Combining Conversation Analysis and Nexus Analysis to analyse sociomaterial and affective practices

Within CA, the embodied and material nature of interaction has gained as important a status as the sequential nature of interpretation (e.g. Streeck, Goodwin & LeBaron 2011). In NA, objects and places are important crystallized discourses, i.e. material results of often several cycles of resemiotization (Iedema 2000). Within organization and design studies, materiality has become a focus in the increasingly popular sociomaterial approach to everyday practices (e.g. Orlikowski 2007). Some sociomaterial scholars (e.g. Sørensen 2013) analyse ethnographic data either as evidence for the sociomaterial configuration (i.e. as use of materials in situation) or experience (as an ahistoric assemblage). Feelings are emphasized in an other approach that has gained prominence; the so-called affective turn (Blackman & Venn 2010) that highlights the embodied and non-conscious side of people’s experience. The analytical effort is to get to the senses and sensations which are regarded as opposite of sense-making. In my presentation, I go through some of my own analyses from various institutional interactions to show how CA-based multimodal analyses of local interactional (or intra-actional) trajectories combined with a nexus analytic understanding of longer socio-historical trajectories help understand the always socio-historical nature of in situ practices – also from an affective and sociomaterial perspective. I’ll renew my earlier (2010) claim on the connections between NA and Goodwin’s (2000) contextual configuration, also as an interdisciplinary offer for an analytic package that might help sociomaterial researchers of practices come even closer to the situation at hand as an assemblage out of which materials, humans and experiences emerge.