Maurice Nevile
I research in conversation analysis (CA), with a focus on social interaction for collaborative work, especially in commercial aviation (e.g. pilots' work). I also research short form poetry (haiku/senryu) as therapy for loss and grief. I live in Australia, and am an Adjunct (Visiting) Professor at the University of Canberra in the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research. Previously I have held positions in Finland (2011-2012), Denmark (2012-2017, resident 3 months per year), and for 10 years at the Australian National Univ., and four years at the Univ. of Canberra.
CONVERSATION ANALYSIS (CA): from the late 1990s I have used video recordings to examine naturally occurring social interaction, especially in settings of collaborative work - the language and embodied practices through which people understand and accomplish the activities for which they are jointly accountable e.g. commercial/military aviation (inc. accidents/incidents), participatory design, dressmaking, and forklift truck driving. I've also conducted major studies on problem gambling, and distraction in car driving.
I completed the 8-day advanced course in conversation analysis at UCLA (2006, Schegloff, Heritage, Lerner), three short courses with Gail Jefferson, and courses with Charles and Candy Goodwin, Lerner, Drew, Heritage, Antaki, and others.
My interests include how people...
1. sequentially organise conduct for social actions (e.g. commands, instructions, requests, proposals) to perform tasks
2. accomplish mobility in and through interaction
3. see and interpret in consequential ways; organise attention and participation
4. touch/use objects and material resources, and orient their bodies within surrounding physical space
5. time and sequence their contributions to progress to next relevant activities and build coherent courses of activity (e.g. and-prefaced turns)
6. create a sense of completion and closure for activities
7. create, identify and resolve, moments of trouble in understanding, action, collaboration, or agreement
8. talk and act to realise, and allow for others, particular roles and responsibilities (e.g through I/you/we pronominal choices)
9. coordinate their activities with others who are physically absent e.g. via radio (pilots and air traffic controllers)
My 2004 book 'Beyond the black box: Talk-in-interaction in the airline cockpit', Ashgate UK), used real flight cockpit video data to examine how pilots coordinate talk and activity to perform tasks. The book launched the series 'Directions in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis'. As co-editor I published three books on social interaction, one focussing on objects and another on multiactivity (both published by John Benjamins, 2014), while a third focussed on interaction and mobility (published by De Gruyter, 2013). I have also co-edited two special issues, one for the journal 'Semiotica', on interaction between drivers and passengers in cars (August 2012), and another for the journal 'Australian Review of Applied Linguistics' (2007) presenting Australian studies in CA.
Other research includes reports for the Australian national government, chapters in books, and papers in the international journals 'Computer Supported Cooperative Work', 'Discourse Studies', 'Human Factors and Aerospace Safety', 'Language in Society', 'Research on Language and Social Interaction', 'Semiotica', and 'Text & Talk'. In Australia I have published in the journals 'Aust. Journal of Linguistics', 'Aust. Review of Applied Linguistics', 'Aust. Journal of Language and Literacy', 'Aust. Journal for Adult Literacy Research and Practice', and 'The Aboriginal Child at School'.
POETRY: I have published in national and international journals, such as 'cattails', 'Echidna Tracks', 'Failed Haiku', 'Frogpond', ''Kingfisher', 'Modern Haiku', 'Presence', 'Prune Juice', 'Stardust Haiku', 'tinywords', and 'Wales Haiku Journal'. In 2022 I published my first poetry collection, 'Translating Loss'.
See examples of poetry here:
https://thehaikufoundation.org/poet-details/?IDclient=2812
https://senryu.life/index-of-poets/24-index-n/146-nevile,-maurice.html
EDITING / PROOFREADING: I have experience advising on over 2000 texts, most recently as consultant editor at the Australian National University editing texts for the Global Commission on the Economics of Water (OECD). See https://mauricenevileeditor.com.au/
QUALIFICATIONS: I have an earned research doctorate (PhD, Linguistics, Australian National Univ., 2002), and obtained a Docentship (Adjunct Professor) from the University of Oulu in Finland (2012). Before my PhD I completed BA Hons (1989, First Class) and MA (1990) degrees from Macquarie University (Sydney).
Address: Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, University of Canberra, https://www.canberra.edu.au/research/faculty-research-centres/cccr
CONVERSATION ANALYSIS (CA): from the late 1990s I have used video recordings to examine naturally occurring social interaction, especially in settings of collaborative work - the language and embodied practices through which people understand and accomplish the activities for which they are jointly accountable e.g. commercial/military aviation (inc. accidents/incidents), participatory design, dressmaking, and forklift truck driving. I've also conducted major studies on problem gambling, and distraction in car driving.
I completed the 8-day advanced course in conversation analysis at UCLA (2006, Schegloff, Heritage, Lerner), three short courses with Gail Jefferson, and courses with Charles and Candy Goodwin, Lerner, Drew, Heritage, Antaki, and others.
My interests include how people...
1. sequentially organise conduct for social actions (e.g. commands, instructions, requests, proposals) to perform tasks
2. accomplish mobility in and through interaction
3. see and interpret in consequential ways; organise attention and participation
4. touch/use objects and material resources, and orient their bodies within surrounding physical space
5. time and sequence their contributions to progress to next relevant activities and build coherent courses of activity (e.g. and-prefaced turns)
6. create a sense of completion and closure for activities
7. create, identify and resolve, moments of trouble in understanding, action, collaboration, or agreement
8. talk and act to realise, and allow for others, particular roles and responsibilities (e.g through I/you/we pronominal choices)
9. coordinate their activities with others who are physically absent e.g. via radio (pilots and air traffic controllers)
My 2004 book 'Beyond the black box: Talk-in-interaction in the airline cockpit', Ashgate UK), used real flight cockpit video data to examine how pilots coordinate talk and activity to perform tasks. The book launched the series 'Directions in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis'. As co-editor I published three books on social interaction, one focussing on objects and another on multiactivity (both published by John Benjamins, 2014), while a third focussed on interaction and mobility (published by De Gruyter, 2013). I have also co-edited two special issues, one for the journal 'Semiotica', on interaction between drivers and passengers in cars (August 2012), and another for the journal 'Australian Review of Applied Linguistics' (2007) presenting Australian studies in CA.
