Friday, March 20, 2009

Lorenza Mondada to visit. April 17-18

Professor Lorenza Mondada will be a guest of the CA community at UW Madison on April 17th and 18th.  She will give a presentation on the 17th, at 4:00, in Sewell Social Sciences 8108.   

Lorenza Mondada is Professor of Linguistics at the Department for Language Studies, University of Lyon 2, and at the ICAR (Interactions, Corpus, Acquisition, Representation) Lab, and CNRS (National de la Recherche Scientifique). 
 
Her research deals with the grammatical and multimodal practices and resources mobilized by participants in interaction. Her current research is carried out on video-recordings from various institutional and professional settings (in medical contexts as well as in other workplaces) and on ordinary conversations, focusing on the ways in which participants sequentially and multimodally organize their (often multiple) courses of action.

The Departments of Sociology and English present:
Professor Lorenza Mondada
  
Presentation Title: "Locating emergencies: place formulations in call centres"
Date: Friday, April 17th
Time: 4:00 PM
Location: Sewel Social Sciences Building, Room to be announced.

Abstract: This talk deals with the way in which participants in remote places coordinate their activities, taking for granted shared spaces, managing the discovery of fragmented and mobile geographies and actively searching for common ways of reassembling them. In order to explore these topics and to document the various practices through which co-participants coordinate, articulate and negotiate locations, spatial formulations, and common recognition of relevant places, the paper focuses on a “perspicuous setting” (Garfinkel & Wieder, 1992) which reveals the praxeological details of these practices: the coordination of remote activities in call centres. During calls, callers give their locations to call-takers, and call-takers give instructions to help-dispatchers about the place in which to find people to be helped. Often, misunderstandings arise about the helped location. The study of place formulations aims at a) documenting the various ‘methods’ (Garfinkel, 1967) through with participants make the relevant geography accountable and publicly intelligible and b) at making explicit the methodology that allows this documentation, based on the analysis of naturalistic video recordings of situated activities.

Contact Cecilia Ford: ceford@wisc.edu

We expect to have a data session on Saturday April 18th, and there will also be opportunities for graduate students and colleagues to meet informally with Lorenza.