Interpersonal touch is crucial for establishing interpersonal bonds. Drawing on the framework of ... more Interpersonal touch is crucial for establishing interpersonal bonds. Drawing on the framework of haptic sociality, this study explores the interactional emergence of embodied relationships among second-grade schoolboys as part of ongoing classroom activity. Focussing on forms of body-to-body behaviour that occur during classroom activities, we describe four different types of touch occurring between the boys – supporting, nudging, wrestling and grooming – and how they are collaboratively accomplished, how they change from one type to another, and how they are deployed as embodied negotiation withing a continuously unfolding embodied relationship. Complementing previous studies on embodied relationships among schoolgirls, our study focuses on the haptic social life of schoolboys.
Tämä tutkimus käsittelee kosketukseen perustuvaa interkorporeaalisuutta, äitien ja heidän 2–3 -vu... more Tämä tutkimus käsittelee kosketukseen perustuvaa interkorporeaalisuutta, äitien ja heidän 2–3 -vuotiaiden lastensa välillä, Tyttöjen Talon ryhmässä. Tutkimuksen aineisto koostuu ryhmän videoiduista tapaamiskerroista. Analyysi keskittyy siihen, miten äidit, lapset ja ryhmän ohjaaja kommunikoivat toistensa kanssa koko kehoillaan, samalla kun ryhmän äidit osallistuvat erilaisiin taidetta hyödyntäviin ryhmätehtäviin. Tutkimus hyödyntää mikrovideoanalyysiä tuodakseen esiin, miten ryhmän jäsenet vuorovaikuttavat toistensa kanssa erilaisilla kosketuskäytänteillä. Nämä käytänteet koostuvat siitä, miten kehot organisoituvat erilaisiin kosketusasetelmiin ja tarkkaavaisuus muodostelmiin; tekevät siirtymiä näissä asetelmissa ja formaatioissa; sekä osallistuvat erilaisiin esineiden ojentamista ja vastaanottamista koskeviin käytänteisiin. Analyysi osoittaa, että edellä mainittujen käytänteiden avulla ryhmän jäsenet neuvottelevat kehojensa välisestä intiimiydestä ja ryhmän aktiviteetteihin osallis...
Moving their bodies in knowledgeable and professional ways in order to handle and connect affecti... more Moving their bodies in knowledgeable and professional ways in order to handle and connect affectively with infants entails a large part of child health care nurses' work. We deploy a phenomenological approach to videoanalysis of interaction to analyze an episode of a 1-month-old infant visiting the child health care clinic with their caregiver to have their body assessed for a neonatal stepping. Focusing on the co-movement of the baby and the nurse, we ask: how do various ways of moving as a co-embodied entity allow and corporeally prompt the baby's age-appropriate bodily ability to emerge? We develop the notion of professional interkinesthesia to indicate specific forms of body work of nurses which in this case entails moving together with the baby to make her successfully perform a specific health care task—the stepping. Building on Charles Goodwin's concept of professional vision, we uncover how the nurse moves and touches the infant's body in ways relevant to the...
Foregrounding the centrality of bodies in therapeutic encounters, we adopt a video-analytic appro... more Foregrounding the centrality of bodies in therapeutic encounters, we adopt a video-analytic approach to investigate interkinesthetic engagement in the context of psychotherapy. Specifically, we examine moments where a patient and therapist collaboratively reenact – provide an embodied demonstration of – emotional events from the patient’s life. Our analysis shows how the patient and therapist work together in such moments to create an arena for the patient to learn to attend to, prolong and investigate embodiments of past memories. We discuss how such activities in therapy allow for revisiting and exploring challenging body memories in a safe and trusting setting. Furthermore, we highlight how it carries the potential to change the patient’s embodied experiences and ways of making-a-body. We discuss the clinical applications of taking such an approach to bodily expressions in psychotherapy.
Jointly coordinated affective activities are fundamental for social relationships. This study inv... more Jointly coordinated affective activities are fundamental for social relationships. This study investigates a naturally occurring interaction between two women who produced reciprocal emotional stances towards similar past experiences. Adopting a microanalytic approach, we describe how the participants re-enact their past experiences through different but aligning synchronized gestures. This embodied dialogue evolves into affective flooding, in which participants co-produce their body memories of pulling down window blinds to block out sunshine. We show how the participants live this moment intercorporeally and how multiple timescales are tied together in gesture, which is both an incarnation of body history and a novel expression of it. Thus, collaborative gesturing is a resource for experiencing together emotions re-enacted from body memories. Contributing to our understanding of the intercorporeality of human action, we provide an empirical investigation into how emotions and mult...