Other research includes reports for the Australian national government, chapters in books, and papers in the international journals 'Computer Supported Cooperative Work', 'Discourse Studies', 'Human Factors and Aerospace Safety', 'Language in Society', 'Research on Language and Social Interaction', 'Semiotica', and 'Text & Talk'. In Australia I have published in the journals 'Aust. Journal of Linguistics', 'Aust. Review of Applied Linguistics', 'Aust. Journal of Language and Literacy', 'Aust. Journal for Adult Literacy Research and Practice', and 'The Aboriginal Child at School'.
POETRY: I have published in national and international journals, such as 'cattails', 'Echidna Tracks', 'Failed Haiku', 'Frogpond', ''Kingfisher', 'Modern Haiku', 'Presence', 'Prune Juice', 'Stardust Haiku', 'tinywords', and 'Wales Haiku Journal'. In 2022 I published my first poetry collection, 'Translating Loss'.
See examples of poetry here:
https://thehaikufoundation.org/poet-details/?IDclient=2812
https://senryu.life/index-of-poets/24-index-n/146-nevile,-maurice.html
EDITING / PROOFREADING: I have experience advising on over 2000 texts, most recently as consultant editor at the Australian National University editing texts for the Global Commission on the Economics of Water (OECD). See https://mauricenevileeditor.com.au/
QUALIFICATIONS: I have an earned research doctorate (PhD, Linguistics, Australian National Univ., 2002), and obtained a Docentship (Adjunct Professor) from the University of Oulu in Finland (2012). Before my PhD I completed BA Hons (1989, First Class) and MA (1990) degrees from Macquarie University (Sydney).
Address: Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, University of Canberra, https://www.canberra.edu.au/research/faculty-research-centres/cccr
less
Uploads
Books, edited collections, monographs
WINNER, 'ACT Notable Book Award for Poetry'
Judge: “Through words and watercolours, the grief of loss is translated, and like all translations, it creates something novel: phrases in which hope finds a home where life can rediscover its sedate, stable flow.”
From the AFTERWORD by Hazel Hall, Australian poet and musicologist
“Haiku is the perfect medium for expressing pain which so often cannot be communicated in ordinary language … In this poignant collection, Maurice Nevile reveals the beauty that lies on the other side of sorrow. It is a book that many readers will wish to revisit again and again.”
Sample haiku:
hospice dawn
a willow disappears
in river mist
one petal
resists the breeze
losing her
two years on
sometimes still reaching
for two plates
early bulbs
such vibrant colours
she left us
the blues
of a quilted sea
I dive into dreams
Haiku from 'Translating Loss', Maurice Nevile (2022)
See more at the publisher site: https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/z.186
It examines in detail the communication that pilots engage in with one another and with other parties, such as traffic controllers, as they perform the routine tasks involved in flying an aircraft. It also makes an important contribution to literature on work and language by addressing one of the most highly technological settings there is: the aircraft cockpit.Using data taken from audio and video recordings of pilots talking in aircraft cockpits on actual scheduled passenger flights, it draws on the analytical approaches of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to analyse their task-related communications. It shows that although the tasks performed by pilots may be 'routine', the communications in and through which they are managed are artful accomplishments. Through the shaping of their talk, the pilots manage its indexical and situated properties in effective and skilled ways. In so doing they accomplish in their moment-by-moment interaction the required features of the pilot's work in the cockpit.
An airline pilot and researcher in ‘aviation human factors’ once described the goal of all airline pilots as ‘to get people from A to B without killing them’: this book explores the place of talk, or actually ‘talk-in-interaction’, in pilots’ achievement of this laudable goal. The book considers how pilots talk and interact with one another, routinely, as they establish what is going on around them, who knows what, who is doing what, and what they are to do next. It explores how, through processes of ‘talk-in-interaction’, pilots develop and make available to one another their situated and moment-to-moment understandings as they work together as a flight crew to perform necessary activities and tasks to fly their plane. The term ‘talk-in-interaction’ reflects an interest here in not just talk, that is verbal aspects of interaction, but pilots’ use of a range of available resources as they make, and interpret as meaningful, contributions to their ongoing work together.
REVIEW COMMENTS
Professor Charles Goodwin, UCLA, USA:-
"Nevile gives us a most original study of cognition and action in the airline cockpit...he insightfully examines how [pilots] use language and gestures linked to the equipment they are using to build consequential collaborative action. His study sheds new light on the organization of talk and action in a most interesting workplace. With its analysis of situated action and language use in a complex technological environment it should be of interest to many different fields."
N.K. Jenkings, from review in the journal 'Sociology':
“Synchronisation and coordination of verbal and non-verbal activities that could not be scripted, and the achievement of mutual understanding are well illustrated by transcript, photographs and description. Through his detailed descriptions of various piloting activities, Nevile provides the reader with actual situated and locally contingent practices of piloting an aircraft that no formal manual could ever provide”
Lorena M. A. de-Matteis, from review in the journal 'Language in Society':
"In sum, the results ... highlight the different ways in which technical crews turn the scripted wordings from company standard operating procedures (SOPs) for cockpit interaction (the so-called “standard callouts”) into real use during their daily routine work, thus continuously constructing an evolving and shared knowledge of the flight’s progression. ...Nevile argues for the necessity of studying talk-in-interaction taking into consideration the
complex interrelations of all the interactional features, from proxemics and gestures to prosody, grammar, and semantics. He also relates the book’s insights into routine interpersonal communication between crew members to human–technology interaction, on the one hand, and to the conceptualization of cognition as a situated phenomenon to which talk-in-interaction greatly contributes, on the other. ... Clearly written and helpful to the lay reader, Nevile’s book not only offers a thorough example of how talk-in-interaction can be studied in a particular sociotechnical setting but also signals a path to be followed by researchers interested in aviation safety."
