Becoming in Interaction

A powerful exhibit of the centrality of language (and social interaction more broadly), Becoming in Interaction documents, with the investigative tool of conversation analysis (CA), one child's growing up in the earlier 21st century. Based on a large collection of video-recorded dinner table conversations that offer raw and unfiltered access to family life as it is actually lived, Waring presents a living map of her own child's journey into language and sociality. By exploring its twists and turns along the four dimensions of doing, thinking, feeling, and being, the author illuminates how the grand endeavor of socialization is made achievable in the micro-seconds of social interaction - pause by pause, gesture by gesture, and turn by turn. The result is a systematics for demystifying the miracle of socialization - both panoramic in its scope and pixel-perfect in its sensitivity.