This study examines tactile intercorporeality between mothers and their two-to-three-year-old chi... more This study examines tactile intercorporeality between mothers and their two-to-three-year-old children in a House of Girls group. Using data from naturally occurring video-recorded group interactions, the study focuses on how mothers, children and the group tutor communicate with each other through their whole bodies while the mothers participate in various art-based group tasks in the group sessions. The study uses micro video analysis to describe how study participants engage with each other through different tactilely managed practices. These practices include bodies organizing themselves into tactile arrangements and attention formations; initiating and producing different transitions in these tactile arrangement-formations; and participating in haptic practices for handing over and receiving objects. The analysis suggests that group members produce these practices in order to experience each other tactilely, and to manage the members’ participation in the group. This study shows that in tactile intercorporeality, moving and living bodies are inseparable from communicating bodies, and that tactile intercorporeality is thus best described as mothers and children co-experiencing the same tactile ecology. Therefore, while producing practical actions in tactile intercorporeality, bodies are inevitably communicating their moment-by-moment unfolding actions and action intentions to each other. This tacit communication is manifold, and besides merely communicating about practical movements and actions, these practical actions can be enacted as resources to accomplish different kinds of interaction projects, such as communicating emotional states, controlling another person’s body or attention, and displaying a need to be in tactile connection with another person. This study suggests that tactile intercorporeality is a crucial locus for human beings’ multilayered ability to communicate with each other. The results complement the wide range of micro studies on embodied interactions, including previous studies on touch in interaction. However, this study also introduces a communicative medium that goes beyond focused interactions: living bodies’ communicating through mere co-being with each other in tactile intercorporeality. Furthermore, this study provides new methodological openings in terms of how intercorporeal phenomena and tactile intercorporeality can be analysed through video recordings. Hence it also opens up multiple possibilities for future research. The study provides more understanding of the everyday life of caregivers and their young children, describing how they go through overlapping activities as intercorporeal units. The study thus describes how managing these overlapping activities is a continuous intercorporeal accomplishment that results from tactile and other embodied negotiations of familiar bodies. The study proposes on the one hand that the existing tactile intimacy of a social relationship offers the relationship participants an opportunity for continuous tactile communication, and on the other hand that the production of tactile practices also provides participants with a medium to reproduce the intimacy of their social relationship as it unfolds moment-by-moment.
In this study, we introduce a video-ethnographic study of a research process in which nursing stu... more In this study, we introduce a video-ethnographic study of a research process in which nursing students try on exoskeletons—wearable forms of technology that are meant to decrease lower back strain when lifting something. We adopt microanalysis of video-recorded interaction to analyze moments in which a nurse tests how her body feels with the exoskeleton. Moreover, we explore how the nurse simultaneously makes accountable—observable and reportable (Garfinkel, 1967, p. vii)—to others how her body feels “inside,” i.e. her experience of kinaesthesia, or the ability of the human body to perceive its own movements and states as a ”body-in-motion” (Sheets-Johnstone, 2002, p. 138). We reflect on how the fact that we video recorded the whole process of testing the exoskeleton with three cameras and complemented our video analysis with observations and post-questionnaires enabled us to capture some of the kinesthetic, interactive, and context-specific aspects of trying on the exoskeleton.
Ergonomics in Design: The Quarterly of Human Factors Applications
In this research, we investigate user experiences with the Laevo exoskeletons in geriatric work. ... more In this research, we investigate user experiences with the Laevo exoskeletons in geriatric work. We introduce two studies where Finnish nurses used exoskeletons and identify the requirements and potential restrictions for using exoskeletons in care context. Our results show that nurses’ intentions to use the exoskeletons were mostly associated with perceived usefulness, ergonomics, and enjoyment of use. Also, social environment issues, such as other people’s reactions, are important considerations. Exoskeleton use has varying requirements depending on where it will be implemented. Thus, the end users’ ideas for the design are crucial in enabling exoskeleton use in different sectors of work.