Airline pilot, Amazon book review:
"This is an amazing project, carefully executed, thoughtfully recorded. Let's state right away that this is NOT one of those books that have 'black box' recordings of aviation accidents. It is rather a ground-breaking nothing-quite-like-it incredibly detailed micro-analysis of routine language and interaction in the professional airline cockpit. For the applied psychology researcher interested in how pilots really communicate in a cockpit or answering questions of small team cognition this is a valuable reference, fully citing its own sources. As someone lucky enough to be a LOSA observer at a major airline, I appreciate that this subject requires carefully study to make realistic suggestions."
THE CHAPTERS ARE:
1 The Workplace as Social Interaction
PART I “I’LL TAKE CLIMB POWER.”
ACCOMPLISHING COCKPIT IDENTITIES THROUGH
PRONOMINAL LANGUAGE
2 Accomplishing Cockpit Identities:
(1) Prescribed Pronominal Forms
3 Accomplishing Cockpit Identities:
(2) Non-prescribed Pronominal Forms
PART II “THAT’S SET".
COORDINATING TALK AND NON-TALK ACTIVITY
4 Accomplishing Takeoff Tasks
5 Managing Tasks in Flight
PART III “HE SAID FINAL APPROACH SPEED.”
INTEGRATING TALK-IN-INTERACTION WITHIN
AND BEYOND THE COCKPIT
6 Talking with Controllers:
(1) Pilot-Pilot Talk Occasioned by Talk with Controllers
7 Talking with Controllers:
(2) Abstaining from Pilot-Pilot Talk about Talk with Controllers
8 Conclusion and Implications"""
See more at the publisher site: http://www.degruyter.com/view/product/183760
The chapters are:
PART I: INTRODUCTION
'Being mobile: Interaction on the move'
Pentti Haddington, Lorenza Mondada and Maurice Nevile
PART II: STAGING AND COLLABORATING FOR MOBILITY
'Withdrawing from exhibits: The interactional organisation of museum visits'
Dirk vom Lehn
'A Walk on the Pier: Establishing relevant places in mobile instruction'
Mathias Broth & Fredrik Lundström
'The collaborative organisation of next actions in a semiotically rich environment: Shopping as a couple'
Elwys De Stefani
'Seeing on the move: Mobile collaboration on the battlefield'
Maurice Nevile
PART III: PROJECTING AND ENGAGING MOBILITY
'Projecting mobility: Passengers directing the driver at junctions'
Pentti Haddington
'Before, in and after: Cars making their way through roundabouts'
Eric Laurier
PART IV: COORDINATING AND CONTROLLING MOBILITY
'Centers of coordination as a nexus of mobile systems'
Inka Koskela, Ilkka Arminen & Hannele Palukka
'Interactionally Generated Encounters and the accomplishment of mutual proximity in Mobile Phone Conversations'
Christian Licoppe and Julien Morel
'Coordinating mobile action in real time: The timely organisation of directives in video games'
Lorenza Mondada
PART V: CREATING AND PERFORMING MOBILITY
'Decomposing movement: spatial deixis in dance instruction'
Leelo Keevallik
'The sociality of stillness'
Karine Lan Hing Ting, Dimitri Voilmy, Monika Büscher & Drew Hemment
PART VI: EPILOGUE
'Interacting Outside the Box: Between Social Interaction and Mobilities'
Paul McIlvenny"""
See more at the publisher site: https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/z.187/main
In this collection the car is considered as a ‘place’ or ‘space’ for meaningful and mediated activities. The papers examine how the physical and spatial configuration of the car, and its possibilities for mobility, can constrain or afford particular interactional practices, social activities and understandings, and impact upon language and processes of interaction. Interaction in cars creates particular demands, opportunities and orientations for its participants, as the car moves through the semiotically rich external environment. Generally, the papers consider driving as not merely a requisite competence for accomplishing travel from point A to point B, but as occurring itself as a situated activity that is integrated with ordinary conversation.
Most research on driving and automobility follows one of two broad directions: driving safety research; and the social and cultural meanings of automobility and driving. Driving safety research, on the one hand, is mostly dominated by studies conducted within a psychological and cognitive scientific framework. In social sciences and human geography, on the other hand, such dominant approaches to driving and drivers have increasingly been critiqued for undermining the cultural and sociological meanings of automobility and driving. Consequently, with the emergence of ‘mobility studies’, scholars have begun to study the social, cultural, and ideological meanings and discourses of the car, car cultures, driving cultures, driving practices, automobility, road systems, and traffic systems, as parts of modern life.
The papers in this special issue can therefore contribute to interdisciplinary dialogue between social scientific and psychological driving research. Further empirical knowledge is needed of how people organize their talk and embodied activities for social activity in cars, and relative to the contingencies of the driving situation and the physical and spatial layout of the car. By drawing on a specific empirical research methodology that relies on recorded data collected from real-life situations inside the car, the papers of this collection can add to the important interdisciplinary discussion that surrounds driving, safety and automobility, and provide food for thought by addressing central issues, raising questions, and perhaps even by providing some answers.
