Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis and the Analysis of Technologized Interaction at Work with Functional Diversity & Mixed Abilities

Prof. Maija Hirvonen (Tampere University)

My talk explores theoretical and methodological positions in the ethnomethodological and conversation-analytical studies (EMCA) of dis/ability in technologized workplace interaction. The talk features research questions and sample analyses from a major European research and innovation project, NewWorkTech, which has collected naturalistic video-recorded data with six different dis/ability groups and from workplaces in six different countries.

EMCA aims at describing systems of situated human conduct and practices of social and technologized interaction from the members’ perspective. Today, this perspective is typically accomplished by an analytical process of interpreting naturally occurring video data in such way that researchers seek to understand the observable conduct and practices as one of the participants. With the emphasis on multimodality and, increasingly, multisensoriality, the analysis of interaction involves a detailed observation of the spatial, visual and other nonverbal modalities as resources of the system.

With regard to dis/ability and functional diversity, such as blindness or neurodivergence, EMCA studies must question the premises of acquiring a ”members’ perspective” in (inter)action which is (yet) not known to or experienced by the researcher. My talk intends to pave some ways for the methodological development in order to analyse (technologized) interaction cooperatively from the perspective of functional diversity and mixed ability – concepts which do not put ontological priority to any one sense or way of being in the world.