Co-Operative Action

This book investigates how language, embodiment, objects, and settings in historically shaped communities combine, and form human actions.

Charles Goodwin (Author)

9781108714778, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 6 June 2019

555 pages, 166 b/w illus.
15 x 23 x 3 cm, 0.83 kg

'The book provides a wealth of insights into the particulars of what it means to be a human being in a world of others. It leaves the reader with a new understanding of the pervasive and specific nature of human cooperation and co-action, and it provides detailed insights into the diversity of semiotic resources available to us in interaction.' Johanne S. Philipsen, Journal of Pragmatics

Co-Operative Action proposes a new framework for the study of how human beings create action and shared knowledge in concert with others by re-using transformation resources inherited from earlier actors: we inhabit each other's actions. Goodwin uses videotape to examine in detail the speech and embodied actions of children arguing and playing hopscotch, interactions in the home of a man with severe aphasia, the fieldwork of archaeologists and geologists, chemists and oceanographers, and legal argument in the Rodney King trial. Through ethnographically rich, rigorous qualitative analysis of human action, sociality and meaning-making that incorporates the interdependent use of language, the body, and historically shaped settings, the analysis cuts across the boundaries of traditional disciplines. It investigates language-in-interaction, human tools and their use, the progressive accumulation of human cultural, linguistic and social diversity, and multimodality as different outcomes of common shared practices for building human action in concert with others.

1. Introduction
Part I. Co-operative Accumulative Action: 2. Co-operative accumulation as a pervasive feature of the organization of action
3. The co-operative organization of emerging action
4. Chil and his resources
5. Building complex meaning and action with a three word vocabulary: inhabiting and reshaping the actions of others through accumulative transformation
6. The distributed speaker
Part II. Intertwined Semiosis: 7. Intertwined knowing
8. Building action by combining different kinds of materials
9. Intertwined actors
10. Projection and the interactive organization of unfolding experience
11. Projecting upcoming events to accomplish co-operative action
Part III. Embodied Interaction: 12. Action and co-operative embodiment in girls' hopscotch
13. Practices of color classification
14. Creating professional vision co-operatively
15. Environmentally coupled gestures
Part IV. Co-operative Action with Predecessors: Sedimented Landscapes for Knowledge and Action: 16. Co-operative action with predecessors
17. The accumulation of diversity through co-operative action
18. Seeing in depth
19. Co-operative action as the source of, and solution to, the task faced by every community of creating new, culturally competent members with specific forms of knowledge and skill
Part V. Professional Vision, Transforming Sensory Experience into Types, and the Creation of Competent Inhabitants: 20. The emergence of conventionalized signs within the natural world
21. Calibrating experience and knowledge by touching the world
22. The blackness of black: color categories as situated practice
23. Environmentally coupled gestures and the social calibration of professional vision
24. Professional vision
25. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Educational psychology [JNC], Education [JN], Psychology [JM]