The chapters are:
Pentti Haddington, Maurice Nevile, and Tiina Keisanen
'Meaning in motion: Sharing the car, sharing the drive'
Eric Laurier, Barry Brown, and Hayden Lorimer
'What it means to change lanes: Actions, emotions, and wayfinding in the family car
Pentti Haddington
'Movement in action: Initiating social navigation in cars'
Maurice Nevile
'Interaction as distraction in driving: A body of evidence'
Tiina Keisanen
' “Uh-oh, we were going there”: Environmentally occasioned
noticings of trouble in in-car interaction'
Lorenza Mondada
'Talking and driving: Multi-activity in the car'
Marjorie Harness Goodwin and Charles Goodwin
'Car talk: Integrating texts, bodies, and changing landscapes'
Elizabeth Keating and Gene Mirus
'The eyes have it: Technologies of automobility in sign language'
Chaim Noy
'Inhabiting the family-car: Children-passengers and parents-drivers on the school run
handling the steering wheel. The study uses naturally occurring data, in-car video recordings of driving in real-world driving situations. The study examines in detail how different forms of in-car distractions develop in situ in real time, and relative to driving activities and to one another.
The literature review examined the link between identifying problem gamblers at venues and current provisions of responsibility in Australia and found that a public health approach was adopted by all states towards minimising harm associated with gambling.
The empirical research carried out in Australia had three components for:
(a) Surveys and consultation with industry staff and problem gambling counsellors;
(b) A detailed survey study of regular gamblers and
(c) Observational work at venues
For the latter, the observational study examined the extent of behaviour visible in the venues, frequency of occurrence, sequencing and how they appeared in reality. Two observational studies were conducted in ACT and South Australia, with over 149 hours of observation conducted on hundreds of gamblers.
For the surveys, over 120 venue/industry staff and 20 counsellors were involved for the first component; 700 regular gamblers surveyed for the second component.
The issue is hard to find online as older issues are not consistently and well supported by the journal's own association (ALAA). But here is the list of contents:
Maurice Nevile & Johanna Rendle-Short: ‘Language as action’ 30.1 *****
Michael Emmison & Susan Danby: ‘Who’s the friend in the background?: Interactional strategies in determining authenticity in calls to a national children’s helpline’ 31.1 *****
Marian May: ‘Troubled conception: Negotiating the likelihood of having children’ 32.1 *****
Anna Filipi: ‘A toddler’s treatment of mm and mm hm in talk with a parent’. 33.1 *****
Louise Skelt: ‘Damage control: closing problematic sequences in hearing-impaired interaction’ 34.1 *****
Rod Gardner & Ilana Mushin: ‘Post-start-up overlap and disattentiveness in talk in a Garrwa community’ 35.1 *****
Helena Austin & Richard Fitzgerald: ‘Resisting categorisation: An ordinary mother’ 36.1 *****
Co-authored with colleagues from the ANU Study Skills Centre (student support centre)
Papers, chapters, others
That paper includes a discussion of terminology (pp129-132), and the potential impact of variation in terminology for analyses, and for the field more widely. It considers “whether there is any basis for, or consequence of, such a great range of terminological wordings.” (p129), and suggests that wide variation in terminology “can lead to ambiguity, imprecision, inconsistency, redundancy, or wasted potential for terminology to express subtle and significant aspects of the body’s involvement and contribution to achieve sense making and intelligible order for social interaction.” (p130). The paper argues that “There is then a risk that such substantial terminological variation can indicate or even lead to confusion among scholars within the field (and beyond) and hinder shared understanding and establishment of identified embodied practices.” (p130). The paper proposes a way forward for clear and consistent terminology to refer generally to the body in studies of language and social interaction.
http://talkbank.org/browser/index.php?url=CABank/Jefferson/Boston77-Poetics.cha
This introduction gives detail of the talk, the availability of the recording, and some personal motivations and reflections.
The active CLAN transcript, linked to the video, is now available at
Talkbank.org:
http://talkbank.org/browser/index.php?url=CABank/Jefferson/Boston77-Poetics.cha
and
emca-legacy.info
http://emca-legacy.info/jefferson.html
The film recording was generously made available by George Psathas, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Boston University. Prof Doug Maynard (University of Wisconsin) arranged for the original film recording to be digitised. I am grateful to Julia Ruser for technical assistance to convert my original transcription in Word into CLAN, and for precisely timing silences.
Jefferson later developed elements of her 1977 talk into the paper ‘On the poetics of ordinary talk’ (Jefferson. G. 1996, in Text and Performance Quarterly, 16,1:1-61). An indication of the significance of the talk is given in that paper’s abstract, where Jefferson notes that, “The 1977 talk was specifically directed to loosening up people’s sense of the sort of work done in the field of Conversation Analysis” (p.1). Jefferson describes the 1996 paper as “a more considered and elaborated version of that talk” (p.1). She notes also that at the time of the talk, a year and half after Harvey Sacks’ death, conversation analysis (CA) was becoming identified very closely with the 1974 Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson paper ‘A simplest systematics...’. Her talk was therefore developed as “an antidote to that drastically constricted version of the field” (p.1), and as “an expression of the wild side of Conversation Analysis” (p.1). Jefferson refers in the paper to a transcription of the talk completed and sent to her by Robert Hopper. I have not seen that transcription and don’t know of its level of detail, but I note that the 1996 poetics paper begins with text apparently paralleling the talk’s content, under the heading ‘The Boston talk (as it never was)’ (p.2) - this would therefore seem to be adapted from Hopper’s transcription. So in my transcription I aim to give a clearer sense of the Boston talk as it actually was.
I developed the transcription primarily as a more detailed record of the talk, as a talk, with no intention to pursue any kind of analysis. I was interested in representing at least something of the content and flow of Jefferson’s spoken analytic voice, especially as reflecting and contributing to the early years of CA’s development and emergence. I hope that the transcription can make further visible the nature of Jefferson’s contribution in the foundation years, such as her approach to data and phenomena, and as representative of the collegial and collaborative context in which she was working.
The period of audience questions and discussion after the talk I have transcribed only relatively minimally.
As a personal comment, it was a delight to listen to and transcribe this video recorded talk by Gail Jefferson, and to see her present on her work in 1977 during the first years of conversation analysis. Apart from the professional interest, I learned that we shared an interest in American football.
