Getting mobile with a walking-help

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Abstract

Ethnomethodology has been one of the few fields were mundane experiences and social ordering such as walking have been a focus of interest (e.g. Ryave and Schenkein 1974). In the present paper we want to discuss how this mundane practice sometimes needs to be achieved through the help of technology. People suffering from severe acquired brain injury often have to find new ways to carry out mundane embodied practices such as walking, eating etc., because their muscles cannot or have “forgotten” how to conduct the movement or parts of it. Our study is based on video-recordings of situations in which people with acquired brain injury were introduced to a new walking help that should enable them to walk (better). Our multimodal interaction analysis (Goodwin 2000) of the data will show how the practice of walking with this specific technology is dependent on the interplay of the material affordances of the technology (e.g. Gaver 1996), the bodily affordances (e.g. Sheller 2011) of the user and, furthermore, the scaffolding by an accompanying helper. The paper will discuss how movement as an enabled experience can be analysed as an entanglement of these three aspects. To do that, the situations of walk are understood as a Latourian socio-material networks or assemblages that perform an action, rather than depicting the walking help as an object of human actions (Latour 2005). From that constellation a publicly observable ‘mobile with’ (Goffman 1971) can sometimes emerge (when the support is mostly linguistic), producing a “normal” situation in the public domain: two independent persons walking together as a joint accomplishment (cp. Collinson 2006), rather than being in a helper-helpee relation. We go through how the different types of bodily restrictions, the design of the walking help and the linguistic or bodily support of the human helper together constitute a moving body.

We finish the talk by considering the ‘bigger picture’ of our ethnomethodological undertaking (cp. Harris (2009) on assisting individual and societal process). What was the Latourian actor-network that brought us to this data and what expectations were there as regards the results?

Collinson, J. A. (2006). Running-together: Some ethnomethodological considerations. Ethnographic Studies 8: 17-29.
Gaver, W. (1996). Affordances for interaction: The social is material for design. Ecological Psychology, 8(2), 111-129.
Goodwin, C. (2000). Action and Embodiement within Situated Human Interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 32, 1489-1522.
Goffman, E. (1971). Relations in public: Microstudies of the public order. New Brunswich, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Harris, S. (2009). Four ethnomethodological paradoxes. Reflections on the work of Kenneth Liberman. Studies in Symbolic Interaction 33: 443-457.
Latour, B. (2005).Reassembeling the social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press.
Ryave, A. L. and J. N. Schenkein. (1974). Not es on the Art of Walking. In Turner, R. (ed.) Ethnomethodology. Selected Readings. Middlesex: Penguin, 265-274.
Sheller, M. (2011). Mobility. Sociopedia.isa http://www.sagepub.net/isa/resources/pdf/Mobility.pdf
OriginalsprogEngelsk
Publikationsdatoaug. 2015
Antal sider2
StatusUdgivet - aug. 2015
BegivenhedIIEMCA 2015: Living the material world: Panel: Technologies to participate – the role of material objects in communication impairment. - University of Southern Denmark, Kolding , Danmark
Varighed: 4 aug. 20157 aug. 2015

Konference

KonferenceIIEMCA 2015: Living the material world
LokationUniversity of Southern Denmark
Land/OmrådeDanmark
ByKolding
Periode04/08/201507/08/2015

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