This study examines the challenges caregivers face in interpreting the bodily behaviors of individuals with late-stage dementia as interactional signals. People with late-stage dementia often exhibit ambiguous, non-verbal conduct, referred to as liminal signs, which are not immediately recognized as communicative. Drawing on Goffman's distinction between “giving” and “giving off” information and Grice's theory of communicative intentions, we analyze interaction sequences where caregivers may or may not notice and respond to these signs. The findings highlight the potential for embodied conduct, such as non-verbal vocalizations and ge2stures, to serve as communicative signals. Three empirical examples show how contextual cues can help caregivers recognize these conduct as meaningful contributions, positioning the person with dementia as a partner in interaction and providing an opportunity for their agency to be expressed and their voice to be heard. The study therefore has theoretical implications for understanding liminal signs and practical implications for improving communication in dementia care.

This study examines video recordings of activities within an elderly care home, particularly focusing on interactions involving people with dementia. The study presents instances where the relevance of the current conduct—and consequently the generation of a fitting response—appears indeterminate to the co-participant. Despite the uncertainty surrounding the mutually understood ‘constitutive expectancies’ (Garfinkel 1963) and a lack of shared understanding of ‘motivational relevancies’ (Schutz 1970), the participants continue to engage with one another. The analysis reveals that, in the face of an unrecognizable set of conduct and the indeterminacy of subsequent actions before closing down the activity, participants strive to maintain some degree of intersubjectivity by preserving or revisiting the constitutive order of their interaction. This commitment to the ‘co-operative’ nature of human actions (Goodwin 2018) is argued to be central to their interactions.

Dementia comprises global health issues, affecting families, healthcare systems, and broader society. Emerging technologies offer new tools for care and support that people living with dementia employ to manage their daily lives. We aim at exploring needs and ideas regarding digital technology and how it can be used to increase self-management and participation for people living with dementia. Ten participants took part in this study; five persons diagnosed with dementia and five spouses of people living with dementia. The data obtained in the individual interviews analyzed descriptively, by reviewing the protocols from the interviews. The data from the focus group session were analyzed for themes. All participants lived in ordinary housing but participated in group activities at a dementia center in Sweden. All participants used digital tools and owned and used smartphones and computers which indicates a baseline familiarity with digital tools. In results from the focus groups three themes emerged: (1) Digital tools as multifunctional resources, (2) Resources and barriers for using digital tools, and (3) Accounting for needs and wishes when planning for the future. The participants in both groups described the potential of digital tools to help mitigate future challenges regarding fears and concerns of future endeavors, e.g. as facilitators for staying in touch with family and friends and to be able to listen to familiar music. In conclusion, digital tools may prove vital in managing daily life and staying socially connected. However, digital reliance can also lead to challenges, especially as cognitive abilities decline.

Detta kapitel handlar om studiet av social interaktion i pedagogiska sammanhang. Kapitlet ger en introduktion till den forskningsteori och metod som kallas samtalsanalys (Conversation Analysis på engelska, CA), och som har sina rötter inom sociologin och särskilt etnometodologin. Därför kallas denna forskningsmetod även för etnometodologisk samtalsanalys, eller EMCA.

Vi börjar med att presentera varför detta teoretiska och metodologiska tillvägagångssätt är relevant för förståelsen av undervisningssammanhang. Vi diskuterar sedan några centrala begrepp inom EMCA och introducerar grundläggande principer för den teoretiska ramen. Därefter beskrivs i detalj hur empiri hanteras från insamling av forskningsmaterial till identifiering av forskningsfenomen och analys. Som exempelstudie presenteras en undersökning av hur lärare och elever i en SFI-kurs (Svenska För Invandrare) interagerar och tillsammans skapar möjligheter för eleverna att förstå grammatiska strukturer på svenska.

Assisted eating is a basic caring practice and the means through which many individuals receive adequate nutrition. Research in this area has noted the challenges of helping others to eat while upholding their independence, though has yet to explicate how this caring practice is achieved in detail and across the lifespan. This paper provides an empirical analysis of assisted eating episodes in two different institutions, detailing the processes through which eating is collaboratively achieved between two persons. Data are video-recorded episodes of infants during preschool lunches and care home meals for adults with dementia, both located in Sweden. Using EMCA's multimodal interaction analysis, three core stages of assisted eating and their underpinning embodied practices were identified: (1) establishing joint attention, (2) offering the food, and (3) transferring food into the mouth. The first stage is particularly crucial in establishing the activity as a collaborative process. The analysis details the interactional practices through which assisted eating becomes a joint accomplishment using a range of multimodal features such as eye gaze, hand gestures, and vocalisations. The paper thus demonstrates how assisted eating becomes a caring practice through the active participation of both caregiver and cared-for person, according to their needs. The analysis has implications not only for professional caring work in institutional settings but also for the detailed analysis of eating as an embodied activity.