As an Australian, I met and knew Gail only much later when I was fortunate to be taught by her in Denmark at two week-long summer schools for new researchers (2000, 2003), and then at a two-day masterclass (2007). These courses were demanding, and in equal measure immensely rewarding and challenging (to say the least), as she responded to and critiqued our analyses of data, and our own transcriptions. I remain indebted to Gail for her insistence on precision in the pursuit and representation of interactional phenomena.
Of different occasions, socially and collegially, of Gail Jefferson I have especially strong and fond memories of a restaurant dinner in Odense with Maria Egbert and Johannes Wagner, and together with Johannes Wagner driving from Denmark to Sweden for the 2007 IPrA Conference in Gothenburg, where she gave what I understand was her final formal conference presentation. Some months later she was kind enough to reply to an email message and tell me of her advanced illness. I remember too her parting comment after one summerschool, “see you in Australia some time”. Unfortunately in Australia I have had no relevant department/discipline position or substantial CA connections, and so I was not able to invite her.
I am certain that Gail would have thought this transcription to be inadequate, but I hope she would not have minded it as a personal, respectful, and appreciative attempt to capture and detail one brief moment of her wider contribution to the field as she gives “a guided tour through the data”, providing in 1977 a view of the “wild side” of CA.
WINNER, 'ACT Notable Book Award for Poetry'
Judge: “Through words and watercolours, the grief of loss is translated, and like all translations, it creates something novel: phrases in which hope finds a home where life can rediscover its sedate, stable flow.”
From the AFTERWORD by Hazel Hall, Australian poet and musicologist
“Haiku is the perfect medium for expressing pain which so often cannot be communicated in ordinary language … In this poignant collection, Maurice Nevile reveals the beauty that lies on the other side of sorrow. It is a book that many readers will wish to revisit again and again.”
Sample haiku:
hospice dawn
a willow disappears
in river mist
one petal
resists the breeze
losing her
two years on
sometimes still reaching
for two plates
early bulbs
such vibrant colours
she left us
the blues
of a quilted sea
I dive into dreams
Haiku from 'Translating Loss', Maurice Nevile (2022)
See more at the publisher site: https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/z.186
It examines in detail the communication that pilots engage in with one another and with other parties, such as traffic controllers, as they perform the routine tasks involved in flying an aircraft. It also makes an important contribution to literature on work and language by addressing one of the most highly technological settings there is: the aircraft cockpit.Using data taken from audio and video recordings of pilots talking in aircraft cockpits on actual scheduled passenger flights, it draws on the analytical approaches of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to analyse their task-related communications. It shows that although the tasks performed by pilots may be 'routine', the communications in and through which they are managed are artful accomplishments. Through the shaping of their talk, the pilots manage its indexical and situated properties in effective and skilled ways. In so doing they accomplish in their moment-by-moment interaction the required features of the pilot's work in the cockpit.
An airline pilot and researcher in ‘aviation human factors’ once described the goal of all airline pilots as ‘to get people from A to B without killing them’: this book explores the place of talk, or actually ‘talk-in-interaction’, in pilots’ achievement of this laudable goal. The book considers how pilots talk and interact with one another, routinely, as they establish what is going on around them, who knows what, who is doing what, and what they are to do next. It explores how, through processes of ‘talk-in-interaction’, pilots develop and make available to one another their situated and moment-to-moment understandings as they work together as a flight crew to perform necessary activities and tasks to fly their plane. The term ‘talk-in-interaction’ reflects an interest here in not just talk, that is verbal aspects of interaction, but pilots’ use of a range of available resources as they make, and interpret as meaningful, contributions to their ongoing work together.
REVIEW COMMENTS
Professor Charles Goodwin, UCLA, USA:-
"Nevile gives us a most original study of cognition and action in the airline cockpit...he insightfully examines how [pilots] use language and gestures linked to the equipment they are using to build consequential collaborative action. His study sheds new light on the organization of talk and action in a most interesting workplace. With its analysis of situated action and language use in a complex technological environment it should be of interest to many different fields."
N.K. Jenkings, from review in the journal 'Sociology':
“Synchronisation and coordination of verbal and non-verbal activities that could not be scripted, and the achievement of mutual understanding are well illustrated by transcript, photographs and description. Through his detailed descriptions of various piloting activities, Nevile provides the reader with actual situated and locally contingent practices of piloting an aircraft that no formal manual could ever provide”
Lorena M. A. de-Matteis, from review in the journal 'Language in Society':
"In sum, the results ... highlight the different ways in which technical crews turn the scripted wordings from company standard operating procedures (SOPs) for cockpit interaction (the so-called “standard callouts”) into real use during their daily routine work, thus continuously constructing an evolving and shared knowledge of the flight’s progression. ...Nevile argues for the necessity of studying talk-in-interaction taking into consideration the
complex interrelations of all the interactional features, from proxemics and gestures to prosody, grammar, and semantics. He also relates the book’s insights into routine interpersonal communication between crew members to human–technology interaction, on the one hand, and to the conceptualization of cognition as a situated phenomenon to which talk-in-interaction greatly contributes, on the other. ... Clearly written and helpful to the lay reader, Nevile’s book not only offers a thorough example of how talk-in-interaction can be studied in a particular sociotechnical setting but also signals a path to be followed by researchers interested in aviation safety."
Airline pilot, Amazon book review:
"This is an amazing project, carefully executed, thoughtfully recorded. Let's state right away that this is NOT one of those books that have 'black box' recordings of aviation accidents. It is rather a ground-breaking nothing-quite-like-it incredibly detailed micro-analysis of routine language and interaction in the professional airline cockpit. For the applied psychology researcher interested in how pilots really communicate in a cockpit or answering questions of small team cognition this is a valuable reference, fully citing its own sources. As someone lucky enough to be a LOSA observer at a major airline, I appreciate that this subject requires carefully study to make realistic suggestions."
