Touch in Social Interaction

Asta Cekaite is a professor in Child Studies at Linköping University. Her research involves an interdisciplinary approach to language, culture, and social interaction. Specific foci include social perspectives on embodiment, touch, emotion, and moral socialization. Empirical fields cover adult–child and children’s peer group interactions in educational settings, and family. With M. Goodwin, she has co-authored Embodied Family Choreography: Practices of Control, Care and Mundane Creativity (2018). Lorenza Mondada is a professor of Linguistics at the University of Basel. Her research deals with social interaction in ordinary, professional, and institutional settings, within an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic perspective (EMCA). Her focus is on video analysis and multimodality, integrating language, and embodiment in the study of human action. Currently she works on how interactants engage not only in coordinating their joint actions in publicly accountable manners, but also in sensing the material world together – within an EMCA perspective on sensoriality in interaction.

'The blossoming research on multimodal interaction has mainly focused on gaze and gesture. This book is the first to explore the richness of uses of a hitherto neglected bodily resource: touch. It reveals the fundamental role that haptic practices play both for emotional exchanges and professional action in contemporary societies.'Arnulf Deppermann, Leibniz-Institute for the German Language, Germany

• List of contributors1. Towards an interactional approach to touch in social encountersAsta Cekaite and Lorenza Mondada2. The Interactive Construction of a Hug SequenceMarjorie Harness Goodwin3. The tactility and visibility of kissing: intercorporeal configurations of kissing bodies in family photography sessions Lorenza Mondada, David Monteiro, and Burak S. Tekin4. Touch as embodied compassion in responses to pain and distressAsta Cekaite5. Control touch in caregiver–child interaction: embodied organization in triadic mediation of peer conflict in Swedish and JapaneseMatthew Burdelski and Asta Cekaite6. When a dance hold becomes illegitimate Leelo Keevallik7. To touch and to be touched: the coordination of touching-whole-body-movements in Aikido practiceAugustin Lefebvre 8. Touching and petting: exploring "haptic sociality" in interspecies interaction Chloé Mondémé9. Professional touch in speech and language therapy for the treatment of post-stroke aphasiaSara Merlino10. Guided touch: the sequential organization of feeling a fetus in Japanese midwifery practicesAug Nishizaka11. Passing touch: handing and handling tools and implements during surgical proceduresChristian Heath and Paul Luff12. Calibrating professional perception through touch in geological fieldworkCharles Goodwin and Michael Sean Smith13. Sensorial explorations of food: How professionals and amateurs touch cheese in gourmet shopsLorenza Mondada14. Ambivalences of touch: an epilogue Christian Meyer and Jürgen StreeckIndex