates the approach with an example. MIA was developed by Norris (Norris 2004, 2011) as a way to help her understand identity production during research with participants in Germany. Since then MIA has been useful in studies that involve social action ranging from marketing, to kite surfing, to vegetarianism. Researchers continually develop the methodology through use, and it has proven especially practical for studies seeking to describe human action that go beyond the verbal mode to include all the modes involved in social action.
MIA draws upon the theoretical notions explicated by Scollon in mediated discourse analysis (MDA)(Scollon 1998, 2001). As with MDA, the notion of mediated action forms the central unit of analysis, and MIA adds further methodological tools to apply the theoretical principles of MDA to the analysis of social action. These developments include delineating social action into higher and lower levels, and introducing the concept of the frozen action. Norris (2004) also developed the concept of modal density to describe more clearly where higher-level actions are positioned on a foreground-background continuum of attention. These methodological tools are introduced below using an example from research into business coaching.
Car conversations constitute a perspicuous setting, characterized by multiactivity (i.e., by an engagement in multiple simultaneous activities, as talking and driving). Based on a corpus of videorecordings of various naturally occurring car journeys, the paper focuses on the way in which participants coordinate their multiactivity in either convergent or divergent ways. It shows how they mobilize various embodied multimodal resources, such as talk, gesture, gaze, head movements, and body postures in order to display their current engagement in one or more activities, in a way highly sensitive to the sequential organization of talk.
This paper examines social interaction as a source of distraction in driving. It uses naturally occurring data, an in-car video recording of driver and passengers during an ordinary real-life journey. The paper shows in close detail how moment-to-moment the embodied and locally occasioned participation in interaction can impact specific activities for driving such as looking and orienting forwards to the road ahead and maintaining hand contact with the steering wheel. Distraction is evidenced as configurations of the body, especially for gaze direction, postural orientation, and hand movement, which serve interaction and do not contribute to driving. The paper examines what interaction as distraction actually looks like in practice, in the rich and meaningful details of drivers' and passengers' complex and temporally unfolding joint experience of real-life real-time car journeys. It explores generally the semiotic resources by which drivers make sense of and organize the demands of interaction and driving as simultaneous and competing activities. These resources include language and the sequentiality of interaction, the position and movement of the body in space, the particular material features and constraints of the car (i.e., seating arrangements, the rear-view mirror), and objects brought into the car such as a mobile phone.
Building on the argument that practices between teacher and learners in classrooms may differ (Scollon and Scollon, 1981; Brice Heath, 1983 [1996]; Street, 1984; Gee, 1996; Barton and Hamilton, 1998), I look at how literacy focused school classroom teaching/learning practices instilled into an individual have a long-term effect. Using a multimodal (inter)action analytical approach (Norris, 2004, 2014) and the site of engagement as my analytical tool that brings together concrete actions, practices and discourses as a coherent whole, I examine actions, practices and discourses produced and reproduced by an art teacher and a new art student in a small private art school in Germany. While the art teacher draws on and re-produces the practice of painting, the new art student draws on and reproduces the practices and discourses that she learned in formal schooling, forcing her to produce and understand modal configurations that do not align with the creative practice that she is learning. This paper has potential educational and social ramifications as it illustrates that formal schooling may have a negative effect upon creativity by focusing the schooled individual upon results and on language/listening. These foci directly translate into modal behaviour which disadvantages the individual when trying to learn a creative practice, where the process and showing/seeing are emphasised. As the world becomes more multimodal and creative, we may want to engage in more research to rethink what and how children are taught.
This article examines tacit participation in an adult art class. Drawing on video excerpts from an extensive 4 month video ethnographic study of an art school, I elucidate how a new student tacitly learns to participate in the group dynamics of the art school. Through video analysis, and using a mediated discourse theoretical (Scollon, 1998, 2011) and multimodal (inter)action analytical lens (Norris, 2004 and Norris, 2011), I illustrate how the learning of tacit practices is accomplished. I show how successful participation for a novice depends on the following three tenets: 1. the ability to gain focused attention (by the novice); 2. the ability to grant the novice access to shared focused attention (by expert participants); and 3. the ability and willingness of expert participants to relinquish their own focused interaction at times in order to allow the novice to learn successful participation. When these three abilities are present, a new student integrates successfully into a new classroom setting, even if the student is mediocre at art. While, if these abilities are missing, a new student will drop out of the class (in this art school), even if they are very good at art.
We live in a country, in which ethical review boards have stringent expectations of what they believe ethical research is. While we certainly have a critical stance towards review boards’ notions of ethics, as researchers, we are firmly grounded in research ethics.