THE CHAPTERS ARE:
1 The Workplace as Social Interaction
PART I “I’LL TAKE CLIMB POWER.”
ACCOMPLISHING COCKPIT IDENTITIES THROUGH
PRONOMINAL LANGUAGE
2 Accomplishing Cockpit Identities:
(1) Prescribed Pronominal Forms
3 Accomplishing Cockpit Identities:
(2) Non-prescribed Pronominal Forms
PART II “THAT’S SET".
COORDINATING TALK AND NON-TALK ACTIVITY
4 Accomplishing Takeoff Tasks
5 Managing Tasks in Flight
PART III “HE SAID FINAL APPROACH SPEED.”
INTEGRATING TALK-IN-INTERACTION WITHIN
AND BEYOND THE COCKPIT
6 Talking with Controllers:
(1) Pilot-Pilot Talk Occasioned by Talk with Controllers
7 Talking with Controllers:
(2) Abstaining from Pilot-Pilot Talk about Talk with Controllers
8 Conclusion and Implications"""
See more at the publisher site: http://www.degruyter.com/view/product/183760
The chapters are:
PART I: INTRODUCTION
'Being mobile: Interaction on the move'
Pentti Haddington, Lorenza Mondada and Maurice Nevile
PART II: STAGING AND COLLABORATING FOR MOBILITY
'Withdrawing from exhibits: The interactional organisation of museum visits'
Dirk vom Lehn
'A Walk on the Pier: Establishing relevant places in mobile instruction'
Mathias Broth & Fredrik Lundström
'The collaborative organisation of next actions in a semiotically rich environment: Shopping as a couple'
Elwys De Stefani
'Seeing on the move: Mobile collaboration on the battlefield'
Maurice Nevile
PART III: PROJECTING AND ENGAGING MOBILITY
'Projecting mobility: Passengers directing the driver at junctions'
Pentti Haddington
'Before, in and after: Cars making their way through roundabouts'
Eric Laurier
PART IV: COORDINATING AND CONTROLLING MOBILITY
'Centers of coordination as a nexus of mobile systems'
Inka Koskela, Ilkka Arminen & Hannele Palukka
'Interactionally Generated Encounters and the accomplishment of mutual proximity in Mobile Phone Conversations'
Christian Licoppe and Julien Morel
'Coordinating mobile action in real time: The timely organisation of directives in video games'
Lorenza Mondada
PART V: CREATING AND PERFORMING MOBILITY
'Decomposing movement: spatial deixis in dance instruction'
Leelo Keevallik
'The sociality of stillness'
Karine Lan Hing Ting, Dimitri Voilmy, Monika Büscher & Drew Hemment
PART VI: EPILOGUE
'Interacting Outside the Box: Between Social Interaction and Mobilities'
Paul McIlvenny"""
See more at the publisher site: https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/z.187/main
In this collection the car is considered as a ‘place’ or ‘space’ for meaningful and mediated activities. The papers examine how the physical and spatial configuration of the car, and its possibilities for mobility, can constrain or afford particular interactional practices, social activities and understandings, and impact upon language and processes of interaction. Interaction in cars creates particular demands, opportunities and orientations for its participants, as the car moves through the semiotically rich external environment. Generally, the papers consider driving as not merely a requisite competence for accomplishing travel from point A to point B, but as occurring itself as a situated activity that is integrated with ordinary conversation.
Most research on driving and automobility follows one of two broad directions: driving safety research; and the social and cultural meanings of automobility and driving. Driving safety research, on the one hand, is mostly dominated by studies conducted within a psychological and cognitive scientific framework. In social sciences and human geography, on the other hand, such dominant approaches to driving and drivers have increasingly been critiqued for undermining the cultural and sociological meanings of automobility and driving. Consequently, with the emergence of ‘mobility studies’, scholars have begun to study the social, cultural, and ideological meanings and discourses of the car, car cultures, driving cultures, driving practices, automobility, road systems, and traffic systems, as parts of modern life.
The papers in this special issue can therefore contribute to interdisciplinary dialogue between social scientific and psychological driving research. Further empirical knowledge is needed of how people organize their talk and embodied activities for social activity in cars, and relative to the contingencies of the driving situation and the physical and spatial layout of the car. By drawing on a specific empirical research methodology that relies on recorded data collected from real-life situations inside the car, the papers of this collection can add to the important interdisciplinary discussion that surrounds driving, safety and automobility, and provide food for thought by addressing central issues, raising questions, and perhaps even by providing some answers.
The chapters are:
Pentti Haddington, Maurice Nevile, and Tiina Keisanen
'Meaning in motion: Sharing the car, sharing the drive'
Eric Laurier, Barry Brown, and Hayden Lorimer
'What it means to change lanes: Actions, emotions, and wayfinding in the family car
Pentti Haddington
'Movement in action: Initiating social navigation in cars'
Maurice Nevile
'Interaction as distraction in driving: A body of evidence'
Tiina Keisanen
' “Uh-oh, we were going there”: Environmentally occasioned
noticings of trouble in in-car interaction'
Lorenza Mondada
'Talking and driving: Multi-activity in the car'
Marjorie Harness Goodwin and Charles Goodwin
'Car talk: Integrating texts, bodies, and changing landscapes'
Elizabeth Keating and Gene Mirus
'The eyes have it: Technologies of automobility in sign language'
Chaim Noy
'Inhabiting the family-car: Children-passengers and parents-drivers on the school run
handling the steering wheel. The study uses naturally occurring data, in-car video recordings of driving in real-world driving situations. The study examines in detail how different forms of in-car distractions develop in situ in real time, and relative to driving activities and to one another.
The literature review examined the link between identifying problem gamblers at venues and current provisions of responsibility in Australia and found that a public health approach was adopted by all states towards minimising harm associated with gambling.
