Spatializing kinship

This paper explores children’s language socialization into kin-based peer relationships in Amdo, Tibet. I examine spontaneous interactions in one extended family to show how children link place and kinship using spatial deixis, the grammatical system that encodes context-dependent reference to location, in Amdo Tibetan. I analyze uses of spatial deixis in two interactive routines: (1) peer-group play, and (2) children’s scaffolding of infants’ roles in multiparty participation frameworks. I argue that children use their emerging deictic repertoires to ‘spatialize kinship,’ mapping kinship relations onto the immediate spaces of co-present interactions as well as the enduring places of the village’s geography. Previous studies have noted that culturally specific forms of relationality influence adults’ uses of deixis by shaping the pragmatics of interactive settings. Building on these insights, the data from Amdo demonstrate the need to consider cultural associations between place and kinship when examining the acquisition of deixis in early childhood.

Approaches toward Community Participation Enhancement in Ecotourism

A vast majority of scholarship share a similar view that collective participation of different stakeholders serves as a prerequisite for ecotourism sustainable development. Local community participation is considered to be an important pillar of ecotourism development as local communities are capable of influencing success or failure of ecotourism development projects. Socio-economic and socio-cultural well-being of local communities are crucial ingredients for maintaining rapport amongst stakeholders and sustaining ecotourism development. Despite being promulgated as a central pillar of ecotourism development, literature reveals that local communities have not been actively participating in planning and decision-making processes regarding ecotourism development. Adoption of Western-centric oriented participation frameworks by numerous state authorities coupled with lacking necessary skills have been identified as the main factors that hinder active participation of local communities in ecotourism development initiatives. It has therefore, been suggested that ecotourism destinations need to adopt and implement participatory approaches that suit their specific contexts and promote bottom-up ecotourism development procedures. Based on its potential for influencing review and amendment of existing tourism-related policies, a local community participation improvement model has been developed. The model is aimed at facilitating inclusive and active participation of all stakeholders in ecotourism development processes.

The participation role of the researcher as a co-operative achievement

In this paper, I examine my role as a researcher doing video-based fieldwork in mainstream classrooms with deaf youths in Iquitos, Peru through the lens of participation frameworks that emerged within moments of situated interaction. While conducting video-based fieldwork, I attempted to primarily occupy the role of a passive participant-observer in order to capture the deaf students’ everyday interactions with minimal interference from the researcher. As I will develop in the paper, it is evident that my status within the classroom participation frameworks was dynamic. While I often was not attended to in the participation framework and positioned as a ratified overhearer of the unfolding interaction, my status could quickly shift as the students and teacher responded to my presence. Moments when my status in the participation framework changed make visible the various roles that I occupied in the classroom, from an observer, to a confidant, to an authority figure. Through interactional extracts, I illustrate how the roles that I occupy in the classroom social ecology are a moment-by-moment co-operative achievement between members of the class and myself.

Conclusion

This final chapter focuses on theoretical and pedagogical implications of the reconceptualization of “participation” and “engagement” presented in this volume. The immeasurably complex work of doing-being-a-student in a classroom in all its varied forms creates a monumental job for teachers as they engage in participation monitoring. This chapter reviews the contributions of this volume, including the concepts of studenting, waves of embodied action, and multimodal listening. The challenges of multimodal analysis are discussed, including single-case analyses of two new phenomena: covert disengagement and domino (dis)engagement. The importance of spatial organization for creating participation frameworks for engagement is illustrated through two comparative examples. Finally, this chapter returns to the concept of “participation,” including discussion of the performance required of students in the classroom, and the relationships between participation, engagement, and learning.

Protest graffiti, social movements and changing participation frameworks

As a type of written discourse without guaranteed readership and response, protest graffiti nonetheless projects a participation framework in which protesters address different participants, including not only the government but also other potential ‘participants’ in the social/cultural/political context. This paper studies a dataset of graffiti associated with a protest movement in Macao, China. A survey of the longitudinal data reveals that the contents and visual representation of the graffiti have changed to reflect evolving participation frameworks which are in response to different stages of social movements. While graffiti in earlier stages tends to be more accusatory and anti-governmental, graffiti in later stages shows a shift of protesters’ position more in alignment with patriotism and allegiance to authority. Instead of presenting views competing with mainstream political discourse, our data, with their multimodal resources, draw heavily on Chinese cultural discourses which are supposedly shared among the protesters and addressees in this context.

RoboDoc: Semiotic resources for achieving face-to-screenface formation with a telepresence robot

Face-to-face interaction is a primordial site for human activity and intersubjectivity. Empirical studies have shown how people reflexively exhibit a face orientation and work to establish a formation in which everyone is facing each other in local participation frameworks. The Face has also been described by, e.g., Levinas as the basis for a first ethical philosophy. Humans have established these Face-formations when interacting since time immemorial, but what happens when one of the participants is present through a telepresence robot? Based on ethnomethodology, Peircean/Goodwinian semiotics, multimodal conversation analysis and video data from a Danish residential rehabilitation center, the article shows the ways in which participants manage to interactively, cooperatively, and moment by moment achieve an F-formation in situ. The article contributes a detailed analysis and discussion of the kind of participant a telepresence robot is, in and through situated interactions: I propose that we term this participant the RoboDoc, given that it is an assemblage of a doctor who controls a robot. By focusing on the affordances of mobility, the article contributes to a renewed understanding of the importance and relevance of establishing Face-orientations in an increasingly technofied telepresence world.

Análisis de los marcos de participación en la interacción en redes sociales virtuales

During decades a topic of interest has been the analysis of participation frameworks both in production and in reception of messages in oral interactions. Researchers from the fields of sociology, communication and linguistics have developed several proposals to describe this process in oral interaction. However, the computer mediated interaction was not considered at the time those models were proposed. Therefore, it is necessary to develop specific models for the description of this type of interactions. The intend of this article is to develop a specific proposal for the description and analysis of production and reception frameworks in virtual social networks.