ABSTRACT
The material turn has challenged traditional social scientific and humanistic research approaches. Both individual and community are rejected as a starting point for theorizing what is going on in societies and cultures. In fact, all dichotomies are deemed suspect, and the research focus draws heavily on actual practices. The concept heterogeneous assemblage is used in at least two strands of the material turn with slightly different takes on the entangled nature of practices. These are actor-network theory, ANT (cf. STS, e.g., Callon, Latour, Law) and new materialism(s) (cf. process philosophy, e.g., Deleuze, Guattari). Both can be placed under the umbrella term sociomaterialism. In their analysis of concrete phenomena, Deleuzian assemblages tend to focus on embodied sensations (affect) that have rhizomatic threads of connection, whereas ANT's assemblages include how heterogeneous entities (actants) stabilize certain practices. With a revised understanding of how the world works (ontology), the usefulness of traditional research methods (epistemology) to study concrete phenomena has also been questioned. Margaret Wetherell has suggested that affect assemblages can be analyzed as observable social practices, giving an EMCA-based study as an illustrative example. The question is whether both new materialist intensities (cf. certain approaches in psychology) and ANT's connections to other people, places, and practices (e.g., in organization studies) could be analyzed with an EMCA approach. This paper acknowledges the existing possibilities EMCA offers to analyze heterogeneous assemblages as situated interactional and material entanglements and enlarges the repertoire by focusing on 1) how the material specifics can make the EMCA "why that now" analysis connect to larger assemblages than the local accomplishment of action, and 2) how observable orientations to phenomena outside of the situation can be treated as an assemblic activity. It will do this with 1) Goodwin's concept lamination that enlarges the strictly situation-bound contextual configuration analysis to the cultural-historical formations through the use of material tools, and with 2) mentionings that combine Membership Categorization Analysis and Cooren's interest in non-human (material) actors. In other words, the well-known sociomaterial concept material-discursive is translated into two analytical possibilities to study sociomaterial heterogeneous assemblages. An empirical study illustrates the tools in practice.
ABSTRACT
The purpose of the article is to elaborate on the scholarly debate on affect. We consider the site of affect to be the activities of embodied, socioculturally and spatially situated participants: "Affective activity is a form of social practice" (Wetherell, 2015, p. 147). By studying affect as a social phenomenon, we treat affect as a social ontology. Social practices are constituted through participation in social interaction, which makes it possible to study affect empirically. Moreover, we suggest that to consider affect a social ontology connects affect to agency. We regard affect as a participants' phenomenon where emotions and knowledge are not separated, i.e., as a social epistemology. To capture the complexity of affective activity, the study of situated participation requires video data. We collected data at a center for persons with acquired brain injury (ABI), which highlights research ethics. The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) framework defines participation as involvement in life situations. ICF focuses on two broader perspectives: the body and the individual in society. We turn ICF's abstract societal perspective on participation to meaningful local accomplishments in lived social practices. Our focus is, in line with a critical social ontology in disability studies, on how-ability, the communicative abilities of the residents (Hughes, 2007). To get closer to life situations as they unfold, we analyze participation in its details as embodied actions during activities in the material environment of the center. To conclude, we demonstrate a resident's competent participation in an occupational therapy session through a fine-grained analysis of affective activity. Interaction, practices, and phenomena are complex theoretical and practical issues. In the analysis of the encounters as complex multimodal and -sensorial situations, we use an extended version of ethnomethodological conversation analysis (EMCA) that incorporates the body and material environment with the interconnectedness of interactional episodes. To do this, we enlarge the scope of analysis from the complexity of local occasions of affective activity to connections between consecutive affective entanglements. In the indicated work we draw on theoretical (lamination) and methodological (nexus analysis) suggestions in order to best pursue the sociocultural nature of situated interactions.
ABSTRACT
This article contributes to the discussion of how people with limited communication means become active participants in the assessment of welfare technologies. The article combines ethnomethodology with insights from Science and Technology Studies and emphasises the situated and multimodal practices that constitute the trial as a joint activity in which the impaired person becomes a competent participant and independent walker. The analysis is based on video recordings from a case study in which a person with brain injury is trying out a new type of walking help. The trial is understood as a situated learning process in which the participants prepare, enact and assess the performance of the technology-supported walking. The article distinguishes two iterative phases in which the impaired person is constituted as an independent walker: the adjustment and assessment of a body-device relation and, further, the performance and assessment of the activity the user can perform.