This study shows how concerted bodily movements and particularly intercorporeality play a central role in interaction, particularly in joint activities with people with late-stage dementia. Direct involvement of bodies in care situations makes intercorporeal collaboration the basic form for engaging with people with late-stage dementia. By detailed analysis of a videorecording of a joint activity involving a person with late-stage dementia as an example, we show that the process of concerted bodily movements includes not only an interactive bodywork but also a reconfiguration of the routine activities and actions in situ. Reconfigurations often require, and are the outcome of, particular practices for the systematic modification of the embodied conducts of the participants and their use of artifacts in the surrounding environment. These practices, that we highlight in our study, are (1) staging activities through organization and re-organization of body parts, as well as artifacts (rather than using verbal descriptions of activities); (2) decomposing (parsing) activities into smaller parts possible for the person with dementia to perform (rather than using verbal action descriptions); and (3) providing embodied directions and bodily demonstrations of actions (rather than using verbal directives). As a result, we point to these practices for their reflexive roles in the change of the use of modalities in interaction: from mainly using verbal language to the prominence of visual depiction and bodily demonstration as necessary methods to facilitate the participation of people with latestage dementia in joint activities

This study suggests that the concept of proto-conversation may be used to describe and understand communication with people with late-stage dementia who have lost their abilities to produce verbal language. In the study, a multimodal conversation analytic method is used to analyze sequences of interactions between professional caregivers in an elderly care home and people with late-stage dementia. The study shows how minimal actions (shift of gaze directions, vocalizations or bodily movements) not instantly recognizable as intentional, communicative conduct, may be recognized and treated as communicative contributions by engaging the person living with dementia in proto-conversations. In such interactional sequences, the caregivers do not only turn the contributions of persons with dementia into actions through their responses, but they also treat the persons as agentive actors and position them as partners in interaction.

Background: This study aims to further the understanding of communication involving people with late-stage dementia by highlighting assisted eating as an interactive joint activity. Assisted eating is, on the surface, primarily a care activity with the purpose of feeding the assisted person and thereby facilitating nutritional uptake. Helping someone to eat requires, nevertheless, fine-grained communication and co-ordination of both attention and embodied actions.

Method: Using video recordings where a person with late-stage dementia is provided with assistance to eat, we show how assisted eating is sequentially organized into smaller, local communicative projects, and how each project’s completion is contingent upon the temporal co-ordination of the participants’ attention and embodied actions.

Results: The analysis shows how actions necessary to carry out the eating (e.g., manipulating the food, bringing the food to the mouth) are also inherently communicative and achieved through an embodied participation framework.

Discussion/conclusion: Our findings show that while the caregiving staff perform most of the actions required in the assisted eating, the person with dementia is a central agent whose actions – displays of engagement and disengagement – are decisive for the progression of the eating activity and play central roles in the interactive achievement of the activity

This study deals with turn-taking in human-robot interactions (HRI). Based on 15 sessions ofvideo-recorded interactions between pairs of human participants and a social robot called Furhat, we explore how human participants orient to violations of the normative order of turn-taking in social interaction and how they handle those violations. As a case in point, we present sequences of HRI to show particular features of turn-taking with the robot and also how the robot may fail to respond to the human participants’ bid to take a turn. In these sequences, the participants either complete the turn in progress and ignore the overlap caused by the robot’s continuation of its turn, or they cut short their own turn and restart in the next possible turn-transition place. In all cases in our data, the overlaps and failed smooth turn-transitions are oriented to as accountable and in some sense interactionally problematic. The results of the study point not only to improvables in robot engineering, but also to routine practices of projection and the ways in which human subjects orient toward normative expectations of ordinary social interactions, even whenconversing with a robot.

This article investigates the role of language cafés as venues where newly arrived migrants to Sweden can socialize and practice the target language. More specifically, we aim to explore how café organizers and volunteers orient to social inclusion as they are interviewed about the goals of the local café and engage in talk‐in‐interaction with the visitors during video‐recorded café sessions. At the methodological level, we rely on ethnomethodologically informed ethnography and conversation analysis, through which we adopt an emic approach to data analysis by taking into account the members’ interpretation of their social world and the actions they accomplish in it. Our analysis uncovers the organizers’ and volunteers’ conceptualization of social inclusion, which they articulate in terms of fostering a sense of belonging and empowerment; they also perceive the mutual benefits derived from the encounters with the migrants at the local café. Overall, the migrants’ views dovetail with the concept of “everyday citizenship,” which highlights the dimensions of belonging, rights, and access to resources for social participation as constitutive of social inclusion. These findings highlight the perceived role of language cafés as a way to act on the existing social reality to transform the local community into an inclusive, equal, and integrated society.