Applying for, and receiving, ethical approval for research projects can be a challenging and drawn out process in any instance. Yet, this can be multiplied many times when researchers aim to study and video tape naturally occurring interactions, and/or want to work with children, youth, and populations that ethics boards consider vulnerable. Some of these considerations we agree with, such as young children; and some of these we disagree with, such as pregnant women. Notions of vulnerability and informed consent are discussed throughout this chapter.
In the worst-case scenario, researchers are put off from conducting research that involves applying for ethics approval. But, in the best-case scenario, the process of applying for ethics approval helps the researchers design a better research project, by considering issues from a participant perspectives. Since we cannot evade ethical approval for our studies in New Zealand, we tend to take this time to work through true ethical dilemmas that could arise in the study that we are proposing.
This article outlines some of our thinking regarding a new project that we are embarking on, where we will investigate video conferencing between family members. For the families, we are looking at a young family with at least one Baby or very young child and their interaction with other family members via video conferencing.
The number of short trips by car is increasing. The objective of this paper is to look at why people use their cars for such trips. The paper draws upon the results of surveys carried out as part of a project for the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR) to investigate the potential for switching short car trips to other modes in Great Britain. The paper commences by considering the various approaches used to look at why people travel by car and, from these, concludes that there is a need to examine the behaviour underlying specific real trips by car. This is followed by a description of the survey methodology used in the project which forms the core of this paper. Then the evidence on why people used their cars for a set of real short trips identified in the surveys is presented. This is considered in terms of a number of dimensions including age, sex, and trip purpose. This is followed by a discussion of the alternatives to the car that drivers say that they might adopt and the factors which they say would make them consider switching to these alternatives.
This article is an introduction to the theoretical and methodological backgrounds of
multimodal (inter)action theory. The aim of this theory is to explain the complexities
of (inter)action, connecting micro- and macro levels of analysis, focusing on the social
actor. The most important theoretical antecedent, mediated discourse analysis (see
Scollon 1998, 2001b), is presented with its key concepts mediated action and modes.
It is shown how action is used as the unit of analysis and how modes are understood
in multimodal (inter)action analysis – as complex cultural tools, as systems of
mediated action with rules and regularities and different levels of abstractness. Subsequently,
methodological basics are introduced, such as lower-level, higher-level and frozen
action; modal density, which specifies the attention/awareness of the social actor; and
horizontal and vertical simultaneity of actions. Horizontal simultaneity can be plotted on
the heuristic model of foreground-background continuum of attention/ awareness. Vertical
simultaneity of actions comprises the central layer of discourse (immediate actions), the
intermediate layer (long-term actions) and the outer layer (institutional or societal contexts).
In short, it is sketched how multimodal (inter)action analysis aims to answer questions
about the interconnection of the different modes on a theoretical as well as on a
practical level.
Moving towards multimodal mediated theory, I propose to define a mode as a system of mediated action that comes about through concrete lower-level actions that social actors take in the world. In order to explain exactly how a mode is a system of mediated action, I turn to a perfume blog and use one blog entry as my starting point. The mode that I primarily focus on in this article is the mode of smell, explicating that the mode of smell is not synonymous with olfactory perception, even though modal development of smell is certainly partially dependent upon olfactory perception.
As I am ostensibly focusing on the one mode, I once again problematize this notion of countability and delineate the purely theoretical and heuristic unit of mode (Norris, 2004). I clarify that modes a) do not exist in the world as they are purely theoretical in nature; b) that modes can be delineated in various ways; and c) that modes are never singular.
Even though the concept of mode is problematical – and in my view needs to always be problematized – I argue that the term and the notion of mode is theoretically useful as it allows us to talk about and better understand communication and (inter)action in three respects: 1. The notion of mode allows us to investigate regularities as residing on a continuum somewhere between the social actor(s) and the mediational means; 2. The theoretical notion of mode embraces socio-cultural and historical as well as individual characteristics, never prioritising any of these and always embracing the tension that exists between social actor(s) and mediational means; and 3. The theoretical notion of mode demonstrates that modal development through concrete lower-level actions taken in the world, is transferable to other lower-level actions taken.
This article argues that de Certeau’s understanding of walking as the archetypal transhuman practice of making the city habitable cannot hold in a post-human world. By concentrating on the practices of driving, I argue that other experiences of the city can have an equal validity. In other words, de Certeau’s work on everyday life in the city needs to be reworked in order to take into account the rise of automobility. The bulk of this article is devoted to exploring how that goal might be achieved, concentrating in particular on how new knowledge like software and ergonomics has become responsible for a large-scale spatial reordering of the city which presages an important change in what counts as making the city habitable.
