Interacting with Objects

Objects are essential for how, together, people create and experience social life and relate to the physical environment around them. Interacting with Objects: Language, materiality, and social activity presents studies which use video recordings of real-life settings to explore how objects feature in social interaction and activity. The studies consider many objects (e.g. paper documents, food, a camera, art, furniture, and even the human body), across various situations, such as shopping, visiting the doctor, interviews and meetings, surgery, and instruction in dance, craft, or cooking. Analyses reveal in precise detail how, as people interact, objects are seen, touched and handled, heard, created, transformed, planned, imagined, shared, discussed, or appreciated. With the companion collection Multiactivity in Social Interaction: Beyond multitasking, the book advances understanding of the complex organisation and accomplishment of social interaction, especially the significance of embodiment, materiality, participation and temporality. By focussing on objects in and for actual occasions of human action, Interacting with Objects: Language, materiality, and social activity will interest many researchers and practitioners in language and social interaction, communication and discourse, design, and also more widely within anthropology, sociology, psychology, and related disciplines.

Zeng Xiaorong, Jiangxi Agricultural University, P.R. China, in Discourse Studies, Vol. 18:2 (2016), pp. 226-228.:
[T]his book, examining specifically and in detail how objects feature in social actions, provides a substantial first step toward describing ‘the interactional ecology of objects’ (p. 17). As objects are an integral part of our everyday actions, the analysis and findings here will interest and impact research in various fields, especially discourse analysis and social action analysis.