Advances in (Video-)Interaction Analysis – Contemporary Studies and Student’s Projects by U.Wedelstaedt

Workshop offline
(form could be changed due to epidemiologic situation)

October 11th – 15th 2021; Faculty of Sociology, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv

Lecturer: Ulrich v. Wedelstaedt (University of Konstanz)

For students and scientists

Registration form up to 4th of October. Letters confirming participation will be sent by October 6 

This one-week workshop continues the 2019 course which gave a rather general introduction into qualitative methods though emphasizing on theories and methods of the sociology of social interaction. The current seminar focuses intensified on advances in studies on (visual) interaction analysis. It features classical key studies and contemporary new developments of sociology, linguistics, or visual anthropology. Along the lines of my own recent empirical research into communication under conditions of high pressure (in i.a. the fields of sports, warfare communication, and medical interaction) and their integration into recent social theory, microsociological concepts and insights are presented. To convey this complex methodological approaches and skills – often said to be not learnable from solely studying textbooks – there are student’s own empirical projects planned as a core element of the seminar. This student’s projects however, are thematically free and should reflect student’s personal interest or can involve already existing ventures. Conducting this projects, we will practice gathering, preparing, and analyzing of audio and/or video data. A larger part of the data preparation will be devoted to transcribing this data for the use in analysis or papers/publications. The projects are designed to capture, deepen, and reflect the course’s content in light of one’s own experiential background. The aim is for the participants to be familiar with current status of video interaction analysis, recognize the advantage of analyzing naturally occurring interaction, and be able to conduct projects on their own to a certain degree at the end of the course.

Attendance in the 2019 seminar – though certainly beneficial – is not a requirement for the participation in the current workshop.

On the first day the course’s program is outlined, followed by contextualization of video analysis in a broader background of qualitative methods, and some epistemological basics of the sociology of social interaction. This session will also serve to getting to know the participant’s individual prior knowledge and background. On the same day there will be a session on developments of interactional analysis, from being rather orientated towards speech to multimodal interaction. The day is concluded by a first collection of ideas and plans for the participant’s projects.

The second day will focus on some key studies of interaction analytical research. It features classical and recent studies and will give insights into transcription of verbal as well as multimodal data. 

The third day is devoted to sessions of practical work on the participant’s own empirical projects. According to the status of the projects, there will be either work on data gathering or preparation (mainly transcription) and subsequent empirical analysis in the form of joint plenary data sessions.

The joint data sessions will continue on the fourth day. They will be finalized by a session on quality criteria of qualitative methods. Additionally, there will be some more preparatory work concerning the presentations of the participant’s projects.

On the final day students will deliver brief reports concerning their own research projects to the workshop audience. The course will be concluded by a brief summary of the seminar’s essential points, feedback from the participants, and a final discussion.

Provisional Schedule

Registration form up to 4th of October. Letters confirming participation will be sent by October 6 

Maximum number of participants - 15. Language - English

Literature (selection)

Büscher, M. (2005). Social Life under the Microscope? Sociological Research Online, 10(1), 100–123.

Flick, U., Kardorff, E. von, & Steinke, I. (Eds.). (2004). A companion to qualitative research. Sage Publications.

Goodwin, C. (1994). Professional vision. American Anthropologist, 96(3), 606–633.

Goodwin, C. (2001). Practices of seeing visual analysis: An ethnomethodological approach. In T. Van Leeuwen & C. Jewitt (Eds.), Handbook of visual analysis (pp. 157–182). SAGE.

Heath, C., Hindmarsh, J., & Luff, P. (2010). Video in Qualitative Research: Analysing Social Interaction in Everyday Life. Sage Publications.

Heath, C., Luff, P., & Knoblauch, H. (2004). Tools, Technologies and Organizational Interaction: The Emergence of ‘Workplace Studies.’ In D. Grant, C. Hardy, C. Oswick, & L. Putnam (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Discourse (pp. 337–358). SAGE Publications.

Koschmann, T. (2011). Understanding understanding in action. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(2), 435–437.

Knoblauch, H., Soeffner, H.-G., Raab, J., & Schnettler, B. (Eds.). (2012). Video analysis: Methodology and methods; qualitative audiovisual data analysis in sociology (3., rev. ed). Peter Lang.

Mair, M., Elsey, C., Smith, P. V., & Watson, P. G. (2016). The Violence You Were/n’t Meant to See: Representations of Death in an Age of Digital Reproduction. In R. McGarry & S. Walklate (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and War (pp. 425–443). Palgrave Macmillan.

Sidnell, J., & Stivers, T. (Eds.). (2013). The handbook of conversation analysis. Wiley-Blackwell.

Silverman, D. (2004). Interpreting Qualitative Data: Methods for Analysing Talk, Text and Interaction (2. ed., reprinted). Sage.

Silverman, D. (2017). Doing qualitative research (Fifth edition). SAGE Publications Ltd.

ten Have, P. (2007). Doing conversation analysis. A practical guide (2nd ed). Sage.

v. Wedelstaedt, U., & Singh, A. (2017). Chapter 13. Intercorporeality with imaginary bodies: The case of trampoline and boxing training. In C. Meyer & U. v. Wedelstaedt (Eds.), Moving Bodies in Interaction – Interacting Bodies in Motion: Intercorporeality, interkinesthesia, and enaction in sports (Vol. 8, pp. 323–344). John Benjamins.

Contact person Mykola Sydorov myksyd@knu.ua