The analysis of video-recorded interaction consists of various professionalized ways of seeing pa... more The analysis of video-recorded interaction consists of various professionalized ways of seeing participant behavior through multimodal, co-operative, or intercorporeal lenses. While these perspectives are often adopted simultaneously, each creates a different view of the human body and interaction. Moreover, microanalysis is often produced through local practices of sense-making that involve the researchers’ bodies. It has not been fully elaborated by previous research how adopting these different ways of seeing human behavior influences both what is seen from a video and how it is seen, as well as the way the interpretation of the data ultimately unfolds in the interaction between researchers. In this article, we provide a theoretical-methodological discussion of the microanalytic research process. We explore how it differs from “seeing” affect in interaction either as a co-operative and multimodal action or as an intercorporeal experience. First, we introduce the multimodal conver...
Social Interaction. Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality
This study investigates a variety of ways in which dental clinicians and adult guardians touch ch... more This study investigates a variety of ways in which dental clinicians and adult guardians touch child patients to get them to participate in dental procedures in China’s mainland. Children at the dentist’s office often experience pain and show fear, and dental care practitioners as well as adult guardians (in our case, parents and grandparents) perform tactile and haptic actions of comfort and control in response. Our analysis shows the dual roles that the children’s bodies play when touching and being touched in the dentist’s office: At times, they are agents or animators in control of their own movements; at other times, they are objects of manipulation by others. Moreover, sometimes their movements are collaboratively controlled by multiple participants, including the patient him/herself. During intercorporeal engagements in Chinese pediatric dentistry, as in many other contexts of interpersonal touch, the center of control and the source of animation of movements and actions are ...
Previous research in the social sciences has shown that haptic interaction rituals are critical f... more Previous research in the social sciences has shown that haptic interaction rituals are critical for maintaining social relationships. However, during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, ‘social distancing’ was encouraged in order to avoid the spread of disease. Drawing on data from self-ethnography as well as publicly available resources, in this study we explore some new, locally negotiated haptic trajectories to accomplish interaction rituals in the time of coronavirus. First, we present self-ethnographic observations of distancing in face-to-face encounters from our everyday lives. Second, utilizing methods of microanalysis of naturally occurring interaction, we investigate video recordings of the embodied negotiation of space and touch among politicians. We analyze three different ways in which politicians negotiate transitional moves in this haptic ritual when one party initiates a handshake: repairing, declining and apologizing. Our analysis shows that politicians adapt their...
Interpersonal touch is crucial for establishing interpersonal bonds. Drawing on the framework of ... more Interpersonal touch is crucial for establishing interpersonal bonds. Drawing on the framework of haptic sociality, this study explores the interactional emergence of embodied relationships among second-grade schoolboys as part of ongoing classroom activity. Focussing on forms of body-to-body behaviour that occur during classroom activities, we describe four different types of touch occurring between the boys – supporting, nudging, wrestling and grooming – and how they are collaboratively accomplished, how they change from one type to another, and how they are deployed as embodied negotiation withing a continuously unfolding embodied relationship. Complementing previous studies on embodied relationships among schoolgirls, our study focuses on the haptic social life of schoolboys.
Tämä tutkimus käsittelee kosketukseen perustuvaa interkorporeaalisuutta, äitien ja heidän 2–3 -vu... more Tämä tutkimus käsittelee kosketukseen perustuvaa interkorporeaalisuutta, äitien ja heidän 2–3 -vuotiaiden lastensa välillä, Tyttöjen Talon ryhmässä. Tutkimuksen aineisto koostuu ryhmän videoiduista tapaamiskerroista. Analyysi keskittyy siihen, miten äidit, lapset ja ryhmän ohjaaja kommunikoivat toistensa kanssa koko kehoillaan, samalla kun ryhmän äidit osallistuvat erilaisiin taidetta hyödyntäviin ryhmätehtäviin. Tutkimus hyödyntää mikrovideoanalyysiä tuodakseen esiin, miten ryhmän jäsenet vuorovaikuttavat toistensa kanssa erilaisilla kosketuskäytänteillä. Nämä käytänteet koostuvat siitä, miten kehot organisoituvat erilaisiin kosketusasetelmiin ja tarkkaavaisuus muodostelmiin; tekevät siirtymiä näissä asetelmissa ja formaatioissa; sekä osallistuvat erilaisiin esineiden ojentamista ja vastaanottamista koskeviin käytänteisiin. Analyysi osoittaa, että edellä mainittujen käytänteiden avulla ryhmän jäsenet neuvottelevat kehojensa välisestä intiimiydestä ja ryhmän aktiviteetteihin osallis...
