I was going to blog about the taken-for-granted but I took it for granted. I still think it's interesting though.

I must admit that I am a little surprised as to how interested I have become in the micro. Previously, I have been inclined toward critical, humanist, or broad cultural-historic approaches to learning. I suppose it has always "felt" more impactful. Yet, here I find myself aligning with approaching power/hegemony/etc. by focusing on what is relevant and unfolding sequentially as talk-in-interaction. Considering this week's reading, I see this as the interaction among people and cultural artifacts. Ideologies, membership, and asymmetries in power are messy, and all people are imaginably and legitimately categorized in a number of ways. Yet, only a handful are demonstrably relevant. For example, Wooffitt discusses how gender is not a fixed personality trait, but accomplished through discourse. I find this notion of accomplished extremely useful in investigating micro-level talk as (potentially) macro-level production.

Take for instance another example from a previous reading: Graham (2015) and the personality word task. Here, Graham provided subjects with a word bank of "positive" and "negative" descriptors as a means to analyze self-characterization. This approach was taken because the young men might have difficulty in expressive language or the inability to answer abstract questions. Therefore, a response of 'I dunno' was disregarded and attributed to some internal property of the individual. This continues to bug me.  Sure, this was a clever method to get the data, but as researchers I don't think this is the preferred approach. Questions are not neutral and responses are always in reference to power dynamics. Graham could have rephrased or paraphrased, ask additional questions, or supplied tools/materials that might support dialogue. 'I dunno' was potentially just the first step in negotiation. This is a common complaint of mine in the learning sciences as well -- a researcher asks a question and the response is simply a translation/transformation of mental machinery. In cases of silence or 'I dunno' it is assumed that it was to complicated or abstract. In reality, there are a variety of possibilities. 

Embodiment

I set out this week to take in the work of Chuck Goodwin. And while I only had time to read two articles, I have become very intrigued by the role of embodiment in discourse analysis. Jørgensen & Phillips (2002) suggest finding a "more sophisticated theory on the body and attempt to translate it into the discourse analytical perspective chosen." Okay, thanks; I guess Goodwin will do...maybe. In all honesty, I find myself analytically concerned with bodies, gaze, and other forms of embodied action that are not speech acts in an of themselves, but exists in complex matrices of social interaction. I feel as though sign systems other than talk function to orient talk, even during asynchronous or purely aural interactions (e.g., message boards or phone conversations). While this might seem counter-intuitive, I often find myself gesturing, referencing, or simply walking around while talking on the phone. These embodied actions are critical to my talk. For example, every week I post a 10 minute powerpoint to my students where I talk over the slides. When I am recording the talk, alone in my office, I am constantly gesturing, clicking around, and pointing, just as if I am giving a lecture. (This reminds me of research as "making the mundane strange and the strange mundane. I hear this a lot and I think I read it in a chapter, but I cannot remember who said this...was it Foucault? Geertz?) And while maybe this is a half-baked example, I think it points to the role of embodiment in all forms of interaction. As Goodwin (2003) mentions, semiotic work is a huge relief to the burden of language. We use gesture and embodied action to simplify language and orient talk; therefore, we should care...right? 

Goodwin (2003) notes a variety of contexts where discourse is practically impossible without a semiotic structure (games being one example that I happen to care particularly about). If we take Jørgensen & Phillips' advice to heart, the primary focus for analysis of talk-in-interaction should not be talk in isolation, but encompassing other semiotic structures and embodied actions (so using video as an information source). So, multimodal conversation analysis? I quick Google tells me this is a thing, but I'm unsure. I think the main idea here is that gesture (and other forms of embodied action) orient attention to a shared activity (which includes a variety of embedded semiotic structures) and are used in conjunction with talk to define and redefine relevance. Seems good to me.