Elizabeth Keating

American Sign Language in virtual space: Interactions between deaf users of computer-mediated video communication and the impact of technology on language practices

According to some discussions concerning new information technologies and technologically enhanced communication, we are now in a revolution as profound as the printing press. The Internet is creating new kinds of meetingplaces and work areas and the possibilities of new types of relationships across time and space. This article reports on some ways that the Internet is shaping language practices in the Deaf community, with an interest in how new tools mediate and influence human behavior, including language and the organization of interaction. This includes the development and manipulation of a computer-mediated image of self and other, creativity and problemsolving in new communicative spaces, creating reciprocal perspectives, new participation frameworks, and specifics of language change. For the first time, deaf people can communicate using manual visual language, in many cases their native language, across space and time zones. This groundbreaking situation makes the Deaf community a particularly productive site for research into relationships between technological innovations and new communicative practices. (American Sign Language, computer-mediated com

Managing Misunderstandings The Role of Language in Interdisciplinary Scientific Collaboration

This article explores how scientists communicate with each other in interdisciplinary collaborative work. It is based on ethnographic research conducted with one such group, which is building a predictive computer model of heat transfer in prostate tissues. The analysis identifies strategies scientists use in their communication practices, including managing different understandings of the validity of knowledge, partial understandings among participants, and interpretive discipline crossing in group meetings. The ideas of productive misunderstandings and of registration as correlating distinct knowledge domains are used to interpret how scientists must manage their unshared backgrounds as part of the collaborative scientific work.

Participation cues: Coordinating activity and collaboration in complex online gaming worlds

The development of digital communication technologies not only has an influence on human communicative practices, but also creates new spaces for human collaborative activity. In this article we discuss a technologically mediated context for interaction, computer games. Closely looking at interactions among a group of gamers, we examine how players are managing complex, shifting frameworks of participation, the virtual game world and the embodied world of talk and plans for action. Introducing the notion of participation cues , we explain how interactants are able to orient to, plan, and execute collaborative actions that span quite different environments with quite different types of agency, possible acts, and consequences. Novel abilities to interact across diverse spaces have consequences for understanding how humans build coordinated action through efficient, multimodal communication mechanisms. (Computer-mediated communication, language and technology, gaming, gesture, participation, multimodality) *

Interspatial subjectivities: engineering in virtual environments

It is becoming increasingly common for workers to collaborate across continents in technologically-mediated spaces, where geography and time are related in new ways, where visual elements for interpreting the others actions are reduced, and where quite diverse cultural practices and beliefs are encountered. Phenomenologically, intersubjectivity, or taking the point of view of the other, and imagining oneself in the others space, requires a new type of work. In this article we discuss two engineering design teams as they orient their actions to the work of building, repairing, and maintaining an “interspatial” subjectivity. We focus on aspects of multimodality, relationships of time, and integration of different local practices and habits, as they are affected by encounters in technologically-mediated space. The engineers are simultaneously building an understanding of the structural space they are creating, as well as how to most effectively transfer or reinvent skills learned as engineer-collaborators.

Homo prostheticus: problematizing the notions of activity and computermediated interaction

Computer-mediated interaction poses new challenges for theories and models of social interaction concerned with relationships between humans and tools. This article discusses deaf signers using sign language in computer-mediated space, a case in which a new technological ‘tool’ is integrated into existing practices and conventions, but also requires new innovations. An influential model for studying humans, tool use, and social interaction is Activity Theory. However, in analyzing procedures deaf signers use in learning how to manage communication in computer-mediated space, key notions of Activity Theory, notably the ‘mediation’ properties of tools and the categories of subject and tool, are found to be insufficient. I propose adding to the concept of mediation and characterizing the relationship between subjects and new tools in interaction as one in which tools are ‘prostheses’ which interactants learn to inhabit. Based on looking at people learning to use a new technology, I argue, a key process in activities with new tools is a process where interactants learn how to enhance and constrain, extend and transform properties of the human body.