Moving their bodies in knowledgeable and professional ways in order to handle and connect affecti... more Moving their bodies in knowledgeable and professional ways in order to handle and connect affectively with infants entails a large part of child health care nurses' work. We deploy a phenomenological approach to videoanalysis of interaction to analyze an episode of a 1-month-old infant visiting the child health care clinic with their caregiver to have their body assessed for a neonatal stepping. Focusing on the co-movement of the baby and the nurse, we ask: how do various ways of moving as a co-embodied entity allow and corporeally prompt the baby's age-appropriate bodily ability to emerge? We develop the notion of professional interkinesthesia to indicate specific forms of body work of nurses which in this case entails moving together with the baby to make her successfully perform a specific health care task—the stepping. Building on Charles Goodwin's concept of professional vision, we uncover how the nurse moves and touches the infant's body in ways relevant to the...
Foregrounding the centrality of bodies in therapeutic encounters, we adopt a video-analytic appro... more Foregrounding the centrality of bodies in therapeutic encounters, we adopt a video-analytic approach to investigate interkinesthetic engagement in the context of psychotherapy. Specifically, we examine moments where a patient and therapist collaboratively reenact – provide an embodied demonstration of – emotional events from the patient’s life. Our analysis shows how the patient and therapist work together in such moments to create an arena for the patient to learn to attend to, prolong and investigate embodiments of past memories. We discuss how such activities in therapy allow for revisiting and exploring challenging body memories in a safe and trusting setting. Furthermore, we highlight how it carries the potential to change the patient’s embodied experiences and ways of making-a-body. We discuss the clinical applications of taking such an approach to bodily expressions in psychotherapy.
Jointly coordinated affective activities are fundamental for social relationships. This study inv... more Jointly coordinated affective activities are fundamental for social relationships. This study investigates a naturally occurring interaction between two women who produced reciprocal emotional stances towards similar past experiences. Adopting a microanalytic approach, we describe how the participants re-enact their past experiences through different but aligning synchronized gestures. This embodied dialogue evolves into affective flooding, in which participants co-produce their body memories of pulling down window blinds to block out sunshine. We show how the participants live this moment intercorporeally and how multiple timescales are tied together in gesture, which is both an incarnation of body history and a novel expression of it. Thus, collaborative gesturing is a resource for experiencing together emotions re-enacted from body memories. Contributing to our understanding of the intercorporeality of human action, we provide an empirical investigation into how emotions and mult...
This study examines tactile intercorporeality between mothers and their two-to-three-year-old chi... more This study examines tactile intercorporeality between mothers and their two-to-three-year-old children in a House of Girls group. Using data from naturally occurring video-recorded group interactions, the study focuses on how mothers, children and the group tutor communicate with each other through their whole bodies while the mothers participate in various art-based group tasks in the group sessions. The study uses micro video analysis to describe how study participants engage with each other through different tactilely managed practices. These practices include bodies organizing themselves into tactile arrangements and attention formations; initiating and producing different transitions in these tactile arrangement-formations; and participating in haptic practices for handing over and receiving objects. The analysis suggests that group members produce these practices in order to experience each other tactilely, and to manage the members’ participation in the group. This study shows that in tactile intercorporeality, moving and living bodies are inseparable from communicating bodies, and that tactile intercorporeality is thus best described as mothers and children co-experiencing the same tactile ecology. Therefore, while producing practical actions in tactile intercorporeality, bodies are inevitably communicating their moment-by-moment unfolding actions and action intentions to each other. This tacit communication is manifold, and besides merely communicating about practical movements and actions, these practical actions can be enacted as resources to accomplish different kinds of interaction projects, such as communicating emotional states, controlling another person’s body or attention, and displaying a need to be in tactile connection with another person. This study suggests that tactile intercorporeality is a crucial locus for human beings’ multilayered ability to communicate with each other. The results complement the wide range of micro studies on embodied interactions, including previous studies on touch in interaction. However, this study also introduces a communicative medium that goes beyond focused interactions: living bodies’ communicating through mere co-being with each other in tactile intercorporeality. Furthermore, this study provides new methodological openings in terms of how intercorporeal phenomena and tactile intercorporeality can be analysed through video recordings. Hence it also opens up multiple possibilities for future research. The study provides more understanding of the everyday life of caregivers and their young children, describing how they go through overlapping activities as intercorporeal units. The study thus describes how managing these overlapping activities is a continuous intercorporeal accomplishment that results from tactile and other embodied negotiations of familiar bodies. The study proposes on the one hand that the existing tactile intimacy of a social relationship offers the relationship participants an opportunity for continuous tactile communication, and on the other hand that the production of tactile practices also provides participants with a medium to reproduce the intimacy of their social relationship as it unfolds moment-by-moment.
