After a recent turn of events I have become interested further in the ideas of 'boundary' and scientific knowledge-practices as utilized in unstructured interview data. Following from Wooffitt's (1992) use of lengthy accounts given in interviews I wish to examine particularly instances where speakers orient to the interview setting in what might be (perhaps erroneously) called 'turning points' in a life-narrative. I will bring some data fragments of life-story interviews with science policy personnel, from which I hope we can glean some understanding of 'science', non-native English accounts and the contingent interview.
What I call "imaginary space" is a recurrently observable phenomenon. It refers to that kind of gesture whose meaning is organized through its juxtaposition with talk and the structure of the participants' bodily arrangement. The meaning of the gesture and the very structure that that meaning of the gesture relies on elaborate each other. It is a kind of what Chuck Goodwin calls a "symbiotic gesture" (the kind of gesture whose meaning is accomplished in the conjuncture of the gesture, talk and the structure of the environment"), but a reflexive one, so to speak, in that body movements structure themselves through each other's conjuncture. In these tems, "imaginary space" is similar to what I call a "model body", but the difference lies in the fact that imaginary space is established between the speaker's and the hearer's bodies, rather than on the speaker's body. Imaginary space is not a peculiar phenomenon, again. I present a couple of instances for it and raises some questions about it, attempting to see in which direction the phenomenon will lead us.