Touch in Social Interaction: Touch, Language, and Body

Description

Rooted in multimodal conversation analysis and based on video recordings of naturally occurring social interactions, this book presents a novel analytical perspective for the study of touch. The authors focus on how different forms of touch are interactionally organized in everyday, institutional, and professional practices, showing how touch is multimodally achieved in social interaction, how it acquires its significance, how it is embedded in the current activity and in its social context, and how it is systematically intertwined with talk, facial expressions, and body posture. Including work by a wide range of renowned researchers, this volume provides rich visual illustrations of situations featuring touch as a social and intersubjective practice. The studies make a compelling contribution to the field by clearly examining and demonstrating the social meaning of touch for the participants in social interaction in a broad range of contexts. Presenting a new methodology for the study of touch, this is key reading for all researchers and scholars working in conversation analysis, multimodality, and related areas. Cover Half Title Title Copyright Contents List of contributors 1 Towards an interactional approach to touch in social encounters 2 The interactive construction of a hug sequence 3 The tactility and visibility of kissing: intercorporeal configurations of kissing bodies in family photography sessions 4 Touch as embodied compassion in responses to pain and distress 5 Control touch in caregiver–child interaction: embodied organization in triadic mediation of peer conflict in Swedish and Japanese 6 When a dance hold becomes illegitimate 7 To touch and to be touched: the coordination of touching-whole-body-movements in Aikido practice 8 Touching and petting: exploring “haptic sociality” in interspecies interaction 9 Professional touch in speech and language therapy for the treatment of post-stroke aphasia 10 Guided touch: the sequential organization of feeling a fetus in Japanese midwifery practices 11 Passing touch: handing and handling tools and implements during surgical procedures 12 Calibrating professional perception through touch in geological fieldwork 13 Sensorial explorations of food: how professionals and amateurs touch cheese in gourmet shops 14 Ambivalences of touch: an epilogue Index