Touch in Social Interaction

Asta Cekaite is a professor in Child Studies at Linkoeping 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.

List of contributors





1. Towards an interactional approach to touch in social encounters


Asta Cekaite and Lorenza Mondada





2. The Interactive Construction of a Hug Sequence


Marjorie Harness Goodwin





3. The tactility and visibility of kissing: intercorporeal configurations of kissing bodies in family photography sessions


Lorenza Mondada, David Monteiro, and Burak S. Tekin





4. Touch as embodied compassion in responses to pain and distress


Asta Cekaite





5. Control touch in caregiver-child interaction: embodied organization in triadic mediation of peer conflict in Swedish and Japanese


Matthew Burdelski and Asta Cekaite





6. When a dance hold becomes illegitimate


Leelo Keevallik





7. To touch and to be touched: the coordination of touching-whole-body-movements in Aikido practice


Augustin Lefebvre





8. Touching and petting: exploring "haptic sociality" in interspecies interaction


Chloe Mondeme





9. Professional touch in speech and language therapy for the treatment of post-stroke aphasia


Sara Merlino





10. Guided touch: the sequential organization of feeling a fetus in Japanese midwifery practices


Aug Nishizaka





11. Passing touch: handing and handling tools and implements during surgical procedures


Christian Heath and Paul Luff





12. Calibrating professional perception through touch in geological fieldwork
Charles Goodwin and Michael Sean Smith



13. Sensorial explorations of food: How professionals and amateurs touch cheese in gourmet shops


Lorenza Mondada





14. Ambivalences of touch: an epilogue


Christian Meyer and Jurgen Streeck





Index