This paper aims to contribute to our understanding of the implications of ‘being-on-the-move’ for language use and the organization of social actions in the context of driving a car. The paper analyses the social and sequential organization of multimodal, embodied and technologically mediated human action. More specifically, we look at how interlocutors negotiate routes as a social accomplishment. When several participants are present inside the car, both the route and often also the end point of the journey can become subject to negotiation between the driver and the passenger(s). As previous research has shown, participants to an interactional situation rely on various semiotic (linguistic, material, and embodied) resources to organize their interaction. One important aim of this paper is to consider how—in addition to above resources—movement in time and space, and the changing contextual configuration caused by movement, both drives action and is used as a resource in action production. The data come from recordings of social interaction inside cars.
In this chapter, I discuss the methodology called multimodal (inter)action analysis (Norris, 2004, 2011). First, I give an overview of the origin, the units of analyses and heuristic tools of the methodology. Then, I illustrate the methodology with one novel example in which a usually lower-level action of reading a number balloons into a higher-level action of reading. Through this development of a lower-level into a higher-level action, the actual higher-level action that the social actor was focusing upon is pushed back in her attention, bringing with it some frustration.
Car cruising is a common phenomenon around the globe. In Iceland, the activity
is a major assimilative sociocultural phenomenon for young people and especially for
novice drivers. This article documents car cruising in Iceland and contextualizes it within discussions
of automobility. It is based on semi-structured, ‘on the move’ interviews taken with
people during cruising. Participants were also asked to take pictures of their cruising activities.
It seems that car cruising is an opportunity for young people to integrate themselves into
the systemic regime of automobility. This shows the importance of socialities when it comes
to individual practices and expressions of automobility, but also the structuring role of those
socialities. The paper also elucidates how that activity impacts upon spaces. It demonstrates
that it is intimately connected with human territoriality, or how young drivers appropriate
and influence the spaces and places of automobility and ultimately contribute to their production
and reproduction, thus sustaining the systemic regime of automobility.
Multimodality is an innovative approach to representation, communication and interaction which looks beyond language to investigate the multitude of ways we communicate: through images, sound and music to gestures, body posture and the use of space.
The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis is the first comprehensive ‘research tool kit’ for multimodal analysis, with 22 chapters written by leading figures in the field on a wide range of theoretical and methodological issues. It clarifies terms and concepts, synthesizes the key literature with in-depth exploration and illustrative analysis, and tackles challenging methodological issues.
The Handbook includes chapters on key factors for Multimodality such as technology, culture, notions of identity and macro issues such as literacy policy. The handbook takes a broad look at multimodality and engages with how a variety of other theoretical approaches have looked at multimodal communication and representation, including visual studies, anthropology, conversation analysis, socio-cultural theory, socio-linguistics and new literacy studies.
Detailed multimodal analysis case studies are also included, along with an extensive glossary of key terms, to support those new to multimodality and allow those already engaged in multimodal research to explore the fundamentals further.
The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as researchers involved in the study of multimodal communication.
I have conducted a good number of ethnographic studies of social actors acting in their everyday life in the last ten years and have found that many social actors paint, write poetry, or dance, but only few of them are considered community artists, poets, or dancers. How is it, I am asking in this chapter, that some actions are actions that produce one social actor as a community artist while the same kind of actions may not produce another social actor as a community artist. Here, I am taking a close look at one woman, Sandra, who at the time of study, began to paint. The data pieces come from a one-year ethnographic study that I conducted in Germany in 1999-2000. Sandra, soon after having painted her first painting was viewed by her immediate network as an artist. An obvious answer would be that there was a strong quality of artistic expression, however, here, I will stay away from evaluating the art work as such, but will investigate this case in a more holistic way, illustrating how the identity production of community artist has come about.
The overarching theme of Discourse and Technology is cutting-edge in the field of linguistics: multimodal discourse. This volume opens up a discussion among discourse analysts and others in linguistics and related fields about the two-fold impact of new communication technologies: The impact on how discourse data is collected, transcribed, and analyzed—and the impact that these technologies are having on social interaction and discourse.
As inexpensive tape recorders allowed the field to move beyond text, written or printed language, to capture talk—discourse as spoken language—the information explosion (including cell phones, video recorders, Internet chat rooms, online journals, and the like) has moved those in the field to recognize that all discourse is, in various ways, "multimodal," constructed through speech and gesture, as well as through typography, layout, and the materials employed in the making of texts.
