The Temporal Organisation of Leaning in Social Interaction

EMCA research has documented how the moving human body is a core resource for sense-making. This means that people engaged in interaction are constantly foraging for materials from which to fashion their contributions (Goodwin, 2018). Co-participants, in turn, are faced with a set of raw materials being mobilised and potentially used as resources for sense-making. In this paper, we focus on a particular bodily movement, learning forward. The unsupported lean is temporally organized and bringing the body off balance projects that the lean will be resolved. The study uses video-data from a range of institutional settings to explore how a leaning body is treated as indexing a range of social actions. We discuss this as having emerged from the human capacity to stand upright, and a shared knowledge of the additional exertion required to counteract gravitational forces when bringing the upper body off its vertical axis.