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Mobile Eyetracking: New avenues for the study of gaze in social interaction
Edited by Elisabeth Zima and Anja Stukenbrock
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 351] 2025
► pp. 166–188

Chapter 6
Gaze aversion as a marker of disalignment in interactions

 | University of Duisburg-Essen
Social interaction requires participants to be aligned with each other. Interactional disalignment occurs when actions are inappropriate for a given situation or when actions are not followed up by interlocutors. This study examines gaze aversion as a visual practice in which participants display and maintain interactional impasses that result from disalignment. As the data suggest, the participants redirect their foveal attention to interactional less relevant areas of interest to avoid visually addressing other participants and show self-involvement as a state of unavailability. The data basis is two video recordings (40 min each) of triadic interactions in a laboratory. The participants wear mobile eye-tracking glasses (Tobii Pro Glasses 2). The data are in English.
Keywords: conversation analysis, disalignment, mobile eye tracking, multimodality, progressivity, self-involvement
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The role of gaze in disalignment sequences
  • 3.Data and methodology
  • 4.Analysis
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Author queries
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
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