Eric Laurier’s research while affiliated with University of Edinburgh and other places

Unpleasant social interactions on the road can negatively affect driving safety. At the same time, researchers have attempted to address social discomfort by exploring Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs) as social mediators. Before knowing whether CUIs could reduce social discomfort in a car, it is necessary to understand the nature of social discomfort in shared rides. To this end, we recorded nine families going on drives and performed interaction analysis on this data. We define three strategies to address social discomfort: contextual mediation, social mediation, and social support. We discuss considerations for engineering and design, and explore the limitations of current large language models in addressing social discomfort on the road.

In this article, we examine the outbursts of a white passenger on a London tram, antagonizing others through swearing, nationalist, racist and anti-immigrant talk and the responses of carriage members to her confrontational talk. Our analysis uses a video recording of the event made by a passenger that circulated widely on social and news media. We document multiple forms of response, including the video-witnessing itself. We describe how the trouble-making passenger antagonizes other passengers in order to produce opponents. In addition, we track how members of the carriage, in responding, show their right to respond, seek to avoid the terms of the confrontation and, once constituted as political opponents, their opposition to the politics being expressed. In examining the responses to the trouble-making and the politics being contested between the persons involved and, in tracking how public transport is attempted to be transformed into an ad hoc agora, we contribute to Barnett’s work on convening public space, ordinary action, and politics in human geography.

The advent of autonomous cars creates a range of new questions about road safety, as well as a new collaborative domain for CSCW to analyse. This paper uses video data collected from five countries - India, Spain, France, Chile, and the USA - to study how road users interact with each other. We use interactional video analysis to document how co-ordination is achieved in traffic not just through the use of formal rules, but through situated communicative action. Human movement is a rich implicit communication channel and this communication is essential for safe manoeuvring on the road, such as in the co-ordination between pedestrians and drivers. We discuss five basic movements elements: gaps, speed, position, indicating and stopping. Together these elements can be combined to make and accept offers, show urgency, make requests and display preferences. We build on these results to explore lessons for how we can design the implicit motion of self-driving cars so that these motions are understandable - in traffic - by other road users. In discussion, we explore the lessons from this for designing the movement of robotic systems more broadly.

Welfare organisations across the world are becoming more streamlined with less time for building relationships with clients, rendering non-governmental organisations increasingly important for welfare provision. In this paper, we investigate an understudied area in social work: the small talk through which volunteer organisations conduct social work tasks in interaction with clients. The data consist of 108 phone calls to a helpline that offers social contact to older people, recorded in 2020 in Sweden. We use conversation analysis to investigate how callers and call-takers rely on and produce informal sociability in providing support for clients. Specifically, we show that talk about the weather, a prosaic small talk topic, is interwoven with institutional work. By allowing or preventing outdoor activities, weather is a conduit for call-takers and callers to introduce and navigate norms of remaining active as an older adult. Cultural understandings and concerns about good or bad weather allow participants to move between reproducing client/service-provider asymmetries and reaching affiliative affective stances. Thus, the supposedly banal topic of the weather, known as a resource for sociability amongst the unacquainted, is, in this setting, used in ways particular to social work practice.

Recognition and misrecognition have been theorized as key concepts for social justice. Misrecognition involves being disrespected or labelled in ways which do not accord with a person’s self‐identify. Racism can be understood as a specific form of misrecognition but little research has explored this form or drawn on notions of misrecognition in the discursive psychological study of racism. Our study addresses this gap by drawing on discursive psychology and conversation analysis to examine reports of racial encounters in public spaces, where misrecognition of the targets’ nationality is invoked. We demonstrate that instances of misrecognition are judged as racism through the selection and use of categories and/or category‐sensitive predicates that exclude the target of them from (national) category membership to which they claim entitlement. People reporting racialized encounters and those responding to them treat the description and evaluation of such incidents sensitively, orienting to the delicacy of alleging racism. In this article, we enhance theoretical understandings of misrecognition by showing how it is constructed interactionally and demonstrate the value of notions of recognition and misrecognition for the study of racism.

In this paper, we use ethnomethodology, membership categorisation analysis, and conversation analysis (EMCA) to investigate traversing obstacles in outdoor environments as reflexively constitutive of producing, resisting and adjusting family relationships. We look at how relationship membership categorisations are a resource to be drawn upon in organising intercorporeal mobile actions. When faced with obstacles, group members offer, recruit, request or reject assistance, through altered bodily movements, in relation to obstacles. The assistance offered is then constituted through, literally, lending a hand in finely coordinated and adjusted forms of contact and support. We locate the significance of assisting practices that are made relevant by these relationships (e.g. adult-child) and how such practices are intertwined with perceiving the local environment (e.g. rivers, the terrain underfoot). The data is video recordings of families walking through the countryside and assisting one another in crossing obstacles. Our findings on the organisation and accountability of traversing, through touch, gesture and talk, contribute to studies of family practices, mobility, and inter-corporeality.

Resources made available through the digital map app change, but do not replace, the skills of 'ordinary wayfinding'. Looking at the challenges of wayfinding with new mobile devices helps inform the development of digital mapping tools for navigating through difficult terrain. With this background in mind, in this article we consider how the contemporary navigational resources of mobile devices with GPS, and the resources of countryside landscape features, are brought together in visiting a tourist site. We analyse video data from groups walking across unfamiliar moorland terrain, following a guide and map app which takes them on a tour of a remote Roman marching camp in the Brecon Beacons National Park, Wales. Following an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approach, we examine three instances of navigational work for paired walkers as they traverse the moorland. The three fragments are of: an orientational struggle to establish where to go next; a routine check to select a path and the discovery of a feature mentioned in the guide. Across the three episodes we explicate how our walkers make sense of the guide and map in relation to investigating the moorland surface. We examine how their ambulatory and undulatory practices on the moorland are tied to their wayfinding practices. While we analyse wayfinding talk, we also attend to the mobile practices of stopping and pausing as part of practical navigational reasoning.

Although the vehicle horn is a minimal audible unit for communication, we will show that its uses are impressively varied. Drawing upon a corpus of video recordings from dashcams, we show how drivers use the horn for creating awareness; how they target particular vehicles; and how they use it for warnings, for complaints, and in instructing the seeing of an aspect of an ambiguous traffic object. Drivers’ use of the horn involves, first, their sounding it in recognizable relations to past, current, and projected configurations of traffic on the road. Second, it involves drivers manipulating the vehicle horn to create sounds of shorter and longer durations that can then produce hearably distinct actions. Third, and finally, the driver can use the horn as an initiating or responsive action in relation to the actions of other members of traffic. The data are from road users in Chennai, India.