The empirical research carried out in Australia had three components for:
(a) Surveys and consultation with industry staff and problem gambling counsellors;
(b) A detailed survey study of regular gamblers and
(c) Observational work at venues
For the latter, the observational study examined the extent of behaviour visible in the venues, frequency of occurrence, sequencing and how they appeared in reality. Two observational studies were conducted in ACT and South Australia, with over 149 hours of observation conducted on hundreds of gamblers.
For the surveys, over 120 venue/industry staff and 20 counsellors were involved for the first component; 700 regular gamblers surveyed for the second component.
The issue is hard to find online as older issues are not consistently and well supported by the journal's own association (ALAA). But here is the list of contents:
Maurice Nevile & Johanna Rendle-Short: ‘Language as action’ 30.1 *****
Michael Emmison & Susan Danby: ‘Who’s the friend in the background?: Interactional strategies in determining authenticity in calls to a national children’s helpline’ 31.1 *****
Marian May: ‘Troubled conception: Negotiating the likelihood of having children’ 32.1 *****
Anna Filipi: ‘A toddler’s treatment of mm and mm hm in talk with a parent’. 33.1 *****
Louise Skelt: ‘Damage control: closing problematic sequences in hearing-impaired interaction’ 34.1 *****
Rod Gardner & Ilana Mushin: ‘Post-start-up overlap and disattentiveness in talk in a Garrwa community’ 35.1 *****
Helena Austin & Richard Fitzgerald: ‘Resisting categorisation: An ordinary mother’ 36.1 *****
Co-authored with colleagues from the ANU Study Skills Centre (student support centre)
That paper includes a discussion of terminology (pp129-132), and the potential impact of variation in terminology for analyses, and for the field more widely. It considers “whether there is any basis for, or consequence of, such a great range of terminological wordings.” (p129), and suggests that wide variation in terminology “can lead to ambiguity, imprecision, inconsistency, redundancy, or wasted potential for terminology to express subtle and significant aspects of the body’s involvement and contribution to achieve sense making and intelligible order for social interaction.” (p130). The paper argues that “There is then a risk that such substantial terminological variation can indicate or even lead to confusion among scholars within the field (and beyond) and hinder shared understanding and establishment of identified embodied practices.” (p130). The paper proposes a way forward for clear and consistent terminology to refer generally to the body in studies of language and social interaction.
http://talkbank.org/browser/index.php?url=CABank/Jefferson/Boston77-Poetics.cha
This introduction gives detail of the talk, the availability of the recording, and some personal motivations and reflections.
The active CLAN transcript, linked to the video, is now available at
Talkbank.org:
http://talkbank.org/browser/index.php?url=CABank/Jefferson/Boston77-Poetics.cha
and
emca-legacy.info
http://emca-legacy.info/jefferson.html
The film recording was generously made available by George Psathas, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Boston University. Prof Doug Maynard (University of Wisconsin) arranged for the original film recording to be digitised. I am grateful to Julia Ruser for technical assistance to convert my original transcription in Word into CLAN, and for precisely timing silences.
Jefferson later developed elements of her 1977 talk into the paper ‘On the poetics of ordinary talk’ (Jefferson. G. 1996, in Text and Performance Quarterly, 16,1:1-61). An indication of the significance of the talk is given in that paper’s abstract, where Jefferson notes that, “The 1977 talk was specifically directed to loosening up people’s sense of the sort of work done in the field of Conversation Analysis” (p.1). Jefferson describes the 1996 paper as “a more considered and elaborated version of that talk” (p.1). She notes also that at the time of the talk, a year and half after Harvey Sacks’ death, conversation analysis (CA) was becoming identified very closely with the 1974 Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson paper ‘A simplest systematics...’. Her talk was therefore developed as “an antidote to that drastically constricted version of the field” (p.1), and as “an expression of the wild side of Conversation Analysis” (p.1). Jefferson refers in the paper to a transcription of the talk completed and sent to her by Robert Hopper. I have not seen that transcription and don’t know of its level of detail, but I note that the 1996 poetics paper begins with text apparently paralleling the talk’s content, under the heading ‘The Boston talk (as it never was)’ (p.2) - this would therefore seem to be adapted from Hopper’s transcription. So in my transcription I aim to give a clearer sense of the Boston talk as it actually was.
I developed the transcription primarily as a more detailed record of the talk, as a talk, with no intention to pursue any kind of analysis. I was interested in representing at least something of the content and flow of Jefferson’s spoken analytic voice, especially as reflecting and contributing to the early years of CA’s development and emergence. I hope that the transcription can make further visible the nature of Jefferson’s contribution in the foundation years, such as her approach to data and phenomena, and as representative of the collegial and collaborative context in which she was working.
The period of audience questions and discussion after the talk I have transcribed only relatively minimally.
As a personal comment, it was a delight to listen to and transcribe this video recorded talk by Gail Jefferson, and to see her present on her work in 1977 during the first years of conversation analysis. Apart from the professional interest, I learned that we shared an interest in American football.
As an Australian, I met and knew Gail only much later when I was fortunate to be taught by her in Denmark at two week-long summer schools for new researchers (2000, 2003), and then at a two-day masterclass (2007). These courses were demanding, and in equal measure immensely rewarding and challenging (to say the least), as she responded to and critiqued our analyses of data, and our own transcriptions. I remain indebted to Gail for her insistence on precision in the pursuit and representation of interactional phenomena.
Of different occasions, socially and collegially, of Gail Jefferson I have especially strong and fond memories of a restaurant dinner in Odense with Maria Egbert and Johannes Wagner, and together with Johannes Wagner driving from Denmark to Sweden for the 2007 IPrA Conference in Gothenburg, where she gave what I understand was her final formal conference presentation. Some months later she was kind enough to reply to an email message and tell me of her advanced illness. I remember too her parting comment after one summerschool, “see you in Australia some time”. Unfortunately in Australia I have had no relevant department/discipline position or substantial CA connections, and so I was not able to invite her.
