Paul McIlvenny

The Joy of Biking Together: Sharing Everyday Experiences of Vélomobility

Abstract This paper analyses how adults and children elicit and share their everyday experiences of cycling together in a variety of circumstances. Video data were collected of commuter cyclists, family bike rides and school bike tours. Using an ethnomethodologically informed approach to talk, mobile action and interactional practices, the novel video recordings of these diverse vélomobile formations are analysed in order to document how cyclists organise and mobilise their experiences and accompanying emotions in relation to the concurrent activity of biking together. Assuming that displays of emotion are situated, social activities, the analysis focuses on how embodied displays of emotion are accomplished, maintained, assessed and resisted by co-riders in motion.

Moving Together: Mobile Formations in Interaction

As we strolled down the city’s sidewalks, Xipoogi walked behind me, with Xaboasi behind him. I slowed down to let them catch up. They slowed down too. I slowed down more. Ditto. I stopped. They stopped. They simply would not walk beside me, not even when I asked them to. This makes sense on a narrow jungle path. [. . .] In the city, though, walking abreast, while spatially inefficient, allows the walkers to converse more easily and to be perceived as a group. I smiled about our walking arrangement.

Vélomobile Formations-in-Action: Biking and Talking Together

Cycling is not just a skilled accomplishment by individual cyclists, it can also be social. Cycling to work with other commuters or learning to ride a bike with a caregiver, for example, both involve a keen attention to negotiating and maintaining being together in and through cycling and being seen to be together in a “mobile with”. This article reports on an investigation of some of the different vélomobile formations-in-action that involve specific arrangements of bodies on bikes and configurations of a “vélomobile with”. Video recordings of commuter and family bike rides using consumer and micro video cameras from multiangles were made to capture aural and visual features of the local organization of the ride from the participants’ perspective(s). Several phenomena are presented and discussed, including starting, stopping, and maintaining a vélomobile formation; singling up and tucking in; and stretchy mobile formations. The analysis starts by analyzing side-by-side arrangements, which are then temporarily disrupted, and finishes with formations that are more extensively stretched, but which still afford opportunities for social interaction.

A Home Away from Home: Mediating Parentcraft and Domestic Space in a Reality TV Parenting Program

ABSTRACT The House of Tiny Tearaways (HTT) first appeared on British television in May 2005. Over a six-day period, three families are invited to reside in a specially designed house together with a resident clinical psychologist. The house is to be “a home away from home” for the resident families. The analysis presented in this article focuses on the mediation of domestic spaces and familial technologies and the work of governmentalizing parenting (i.e. the conduct of parental conduct) through discursive and spatial practices. The article draws upon mediated discourse analysis and conversation analysis in order to analyze excerpts from the program and to explore how the affordances and constraints of the specially designed house—its architecture and spatial configuration, as well as the surveillance technology embedded within its walls—are assembled within particular familial activities, and how the relationships between family members are reshaped as a result. The analysis focuses on several key phenomena: 1) practices of video observation in relation to the domestic sphere; 2) use of inscription devices, such as video displays, to capture and visualize behavior and action in the “home;” 3) practicing “techniques” of parentcraft in place; and 4) doing “becoming” the proper object of family therapy or counseling in a simulated “home” laboratory. I conclude that the HTT house is a domesticated laboratory, both for (re)producing problem behaviors and communicative troubles, and for affording participants opportunities to mediate action in new ways.

Communicative Action and Computers: Re-embodying Conversation Analysis?

Publisher Summary Conversation analysis (CA) investigates embodied conduct. Research in empirical investigations of communicative action disembody and objectify phenomena. The importance and complex social order of conversation was discovered by an empirical discipline known as conversation analysis (CA) that grew out of a quirky sociological enterprise called ethnomethodology. This chapter discusses two main directions—(1) the pragmatic use of the findings and methods of CA in the design and evaluation of intelligible systems; (2) theoretical and practical task of embodied modeling of social action, activity, and structure. It also describes two parallel empirical investigations that use ethnomethodology and CA in a study concerned with the nature and importance of interactivity and situated dialogue. The focus on conversation by human–computer interaction or artificial intelligence is indicative of the movement towards the social; in particular communicative interaction and intersubjectivity. The methods of study, findings, and metaphors are the crucial facets for partnership. With computers it is the technology, metaphors, and models that come with automata/machines.