Global offshoring of engineering project teams: trust asymmetries across cultural borders

Offshoring represents a new way to organize engineering project work, enabling firms to leverage global cost differences and growing talent pools, particularly in emerging economies. How can such firms build trust across onshore and offshore sites when the project team members differ in cultural value systems and practices? How can resulting asymmetries in trust be managed? The literatures on virtual teams, trust, and culture highlight important differences when teams are largely operating in technology-mediated spaces vs. when they come together in face-to-face spaces. Our findings from ethnographic studies on global engineering projects suggest the need for high levels of trust, but project teams have few capabilities to meet this need. The conditions of project teams engender asymmetrical trust in cross cultural contexts. There is a paucity of work on global engineering project teams, asymmetrical trust, and trust repair in large complex global projects. The research opportunities remain ample.

Power and Pragmatics

Language is an important means through which power relations are created and negotiated. In addition to everyday choices speakers make about their own language use, variations in ways of talking are related to local theories of power, status, identity, self, ethnicity, class, and gender. Grammatical and lexical choices, choices in forms of address and reference, turn-taking, narratives of cause and effect, genre, and stylistic performance, as well as the organization of space for talk and participation, embodied behaviors, and silence are used as elements in the distribution of power. Power and language are connected through the marking of certain encounters and contexts as requiring particular types of language use, the privileging of certain types of language, who may or may not speak in certain settings, which contexts are appropriate for which types of speech and which for silence, what types of talk are appropriate to persons of different statuses and roles, norms for requesting and giving information, and practices for alternating between speakers. Pragmatic uses of language are an important tool for constructing social difference and distinctions between individuals in terms of efficacy and power.

The Sociolinguistics of Status in Pohnpei

Abstract Pohnpeian is one of several Pacific languages with a complex honorific speech register. Studying everyday interactions in which honorific speech occurs reveals that the use of these status-marking forms is not as regularized as native speakers imply or as theories would predict. This suggests that asymmetries of status may be context-specific in ways that are not revealed by generalized descriptions of a societys social organization. Looking at particular interactions contributes to our understanding of the situated, collaborative process of creating and sustaining social difference. Pohnpeians use honorifics to create status relationships between individuals when referring to a persons activities, such as giving and taking or coming and going, as well as when referring to possessions, knowledge states, food and eating. In Pohnpei, as in some other Pacific societies, high and low status are linked to vertical as well as horizontal spatial orientations, so that space can be reinterpreted in a way that is analogous to status markings in language. This paper discusses some of the ways speakers use language to build notions of “high status” and “low status” not just as different levels, but as saliently different spheres of influence and efficacy.

A woman’s role in constructing status hierarchies: using honorific language in Pohnpei, Micronesia

This paper examines howpower and Status relations are created and negotiated through honorific language among the Pohnpeian people of Micronesia. It argues that women play a crucial role in constructing and legitimizing Status asymmetries. Excerpts from transcripts of videotaped interactions are shown to illustrate how women play an active role in structuring social space according to rank, and in shaping and mediating interpretations of ongoing interaction

Contesting representations of gender stratification in Pohnpei, Micronesia

Abstract Both space and language are resourcesin the production of social hierarchies. In Pohnpei, Micronesia, the social categorization of space in the feasthouse creates a map of the social order that includes a subordinate identity for women, that of a wife whose status depends on her husbands. However, women orators at feasts discursively subvert characterizations of womens status as contingent on men. The orators invoke a more complex range of gendered subject positions than are expressed spatially, including womens multiple identities as mother, sister, and wife. This article examines how gendered space in the Pohnpeian feasthouse relates to gendered discourse and discourse about gender. The tension between the spatial representation of womens status and the discursive one indicates that the production of social stratification is a dynamic and interactive process in Pohnpei, entailing contradiction as well as confirmation within and across semiotic modalities.