Multimodality, Materiality and Diverse Participants: Extending Interaction-Based Approaches to Social Theory

Interaction-based traditions in sociology, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis (CA), and Goffmanian studies of the interaction order, have long argued that social order, shared meaning, and institutional realities are continuously produced through the situated practices of participants. Building on Harold Garfinkel, Erving Goffman, Harvey Sacks, Charles Goodwin and their successors, this scholarship treats talk, embodiment, materiality, and the sequential organization of action as the principal sites where sociality is achieved. Recent work has substantially broadened this remit: multimodal analysis has brought gaze, gesture, posture, and material surroundings into sequential accounts of action; studies of human-machine and human-robot interaction have opened new questions about agency and membership; and research with multilingual, multicultural, and cognitively or communicatively diverse participants has tested and extended core theoretical assumptions about competence, intersubjectivity, and the social.This Research Topic aims to advance sociological theory by foregrounding what can be learned from close, empirical study of social interaction in its full multimodal and material complexity, and across the widest possible range of participants and settings. Where interaction-based approaches are sometimes treated as descriptive or narrowly methodological, we wish to show how detailed analyses of situated practice generate, refine, and challenge theoretical concepts central to sociology, including action, sense-making, knowledge, morality, identity, normativity, and the constitution of the social. Recent advances make this a particularly productive moment: the integration of embodiment and materiality into sequential analysis; the study of interactions involving robots, conversational agents, and other non-human participants; renewed attention to professional, pedagogical, and clinical practices; and growing engagement with participants whose linguistic, cognitive, or communicative profiles unsettle taken-for-granted assumptions about competent membership. Contributions are invited that mobilize these developments to rethink classical theoretical questions, generate new conceptual tools, and connect interactional findings to wider sociological debates and adjacent disciplines.This Research Topic welcomes empirical, conceptual, and methodological contributions that use interaction-based approaches, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, multimodal conversation analysis, and related traditions, to advance sociological theorizing. We invite original research articles, conceptual analyses, hypothesis and theory papers, methods papers, review articles, and brief research reports. Themes which may be explored in the Research Topic, include, but are not limited to:• Multimodal approaches to social action, embodiment, and communication• Materiality, artefacts, and the situated production of meaning• The interactional organization of knowledge, morality, and identity• Affectivity and emotional displays in social interactions• The accomplishment of social order in everyday and institutional encounters• Interaction in pedagogical, clinical, care, and other professional settings• Multilingual and multicultural interaction and the negotiation of difference• Interaction involving participants with diverse cognitive and communicative abilities, including dementia, aphasia, and speech and language pathologies• Human–non-human interactions such as human-animal or human-machine and human-robot interaction as sites for sociological theorizing• Methodological and theoretical innovations at the interface of EMCA and adjacent fields (interactional linguistics, sociolinguistics, social anthropology, intellectual history, cultural studies)• Bridging micro-analytic findings with wider sociological and interdisciplinary debates Topic editors: Ali-Reza Majlesi, Simon Magnusson, Silvia Kunitz, Hanna Svensson Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/80746/multimodality-materiality-and-diverse-participants-extending-interaction-based-approaches-to-social-theory