In this study, we introduce a video-ethnographic study of a research process in which nursing stu... more In this study, we introduce a video-ethnographic study of a research process in which nursing students try on exoskeletons—wearable forms of technology that are meant to decrease lower back strain when lifting something. We adopt microanalysis of video-recorded interaction to analyze moments in which a nurse tests how her body feels with the exoskeleton. Moreover, we explore how the nurse simultaneously makes accountable—observable and reportable (Garfinkel, 1967, p. vii)—to others how her body feels “inside,” i.e. her experience of kinaesthesia, or the ability of the human body to perceive its own movements and states as a ”body-in-motion” (Sheets-Johnstone, 2002, p. 138). We reflect on how the fact that we video recorded the whole process of testing the exoskeleton with three cameras and complemented our video analysis with observations and post-questionnaires enabled us to capture some of the kinesthetic, interactive, and context-specific aspects of trying on the exoskeleton.
Ergonomics in Design: The Quarterly of Human Factors Applications
In this research, we investigate user experiences with the Laevo exoskeletons in geriatric work. ... more In this research, we investigate user experiences with the Laevo exoskeletons in geriatric work. We introduce two studies where Finnish nurses used exoskeletons and identify the requirements and potential restrictions for using exoskeletons in care context. Our results show that nurses’ intentions to use the exoskeletons were mostly associated with perceived usefulness, ergonomics, and enjoyment of use. Also, social environment issues, such as other people’s reactions, are important considerations. Exoskeleton use has varying requirements depending on where it will be implemented. Thus, the end users’ ideas for the design are crucial in enabling exoskeleton use in different sectors of work.
The analysis of video-recorded interaction consists of various professionalized ways of seeing pa... more The analysis of video-recorded interaction consists of various professionalized ways of seeing participant behavior through multimodal, co-operative, or intercorporeal lenses. While these perspectives are often adopted simultaneously, each creates a different view of the human body and interaction. Moreover, microanalysis is often produced through local practices of sense-making that involve the researchers’ bodies. It has not been fully elaborated by previous research how adopting these different ways of seeing human behavior influences both what is seen from a video and how it is seen, as well as the way the interpretation of the data ultimately unfolds in the interaction between researchers. In this article, we provide a theoretical-methodological discussion of the microanalytic research process. We explore how it differs from “seeing” affect in interaction either as a co-operative and multimodal action or as an intercorporeal experience. First, we introduce the multimodal conver...
Social Interaction. Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality
This study investigates a variety of ways in which dental clinicians and adult guardians touch ch... more This study investigates a variety of ways in which dental clinicians and adult guardians touch child patients to get them to participate in dental procedures in China’s mainland. Children at the dentist’s office often experience pain and show fear, and dental care practitioners as well as adult guardians (in our case, parents and grandparents) perform tactile and haptic actions of comfort and control in response. Our analysis shows the dual roles that the children’s bodies play when touching and being touched in the dentist’s office: At times, they are agents or animators in control of their own movements; at other times, they are objects of manipulation by others. Moreover, sometimes their movements are collaboratively controlled by multiple participants, including the patient him/herself. During intercorporeal engagements in Chinese pediatric dentistry, as in many other contexts of interpersonal touch, the center of control and the source of animation of movements and actions are ...
Previous research in the social sciences has shown that haptic interaction rituals are critical f... more Previous research in the social sciences has shown that haptic interaction rituals are critical for maintaining social relationships. However, during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, ‘social distancing’ was encouraged in order to avoid the spread of disease. Drawing on data from self-ethnography as well as publicly available resources, in this study we explore some new, locally negotiated haptic trajectories to accomplish interaction rituals in the time of coronavirus. First, we present self-ethnographic observations of distancing in face-to-face encounters from our everyday lives. Second, utilizing methods of microanalysis of naturally occurring interaction, we investigate video recordings of the embodied negotiation of space and touch among politicians. We analyze three different ways in which politicians negotiate transitional moves in this haptic ritual when one party initiates a handshake: repairing, declining and apologizing. Our analysis shows that politicians adapt their...
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