October 16, 2011

The 66th Meeting of Mind and Activity



Saturday, October 29, 2011

3:30PM - 7:00PM
Room 1504*, on the 5th floor of Main Building (Building #1)
* The room is different than usual.
Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo

Program

We plan to have one data session and one presentation.

3:30 PM: Data session led by Domenic Berducci,
Crying rhythm as interactional resource

In this data session I would like to examine the function of an infant's crying rhythm (period) and its relation to caregiver turn taking. It appears that the caregiver responds to infant and talks to camera at proto-TRPs, ie the caregiver responds at the normatively correct time. Thus being so, it appears that caregiver's is ordering the sequence. At the same time, it also appears that the infant's crying rhythm is the primary device for the ordering. There appears to be an assymetrical interaction order, infant cries rhythmically, and caregiver fits his turns into the periodic proto-TRPs provided by infant's cry. I wish to clarify the relationship of the cry-rhythm and the caregiver's turns.

5:45 PM: Lefebvre Augustin,
Sequentiality, Projection and Accomplishment of Membership Categories in Martial Art Interaction (Aikido)

Conversation has been described as a sequential system of communication relying on the production of TCUs (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson 1974), which are not only linguistic units but also multimodal units (Goodwin 1981). Martial arts interactions appear to be a "perspicuous site" for examining the ways multimodal units such as body's movements -gestures- are sequentially organized while linguistic resources are absent.

The goal of my presentation is then to examine the features of sequentiality in martial arts interactions:
1) I will begin by describing how practitioners produce minimal units - gestures - and interpret them.
2) I continue by taking into account the fact that practitioners accomplish "projections" which can succeed or fail.
3) I will finish by examining the conditions into which "projections" can happen, by focusing on the accomplishment of "tori" and "uke" categories. I will discuss the fact that the sequential accomplishment of gestures and the accomplishment of "uke" and "tori" categories are two part of a single phenomenon.

My description is grounded on the fine observation of video-recorded interactions of aikido practice and relies on ethnomethodological and conversational conceptual tools such as: membership categorization devices, normative expectancies, documentary method of interpretation, gesture, projection.





If anybody is interested in bringing their own data, analyses, observations, arguments, or whatever, to a next meeting to discuss together, please contact Aug Nishizaka at augnish(a)soc.meijigakuin.ac.jp.