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.

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

Chloé Mondémé

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 fieldworkCharles 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 Jürgen Streeck

Index