Jarret Geenen

This study examines so-called “ironic memes,” a seemingly inscrutable genre of memetic Internet content, as meaningful digital multimodal text. Considering Internet memes’ semiotic construction patterns and their social functions, this study connects these two concerns, asking: How is the provocatively “nonsensical” design of ironic memes organized and connected to the construction of (group) identities online? Adopting a digital ethnographic approach, we employ a combination of multimodal discursive methods in order to jointly analyze semiotic design patterns and the social actions underlying them. The analysis suggests that, despite their nonsensical appearance, ironic memes rely on distinct design strategies that contribute to the construction of (group) identities rooted in digital literacies. Specifically, ironic memes constitute generic hybrids where semiotic practices are associated with personas that are “less literate” in Internet memeing. Our findings indicate that digital...

Contemporary research investigating the phenomena of lifestyle sport has highlighted the centrality of space, spatiality and spatial appropriation. Lifestyle sports tend to manifest in liminal and/or unbounded spaces with practitioners drawing upon the affordances of the natural environment in new and unique ways. Simultaneously, practitioners employ continuously evolving technical tools (equipment) in the undertaking of these activities. This article articulates the ways in which the specialised equipment employed as mediational means affect the perception, interpretation and valuation of physical components of the natural and man-made environment.In this article, I introduce the notion of actionary pertinence and concept of locational element through the analysis of the ways in which general geographic areas (spaces) become actual kitesurfing locations (places) for specific social actors through mediated action and in direct connection to the mediational means through which action...

In this chapter, we discuss three different projects and three different types of researcher roles when collecting video data. The chapter is a discussion of the roles that we have taken up in actual research projects. We describe some how-to notions from camera positioning to interacting with participants and some of the problems that we found

In this presentation, I first discuss three main foci which build an important aspect of the theoretical underpinnings of the method. One, I discuss the focus on various levels of action from lower-level to higher-level as well as actions that remain embedded in the world in frozen form. Lower-level actions are the smallest meaning units in a particular mode such as a gesture or an utterance; higher-level actions are made up of (or make up) a multitude of lower-level actions such as a conversation or a class; and frozen actions are those actions that are often embedded in objects found in the environment, such as the action of painting may be embedded in a painting on an easel or the action of playing chess can be embedded in the particularly arranged chess pieces on a board. Two, I discuss the focus on social actors. In multimodal (inter)action analysis, social actors with their histories, their levels of attention and their thoughts and feelings are always at the centre of analysi...

formal structures. Norris (2004: 12) finesses this seeming incompatibility with a serious yet often overlooked explication that “a communicative mode is never a bounded or static unit, but always and only a heuristic unit”. This explicitly “highlights the plainly explanatory

This paper reports on analysis from a corpus of audio-video recorded interactions during a collaborative building task. The task generates distinct knowledge asymmetries which motivate interaction toward acquiring shared understandings. The analysis suggests that the convergence of the communicative modes of posture and gaze is crucial to producing shared knowledge. These findings support claims that there are no fixed norms for gaze distribution and postural orientation in interaction, but that these are heavily influenced by the environment and task. Furthermore, the findings suggest participants prioritise producing communicative intersubjectivity over perceptual intersubjectivity. The implications of these findings for the nature of intersubjectivity and research into teamwork are considered.

Language acquisition involves more than learning how to produce words in complex strings. It involves a diversity of aptitudes about how, when, with whom and in what way to use language abilities. While it is acknowledged that these skills are learned through social interaction (Blum-Kulka, S. (1997). Dinner talk: cultural patterns of sociability and socialization in family discourse. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc, Mahwah, NJ; Rogoff, B. (2003). The cultural nature of human development. Oxford University Press, Oxford), our understanding about precisely how they emerge and how they are taught and learned remains preliminary at best. Additionally, much of our understanding is strictly limited to spoken language. The analysis and arguments herein detail the consequentiality of child directed interaction strategies (CDIS) which facilitate non-verbal actions and motivate episodic retrospection, making a tangible link between the current interaction and past experiences. Through a mul...

In this article, I detail incremental microgenetic alterations in the development of one particular socio-interactive aptitude: making a relevant interactive contribution. Taking heed of Clark’s (2014) call for the need to reorient our attention to investigate the pragmatics of interaction by accounting for the multiple communicative modes through which this is acccomplished I detail the ways in which parental facilitation and a flexible participatory configuration, made possible by video-conferencing technology, create conditions enabling the agentive re-introduction of a psycho-socially relevant topic. Paramount are the ways in which residual interactive specificities in introduction, co-production and multimodal configurations re-manifest suggesting a more symbiotic relationship between traditional notions of ‘message’ and ‘production’. During the microgenesis of interactive aptitudes, children are not just learning what constitutes psycho-socially relevant topoi, they also acqui...

We live in a country, in which ethical review boards have stringent expectations of what they believe ethical research is. While we certainly have a critical stance towards review boards’ notions of ethics, as researchers, we are firmly grounded in research ethics. Applying for, and receiving, ethical approval for research projects can be a challenging and drawn out process in any instance. Yet, this can be multiplied many times when researchers aim to study and video tape naturally occurring interactions, and/or want to work with children, youth, and populations that ethics boards consider vulnerable. Some of these considerations we agree with, such as young children; and some of these we disagree with, such as pregnant women. Notions of vulnerability and informed consent are discussed throughout this chapter. In the worst-case scenario, researchers are put off from conducting research that involves applying for ethics approval. But, in the best-case scenario, the process of applyi...

ABSTRACT We live in a country, in which ethical review boards have stringent expectations of what they believe ethical research is. While we certainly have a critical stance towards review boards’ notions of ethics, as researchers, we are firmly grounded in research ethics. Applying for, and receiving, ethical approval for research projects can be a challenging and drawn out process in any instance. Yet, this can be multiplied many times when researchers aim to study and video tape naturally occurring interactions, and/or want to work with children, youth, and populations that ethics boards consider vulnerable. Some of these considerations we agree with, such as young children; and some of these we disagree with, such as pregnant women. Notions of vulnerability and informed consent are discussed throughout this chapter. In the worst-case scenario, researchers are put off from conducting research that involves applying for ethics approval. But, in the best-case scenario, the process of applying for ethics approval helps the researchers design a better research project, by considering issues from a participant perspectives. Since we cannot evade ethical approval for our studies in New Zealand, we tend to take this time to work through true ethical dilemmas that could arise in the study that we are proposing. This article outlines some of our thinking regarding a new project that we are embarking on, where we will investigate video conferencing between family members. For the families, we are looking at a young family with at least one Baby or very young child and their interaction with other family members via video conferencing.