Marjorie Harness Goodwin is currently a Distinguished Research Professor of Anthropology at UCLA. She received her PhD in Anthropology in 1978 from the University of Pennsylvania, with Erving Goffman as her chair, and she received an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University in 2014. In 2018 she was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society of Conversation Analysis. Making use of videotaped interaction, her work combines close ethnographic study with forms of multimodal Conversation Analysis to study children’s peer groups, workplace interaction, and the family. She is the author of He Said She Said: Talk as Social organization among Black Children, The Hidden Life of Girls, and Embodied Family Choreography: Practices of Control, Care, and Mundane Creativity with co-author Asta Cekaite). Her current interests include examination of the lived and embodied practices through which people establish, maintain, and negotiate intimate social relationships throughout the life span.
Our understanding of touch as a basic and complex sense is informed by phenomenological perspecti... more Our understanding of touch as a basic and complex sense is informed by phenomenological perspectives on our corporeal “being-in-the-world” and the notion of intercorporeality ( Merleau-Ponty 1964 ) as well as by sociological perspectives on social life as organized and accomplished through corporeal participation and the interaction order ( Goffman 1983 ). Intercorporeality involves sense-making of oneself and copresent others as body subjects, active in (re)producing a corporeal interaction order that is understood as tactile as well as visual and sonorous. In our review of contemporary ethnographic work, we direct our attention to touch and social interaction and discuss ( a) ritualized supportive interchanges; ( b) moves of compassion that calm a distressed child; ( c) forms of control that socialize the body and gain attention, in particular to create multisensorial, instructional environments; and ( d) forms of touch during care and bodywork in medical and therapeutic contexts.
Proceedings of ICLS 2020 (International Conference of the Learning Sciences), 2020
The core of human connection is embodied action, with synchrony, coordinated movement, and affect... more The core of human connection is embodied action, with synchrony, coordinated movement, and affective attunement through the body present from infancy. Yet whereas all students have the capacity for co-presence, a common focus of formal educational institutions on spoken language for interaction makes communication inaccessible to some students, thus impeding their participation in learning. As such, toward providing resources for nonverbal autistic students we must ask: How do we design for inclusive social participation of students with diverse interactional modalities? This paper outlines the development of an embodied-design solution that centers the dynamic body as the nexus of social interaction, thus reclaiming the natural versatility of multimodal interpersonal communication. The Magical Musical Mat is a domain-general platform that allows people to interact through the non-speaking modalities of touch and sound. It removes interactional asymmetry between diverse interlocutor...
Page 1. Ethnicity/Class/Gender in Children's Negotiations 229 10 The Relevan... more Page 1. Ethnicity/Class/Gender in Children's Negotiations 229 10 The Relevance of Ethnicity, Class, and Gender in Children's Peer Negotiations MARJORIE HARNESS GOODWIN While considerable attention has been paid ...
Social Interaction. Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality
Within a participatory research project, we investigate how forms of touch we call caring touch a... more Within a participatory research project, we investigate how forms of touch we call caring touch are enacted in AdHF medical encounters. Through the theoretical lens of Relational Ontology (Raia, 2018), grounding multimodality in phenomenology, we identify various forms of caring touch. When occurring in conjunction with medical/diagnostic touch, especially in situations of a perceived patient’s vulnerability, caring touch facilitates passages from the person level to the organ, tissue, and gene levels and then back to the whole-person level in an uninterrupted movement, maintaining the person-person relation between doctor and patient. Gentle shepherding (Cekaite, 2010) is used to guide the patient body, and comforting touch (Goodwin & Cekaite, 2018) accompanies invitations to enter a space where death is part of living. We show the existential grounding power of caring touch, which constitutes forms of reciprocal sharing of existential experiences in caring-for-the-Other. All these...
Our understanding of touch as a basic and complex sense is informed by phenomenological perspecti... more Our understanding of touch as a basic and complex sense is informed by phenomenological perspectives on our corporeal “being-in-the-world” and the notion of intercorporeality ( Merleau-Ponty 1964 ) as well as by sociological perspectives on social life as organized and accomplished through corporeal participation and the interaction order ( Goffman 1983 ). Intercorporeality involves sense-making of oneself and copresent others as body subjects, active in (re)producing a corporeal interaction order that is understood as tactile as well as visual and sonorous. In our review of contemporary ethnographic work, we direct our attention to touch and social interaction and discuss ( a) ritualized supportive interchanges; ( b) moves of compassion that calm a distressed child; ( c) forms of control that socialize the body and gain attention, in particular to create multisensorial, instructional environments; and ( d) forms of touch during care and bodywork in medical and therapeutic contexts.
Proceedings of ICLS 2020 (International Conference of the Learning Sciences), 2020
The core of human connection is embodied action, with synchrony, coordinated movement, and affect... more The core of human connection is embodied action, with synchrony, coordinated movement, and affective attunement through the body present from infancy. Yet whereas all students have the capacity for co-presence, a common focus of formal educational institutions on spoken language for interaction makes communication inaccessible to some students, thus impeding their participation in learning. As such, toward providing resources for nonverbal autistic students we must ask: How do we design for inclusive social participation of students with diverse interactional modalities? This paper outlines the development of an embodied-design solution that centers the dynamic body as the nexus of social interaction, thus reclaiming the natural versatility of multimodal interpersonal communication. The Magical Musical Mat is a domain-general platform that allows people to interact through the non-speaking modalities of touch and sound. It removes interactional asymmetry between diverse interlocutor...
Page 1. Ethnicity/Class/Gender in Children's Negotiations 229 10 The Relevan... more Page 1. Ethnicity/Class/Gender in Children's Negotiations 229 10 The Relevance of Ethnicity, Class, and Gender in Children's Peer Negotiations MARJORIE HARNESS GOODWIN While considerable attention has been paid ...
Social Interaction. Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality
Within a participatory research project, we investigate how forms of touch we call caring touch a... more Within a participatory research project, we investigate how forms of touch we call caring touch are enacted in AdHF medical encounters. Through the theoretical lens of Relational Ontology (Raia, 2018), grounding multimodality in phenomenology, we identify various forms of caring touch. When occurring in conjunction with medical/diagnostic touch, especially in situations of a perceived patient’s vulnerability, caring touch facilitates passages from the person level to the organ, tissue, and gene levels and then back to the whole-person level in an uninterrupted movement, maintaining the person-person relation between doctor and patient. Gentle shepherding (Cekaite, 2010) is used to guide the patient body, and comforting touch (Goodwin & Cekaite, 2018) accompanies invitations to enter a space where death is part of living. We show the existential grounding power of caring touch, which constitutes forms of reciprocal sharing of existential experiences in caring-for-the-Other. All these...
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