Speaker

Professor Lorenza Mondada, University of Basel

Title

Minimal fleeting interactions: Exploring the elementary features of interaction

Abstract

The contribution reflects on the limits of interaction, that is, the liminal conditions at which it can be observed and recognized that a social interaction has been initiated, opened and accomplished, even if only for a few seconds.

Among the minimal occurrences discussed from this perspective, I will examine minimal exchanges of gaze, head toss, or embodied greetings in fleeting encounters. These minimal forms enable to discuss the constitutive elementary forms of mutuality that ground social interaction. Moreover, asymmetric encounters in which one party initiates the encounter and its opening, while the other party refuses to engage in it, will also be examined: these cases reveal how participants might radically disagree about the interaction but nonetheless engage in interacting in order to negotiate the closing of the encounter.

Rooted in conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, and based on actual video recording of naturally occurring fleeting encounters in public space, the paper offers a multimodal study of minimal fleeting encounters as basis for a conceptual discussion about the fundamental aspects that constitute social interaction.