Digging the nature: Inspecting the earth in a nature tour

The paper presents complex data (collected, among others, with 360 cameras) and preliminary results from a project on guided tours undertaken during two first Danish ‘Nature Meetings’ (Naturmødet). The general theoretical approach is sociomateriality (e.g. Carlile, Nicolini, Langley & Tsoukas, 2013) that has close connections to Law’s material semiotics (2007) where the material environment is given more agency than in traditional humanistic approaches. Caronia and Cooren (2014) claim that communication studies miss analytical approaches to the role of the material world. The present paper points out that Goodwin’s (2013) contextual configuration with its semiotic fields provides analytical tools for studying human interactions as complex sociomaterial processes. Goodwin understands that the cooperative construction of action is always laminated with sociocultural understandings and learning and is, therefore, not just oriented to the copresent participants and material world, but always connected to other times and places. What happens when this semiotic substrate is taking place in the material substrate of examining the visible and normally invisible (beneath the surface) natural environment? How is nature (plants, animals and different types of surfaces) encountered? Through (expert) accounts of it? Through senses (seeing, smelling and touching)? The data analysed will show how knowledge (epistemology) and material objects (ontology) are entangled in actual practices, questioning the feasibility of that division.