I am certain that Gail would have thought this transcription to be inadequate, but I hope she would not have minded it as a personal, respectful, and appreciative attempt to capture and detail one brief moment of her wider contribution to the field as she gives “a guided tour through the data”, providing in 1977 a view of the “wild side” of CA.
And excerpts from the Conclusion...
I...devoted close attention to two areas well reflecting researchers’ efforts and struggles. Firstly, on terminology, I documented and discussed the lack so far of any accepted and settled general terminology for embodiment phenomena, evidenced in a proliferation of general wordings, and some apparent inconsistencies and troubles. Secondly, on transcribing/representing video-recorded data, I revealed some variations in practice, in particular for dealing with the temporality and the manner of embodiment, and I reflected on some potential impacts of these. For these areas I have noted some ways in which the treatment of embodiment can vary from established principles, approaches, and perhaps even standards of rigor, for doing interaction research, particularly for conversation analysis.
It seems...that writing down what we see, transcribing the body, is proving highly challenging ... The social, institutional, or organizational world is not only “talked into being” (Heritage, 1984) but also embodied into being ... The origins and establishment of the embodied turn in social interaction research reflect not only the greater availability of video data but increasing scholarly sensitivity and recognition for how we are always in our bodies, always everywhere embodied beings, acting and doing things in a material world. In that sense, all interaction is embodied, all actions are embodied, and all turns are embodied turns.
The chapter focuses in particular on how mobility is manifest in processes of interaction through which the pilots see and locate relevant battlefield participants, namely themselves as mobile members of a two-party team, and the target vehicles thousands of feet below them on the ground. The data and analyses show just how the pilots, moment-to-moment, meet the particular demands of mobility both to be visible and to make others visible. While constantly moving, the pilots must monitor and communicate their own positions relative to one another. They must also see, identify, and appropriately respond to, relevant features of an ever-changing external environment, most relevantly in this instance a group of vehicles thousands of feet below them. The target vehicles are also moving, and we see later that their mobility is likely highly consequential for how the actions and events unfold. The data show how mobility features as both a resource and a challenge for seeing satisfactorily to meet the demands of professional activities and goals. We see how mobility contributes to conduct and action for participation on the battlefield.
The book considers details of language, embodied conduct, and spatial and material orientation, for interaction in mobile situations. Mobility is a ubiquitous feature of our everyday and working lives. We are continuously on the move: we walk, we ride, we drive, we fly, we sail. We move from room to room within our homes and workplaces. We use modes and systems of transportation that allow us to travel long distances. In many ways mobility enables us to organise and conduct our personal and working activities, and so relate to others and establish and maintain social networks. As the chapters show, features of interaction can be inextricably intertwined with mobility, for example orienting to demands of mobility, coordinating with mobility, or enabling and accomplishing mobility. We talk and act to negotiate our way around shops, the streets of our suburbs, town centres, and cities. Moving from one place to another might make some activity relevant or possible; alternatively, the activity itself might be constituted by mobility. Some interactions and activities are carried out while on the move, while others might facilitate or control mobility, or make mobility possible. Mobility is germane to social action and participation in social life. We are always mobile for some reason, and we engage with and understand the world as we move through it. We are also very often mobile together with others, and even when we move alone we can very rarely do so fully independently, or without regard to others or to what is happening around us. Mobility therefore is not just abstract motion, but becomes meaningful as, in and through social action and interaction (see also Urry 2007). The book brings together studies that examine in their rich detail the practices of social interaction for experiencing and accomplishing mobility in naturally-occurring settings. That is, we are interested in how people interact, and what is it they actually do, in order to be mobile, or when they are mobile, or to integrate their own or others’ mobility, or to manage mobility with other activities. The studies here ask, for example, what kinds of social actions make mobility possible, and in turn, how does mobility impact social action, and processes of interaction? How do people interact as they attend and respond to the passing environment around them? The studies cover various forms of mobility across a wide range of settings. They focus on mobility as situated and occurring in real-life real-time local (here-and-now) contexts, and in immediate spatial and material circumstances, such as playing games inside the home, shopping in a supermarket, visiting a museum, walking and driving in suburban streets, teaching dance steps, and flying over a battlefield. Mobility might involve a person’s body directly (e.g. for walking, dance, creative performance), or bodies together, or the body itself might be relatively sedentary and mobility is somehow mediated or supported (e.g. when driving cars or flying planes).
Despite all this, there is currently very little research on the nature of everyday social interaction and meaningful activity inside cars. This special issue addresses this situation by focusing on the car as a specific multi-semiotic site, as an environment for meaning-making and for situated and embodied social interaction. The issue offers systematic and detailed analyses of the practices and communicative actions in which people participate while on board a car. The papers here are concerned with both social interaction as the intertwining of multiple modalities of language, the body, and artefacts of the interior material world of the car, as well as with how the car’s movement in time and space through particular external physical surroundings contributes to, or is accomplished by, social interaction. Methodologically, the papers are primarily informed by principles and insights of conversation analysis, ethnomethodology, and multimodal interaction analysis.
In this special issue the car is considered as a ‘place’ or ‘space’ for meaningful and mediated activities. The papers examine how the physical and spatial configuration of the car, and its possibilities for mobility, can constrain or afford particular interactional practices, social activities and understandings, and impact upon language and processes of interaction. Compared to telephone conversations and most sites for ordinary interaction, interaction in cars creates particular demands, opportunities and orientations for its participants, as the car moves through the semiotically rich external environment. Generally, the papers in this special issue consider driving as not merely a requisite competence for accomplishing travel from point A to point B, but as occurring itself as a situated activity that is integrated with ordinary conversation.