Panel: Following competence in atypical interaction across contexts

Description

People with communication and cognitive disabilities often experience a loss of their communication competencies when they transfer between interactional contexts. Little is known, however, about what exactly leads to this loss and how to prevent it. The question is thus what are the resources for a 'successful' interaction and how can these resources be reestablished in other contexts to maintain the participation of the person with limited communication means.In line with ethnomethodological and conversation analytical approaches, we understand competencies as collaborative situated achievements that consist of co-participation in social interaction (Goodwin, 2000; Clark & Wilkinson, 2013) rather than individual and cognitive skills. Accordingly, communicative competencies in “atypical interaction” (Antaki & Wilkinson 2012) require studying individuals in concrete interactional contexts taking a multimodal and resource-oriented approach. This involves, e.g. studying how resources from previous collaborative activities (e.g. linguistic resources, objects, technologies, space) are made relevant for the ongoing co-participation in an activity and how they are collaboratively used to build social action in a structured way (Goodwin & Goodwin 2004). How is competence, or incompetence, made relevant during these activities over time and across contexts.The panel brings together interdisciplinary scholars (e.g. linguistics, psychology, education science, and sociology) who study various types of atypical interaction in different settings. By following the participants’ interactive construction of competences across different contexts, the panel aims to identify communication practices that sustain communicative competences in people living with communicative disabilities as they move between different institutional and everyday contexts.The individual presentations will investigate competencies in collaborative interaction within specific activity types across various contexts (e.g. shifting from an institutional to private contexts), across different populations (interaction with person with autism, dementia or brain injury, children and adults) and/or across various groups of interlocutors (e.g. family members, care personal). The term "across context" can also be understood as a development of competences over time, as for example in learning processes.The presentation invite us to re-think competencies in atypical interaction with the aim to contribute to a better understanding of how to foster successful interaction with participants with communication impairments.

Period	Jun 2019
Event type	Conference
Location	Helsinki, FinlandShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International