The multimodal and multisensorial achievement of sequence completion: Moving away from exhibits in a museum as a blind-sighted couple

This paper explores the complexity of multimodal resources as they are mobilized and made sense of by the participants in social interaction. Rooted in Conversation Analysis, and grounded on the study of video-recorded interactions between visually impaired and sighted participants, the paper focuses on the details of how the participants mobilize a rich array of resources, how they make them mutually accessible for each other, and how they interpret them in order to smoothly organize their coordinated action. In particular, the paper shows that action has not only to be multimodally formatted, but also to be made perceptually and sensorially available to others, and actually perceived and sensed as such in order to make sense. The case studied focuses on the navigation of a blind-sighted couple of close relatives in a museum, and more particularly on their transition from one exhibit to the next. In order to achieve finely-tuned transitions, the participants haptically sense one another and this inter-sensorial connection enables them to timely coordinate their navigation together. Beyond offering a systematic study of their practices, the paper introduces and discusses this notion of inter-sensoriality as an important complement to the notion of multimodality.