The contributors have responded to the expanding scope of discourse analysis by asking five key questions: Why should we study discourse and technology and multimodal discourse analysis? What is the role of the World Wide Web in discourse analysis? How does one analyze multimodal discourse in studies of social actions and interactions? How does one analyze multimodal discourse in educational social interactions? and, How does one use multimodal discourse analyses in the workplace? The vitality of these explorations opens windows onto even newer horizons of discourse and discourse analysis.
In this monograph, the author offers a new way of examining the much discussed notion of identity through the theoretical and methodological approach called multimodal interaction analysis. Moving beyond a traditional discourse analysis focus on spoken language, this book expands our understanding of identity construction by looking both at language and its intersection with such paralinguistic features as gesture, as well as how we use space in interaction. The author illustrates this new approach through an extended ethnographic study of two women living in Germany. Examples of their everyday interactions elucidate how multimodal interaction analysis can be used to extend our understanding of how identity is produced and negotiated in context from a more holistic point of view.
Our perception of our everyday interactions is shaped by more than what is said. From coffee with friends to interviews, meetings with colleagues and conversations with strangers, we draw on both verbal and non-verbal behaviour to judge and consider our experiences.
Analyzing Multimodal Interaction is a practical guide to understanding and investigating the multiple modes of communication, and provides an essential guide for those undertaking field work in a range of disciplines, including linguistics, sociology, education, anthropology and psychology. The book offers a clear methodology to help the reader carry out their own integrative analysis, equipping them with the tools they need to analyze a situation from different points of view. Drawing on research into conversational analysis and non-verbal behaviour such as body movement and gaze, it also considers the role of the material world in our interactions, exploring how we use space and objects - such as our furniture and clothes - to express ourselves. Considering a range of real examples, such as traffic police officers at work, doctor-patient meetings, teachers and students, and friends reading magazines together, the book offers lively demonstrations of multimodal discourse at work.
Illustrated throughout and featuring a mini-glossary in each chapter, further reading, and advice on practical issues such as making transcriptions and video and audio recordings, this practical guide is an essential resource for anyone interested in the multiple modes of human interaction.
In this article, I investigate the practice-based research project called the poetry-to-painting project that the independent German artist, Andrea Brandt, who has also been a participant in two of my ethnographic studies on identity production, and I are involved in.
‘Divorce: A visual essay’ (Norris and Brandt, 2011) illustrates Andrea’s early to current emotive stages that she links to the life-changing event, her divorce. Taking this project as my example, I develop some theoretical thoughts and demonstrate how a practice-based project embeds and produces theoretical thought. I lean on mediated discourse theory (Scollon, 1998, 2001) and multimodal (inter)action analysis (Norris, 2004, 2011a).
Through this project, the notion of ‘modes’ is revisited, as are the notions of ‘practice’ and ‘nexus of practice’ as these pertain to the practice-based research project. Throughout the article, I show how practice-based research may gain by taking a multimodal mediated approach. This approach fosters a new way of thinking and thereby fosters the development of knowledge through practice-based research.
Taking the action, rather than the utterance or the text, as the unit of analysis, this article isolates different modes, investigating the interdependent relationships, illustrating that the visual mode of gestures can take up a hierarchically equal or a super-ordinate position in addition to the commonly understood sub-ordinate position in relation to the mode of spoken language. Building on McNeill, Birdwhistell, Eco, and Ekman and Friesen, and using a multimodal interaction analytical approach (Norris), I analyse in detail three separate everyday (inter)actions in which a deictic gesture is being performed and spoken language is used by the social actor performing the gesture. With these examples, I build on previous work in multimodal analysis of texts and multimodal interaction analysis, illustrating that the verbal is not necessarily more important than the visual (Kress and Van Leeuwen; Norris; Scollon), demonstrating that verbal and visual modes can be utilized together to (co)produce one message (Van Leeuwen), and showing that a mode utilized by a social actor producing a higher-level discourse structure hierarchically supersedes other modes in interaction (Norris).
This article investigates a multiparty interaction in an accounting office by applying a multimodal approach to discourse (Norris, 2004a). This approach allows the incorporation of all relevant communicative modes and is based on the following three notions: 1) the notion of mediated action; 2) the notion of modal density; and 3) the notion of a foreground– background continuum of attention/awareness. The article illustrates that a social actor in a multiparty interaction simultaneously co-constructs several higher-level actions with the various participants on different levels of their attention/awareness. On a theoretical level, the article argues that traditional approaches to discourse analysis, with their unconditional focus on language as the primary mode, misconstrue the multiple higher-level actions that a social actor is engaged in simultaneously as dyadic or triadic interactions in quick succession.
