Talking to/through the baby to produce and manage disaffiliation during well-child visits
Claudia Zanini | Swiss Paraplegic Research & University of Lucerne, Switzerland
Esther González-Martínez | University of Fribourg & University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland, Switzerland
Relying on multimodal conversation analysis, this chapter examines the sequential and collaborative deployment of talking to/through the baby to produce and manage disaffiliation during well-child visits. We argue that this practice is oriented to and constitutes disaffiliation as a restricted activity preempted, mitigated and limited by the participants of the visits. It makes relevant and conciliates the medical, interactional and relational constraints of the visits and contributes to their institutional specificity. The chapter concentrates on three nurse-baby-mother interaction sequences drawn from a corpus of video recordings of well-child visits at a healthcare centre in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland.
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