Walking with Gail

Abstract

By analysing the movements through space of a famous conversation analyst delivering a well-known lecture, this paper reveals the creative construction of space within the social and physical constraints of the lecture hall, and in so doing contributes to the embodied analysis of humans in material environments. While founded in a multimodal or embodied conversation analysis, it uses terminology and insights from dance to help ‘see’ and analyse the movements as ‘footwork’ and ‘figures’.

Keywords

• Conversation analysis
• embodied interaction
• walking
• dance