Dispreferred actions generally come with accounts. While in this case, COVID-19 is fairly obviously the issue, we do want the community to realize that our executive board did not make this decision lightly.
After a short summer hiatus, we are back with the third edition of the ISCA Newsletter. With the growing stress and anxiety many of us are experiencing due to a range of global issues, this seems an opportune time to share some positive developments, which show how we as a community can come together. While it will be a while before we get to see each other again in person, we manage to find ways to keep connected and indeed use this time to become even more of a global, inclusive community. And who knows, some of these innovations may be here to stay.
By Nils Klowait and Maria Erofeeva.
The embodied turn in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (EMCA) (Goodwin, 2000; Mondada, 2016; Nevile, 2015) in many ways coincided with the material turn: with a greater focus on the interactional ecology came a renewed interest in the role taken by the material environment (Nevile, Haddington, Heinemann, & Rauniomaa, 2014). The way non-human entities may come into play during human interaction currently evolves in multiple branches, some of which are further or closer to the general concerns of EMCA. Put on an ontological gradient, objects may play the role of context, props, resource spaces, parts of the public substrate (Goodwin, 2018), sets of discrete affordances (Hutchby, 2001) and, finally, as autonomous interactants (Cooren, 2004; Latour, 1996).