Gaze and the Organization of Participation in Collective Visual Conduct

Abstract

In this article, we demonstrate how participants make use of others’ gazing actions to monitor and engage events in their surroundings. Specifically, we focus on a tension between one sort of gazing action that participants freely join in, “noticing”, and another, “watching”, that is subject to constraints related to participant identities toward a collective and their corresponding rights of membership that include toward what and with whom they may gaze. Employing the method of conversation analysis, we provide a fine-grained examination of differences between the two gazing actions that include movements of the head, body, eyes, and feet, and highlight how these differences provide a resource for differentially orienting to the environment and joining in visually based activities with others.

Keywords

• gaze
• action formation
• participation frameworks
• group membership