Opening before closing: The porosity of encounters-in-a-series

Abstract This article addresses classical issues in conversation analysis related to the overall structural organization of social interaction, achieved through opening and closing sequences. While the integrity and autonomy of social interaction are most often oriented to by participants in single interactions, the study of some institutional interactions shows that forms of porosity between encounters do exist, in which one encounter impinges on another. This is the case of encounters-in-a-series, in which a new encounter is opened as the previous is not yet closed. The article examines interactions in which participants orient to the preservation of the integrity of successive encounters, contrasted with cases in which the initiation of the opening of a new encounter happens during or before the closing of the previous, and discusses how and when this is treated as normatively delicate or not, within the participants’ local endogenous analysis of the overall structural organization of the interaction. (Social interaction, conversation analysis, multimodality, overall structural organization, opening, closing, encounters-in-a-series, porosity)