Revisiting talk in space: The inescapable mobility of social interaction
Table of contents
In the social sciences, the “mobility turn” (Urry 2000) has uncovered numerous aspects of social life that the earlier neglection of mobility had made invisible, or unthinkable, thereby calling for a reconceptualization of culture and society from this perspective. This chapter discusses the way in which similar issues can be raised with regard to social interaction, from the perspective of Ethnomethodology (EM) and Conversation Analysis (CA). It sketches the conceptual consequences of the “mobility turn” for studying social interaction and for revisiting the role of space in talk and interaction (see Haddington et al. 2013). The consequences for EMCA of the neglection of mobile activities by a too exclusive focus on stationary activities are presented (§ 2). The chapter reviews EMCA work on “stationary” and “mobile” interactions (§ 3) and then questions what appears to be a seemingly obvious dichotomy (§ 4). Next, it examines the relevance of space and mobility in social interaction in three classical fields of EMCA, i.e., the analysis of telephone conversations (§ 4.1), the study of mobility mediated by technologies, such as cars (§ 4.2), and the investigation of spatiality in various kinds of interactional spaces (§ 4.3).
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