This study investigates framing in discourse
while considering spontaneous role-play between a young child
(age 2 years 11 months) and her mother, wherein the participants
reverse roles from real life and reenact shared prior experiences.
Data consist of two tape-recorded naturally occurring pretend-play
episodes and the real-life interactions on which they are based,
all of which took place at home. Analysis of the role-play episodes
illustrates how framing occurs from moment to moment in interaction
in this context, showing that the participants use both play
and non-play utterances collaboratively to evoke, maintain,
and embed multiple play frames with increasingly specific, and
at times blended, metamessages. By linking the role-play
interactions back to their real-life counterparts, I explore
the relationship between framing and “prior text.”
This analysis adds to our understanding of framing by showing
how frames are layered in discourse. Additionally, it links
frames theory to the notion of intertextuality by illustrating
how prior text can be used as a resource for framing.
The social sciences have generally ignored the motor car and its awesome consequences for social life, especially in their analysis of the urban. Urban studies in particular has failed to consider the overwhelming impact of the automobile in transforming the time-space 'scapes' of the modern urban/suburban dweller. Focusing on forms of mobility into, across and through the city, we consider how the car reconfigures urban life, involving distinct ways of dwelling, travelling and socializing in, and through, an automobilized time-space. We trace urban sociology's paradoxical resistance to cultures of mobility, and argue that civil society should be reconceptualized as a 'civil society of automobility'. We then explore how automobility makes instantaneous time and the negotiation of extensive space central to how social life is configured. As people dwell in and socially interact through their cars, they become hyphenated car-drivers: at home in movement, transcending distance to complete a series of activities within fragmented moments of time. Urban social life has always entailed various mobilities but the car transforms these in a distinct combination of flexibility and coercion. Automobility is a complex amalgam of interlocking machines, social practices and ways of dwelling which have reshaped citizenship and the public sphere via the mobilization of modern civil societies. In the conclusion we trace a vision of an evolved automobility for the cities of tomorrow in which public space might again be made 'public'.
The separation of school learning from experience and cognition outside the school is illustrated with the help of a study of students' misconceptions of the phases of the moon. Three new approaches to overcome the encapsulation of school learning are discussed: Davydov's theory of ascending from the abstract to the concrete in learning and instruction, Lave and Wenger's theory of legitimate peripheral participation, and finally Engeström's theory of learning by expanding. Davydov's theory suggests that the encapsulation may be overcome by teaching students theoretical and dialectical thinking, embodied in “kernel concepts” of the given curricular subject, seen as powerful cognitive tools that transcend the boundaries of school learning. Lave and Wenger's theory suggests that the encapsulation may be overcome by engaging students in genuine communities of practice either outside school or transplanted into the school. Finally, the theory of expansive learning suggests that the object of school learning should be radically widened, to include the context of criticism, the context of discovery, and the context of application of the given contents. The institutional boundaries of school will be transcended by creating networks of learning from below.
Incluye bibliografía e índice
It is August 18, 1634. Father Urbain Grandier, convicted of sorcery that led to the demonic possession of the Ursuline nuns of provincial Loudun in France, confesses his sins on the porch of the church of Saint-Pierre, then perishes in flames lit by his own exorcists. A dramatic tale that has inspired many artistic retellings, including a novel by Aldous Huxley and an incendiary film by Ken Russell, the story of the possession at Loudun here receives a compelling analysis from the renowned Jesuit historian Michel de Certeau. Interweaving substantial excerpts from primary historical documents with fascinating commentary, de Certeau shows how the plague of sorceries and possessions in France that climaxed in the events at Loudun both revealed the deepest fears of a society in traumatic flux and accelerated its transformation. In this tour de force of psychological history, de Certeau brings to vivid life a people torn between the decline of centralized religious authority and the rise of science and reason, wracked by violent anxiety over what or whom to believe. At the time of his death in 1986, Michel de Certeau was a director of studies at the école des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris. He was author of eighteen books in French, three of which have appeared in English translation as The Practice of Everyday Life, The Writing of History, and The Mystic Fable, Volume 1, the last of which is published by The University of Chicago Press. "Brilliant and innovative. . . . The Possession at Loudun is [de Certeau's] most accessible book and one of his most wonderful."âStephen Greenblatt (from the Foreword)
Estudio de los factores culturales, históricos e institucionales que moldean el funcionamiento de la mente. El autor llega a formular los significados mediacionales, en especial el lenguaje, y cómo surgen en la historia social y organizan las bases de la socialización.
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