Video interventions in “everyday life”: semiotic and spatial practices of embedded video as a therapeutic tool in reality TV parenting programmes

Video technologies have made their way into many domains of social life; for example, as a useful tool for therapeutic purposes. Reality TV parenting programmes, such as Supernanny, Little Angels, and The House of Tiny Tearaways, all use embedded video as a prominent element, not only of the audiovisual spectacle of reality television but also of the therapy, counselling, coaching and instruction intrinsic to these programmes. The main uses of embedded video can be categorised into the following genres: live video observation/monitoring; live video relay and instruction from one space to another; and video-prompted recall. Using a multimodal conversation analytical approach, excerpts from these programmes are analysed to investigate several key phenomena: mediated space and video practice; use of embedded video to localise, spatialise and visualise talk and action that is distant in time and/or space; the translating, stretching and cutting of experience in and through video technologies; and the display and embodied mediation of professional vision. The use of video technology enables the professional to do a number of important therapeutic or counselling tasks; for example, to give timely advice and instruction to a parent in the midst of a troublesome situation involving their child(ren) or to use playback of video recordings of past conduct to prompt reflection and a perspective shift by the parent(s). These have to be managed both temporally and spatially, as sequentially organised settings in which semiotic space is designed to channel interaction and experience, and interactional space is governed from a distance through the semiotic representations afforded by the video technology.

Multimodal discourse in mediated spaces

In line with the burgeoning interest in the analysis of multimodal and mediated discourse, in this special issue we venture to profile empirical research that investigates how different semiotic, spatial and interactional resources are interleaved in the mediated discourses and lived practices of particular settings. The aim we have in mind is not an overarching theoretical contribution, but rather to expose the heterogeneity and variety of contemporary sites and mediated spaces of social interaction and sociality in which multimodal interaction and communication transpire. In this special issue, these sites include public places of commemoration, a critique session in architectural education, a collaborative video-editing suite, a cross-cultural virtual work site, domestic and public spaces in reality TV parenting programmes, a participatory democratic meeting, and a domestic setting for a story told by an aphasic man. Space and discourse are increasingly enmeshed and mutually constitutive. There are, of course, different conceptualisations of space, such as semiotic space, interactional space, social space, geographical space, virtual space and more. Many of these have emerged, directly and indirectly, from the vibrant ideas and stimulating concepts stemming from human and cultural geography. Recently, emerging subfields that have space and spatialities as a prominent focus or actor include the study of semiotic landscapes (Jaworski and Thurlow 2010) or, alternatively, linguistic landscapes (Shohamy and Gorter 2009) and (interactional) mobility studies (Adey 2010; Haddington, Mondada, and Nevile forthcoming; McIlvenny, Broth, and Haddington 2009; Vannini 2010). Intricate conceptualisations such as Harris’s (1998) ‘‘integrational linguistics’’, Scollon and Scollon’s (2003) ‘‘geosemiotics’’, and also Thrift’s (2007) ‘‘non-representational theory’’, as well as much of the theorising done under the larger umbrella of ‘‘performance theory’’ all these open up invigorating intellectual discussions in which spatial modalities and discourses are enmeshed and intertwined (for recent overviews, see Falkheimer and Jansson 2006; Warf and Arias 2009). The explorations of multimodal and discursive spaces in our special issue concern not only discursive representations of space, but also how socio-semiotic constructions of places and spaces are multimodally accomplished and performed. One goal is to investigate and understand the contingent relationships between modes of semiosis/discourse and multiple spaces. The layering of different spaces combined with the interweaving of semiotic modalities in and across these spaces affords a variety of subjectivities, agencies, actions and micro-ecologies. Additionally, if there are multiple perspectives on space, then the movement or transition between spaces is crucial. The discursive mediation of two spaces through docking, coupling, relaying and bridging, for example may lead to schisming or ‘‘space-switching’’. Furthermore, the semiotic and discursive properties of a space may be appropriated or echoed in other spaces (interspatiality) for a variety of tasks and purposes. Discursive modes may or may not be interchangeable as an actor traverses spaces. Social Semiotics Vol. 21, No. 2, April 2011, 147 154

Refusing What We Are: Communicating Counter-Identities and Prefiguring Social Change in Social Movements

Protests by a range of new social movements have been studied extensively, but few studies have focused on the communicative practices and mediated actions in which new identities and forms of subjectivity are discursively produced. This chapter investigates what Michel Foucault called ‘counter-conducts’, practices in which alternative modes of being governed are performed. By questioning the conduct of their conduct, participants simultaneously question the relationship of the self to itself, playing with and risking identity in the process. The case study scrutinises video recordings of the “United Nathans weapons inspectors” protest theatre event that took place in 2003. Using Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis (EMCA), the chapter examines how ‘counter-identities’ are achieved and made accountable in the interactional practices of the prefigurative protest event. This approach helps document the ways in which fields of visibility and modes of rationality are sequentially and categorially organised in the contingent accomplishment of counter-identities.