Micro dramas and morality-in-interaction: A commentary

1 Introduction

In Erving Goffman’s writings (see 1959], [1971, 1981), talking is always a situated interactional affair, where interaction takes place in social space. Many of his concepts, like face, facework, frames, front and settings, invoke a material world, and the dynamics of positioning oneself or others within a given space or territory – as in his theorizing on footing, positionings, ripostes, come-backs and stance.^[1] Moreover, much of Goffman’s writings, not only his first book (The presentation of self in everyday life, 1959) concerns the dramaturgic staging of frontstage and backstage, where participants at times act in the open and sometimes more collusively, as in what I will here call staged performances.

As in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) – another theoretician concerned with dialogic and dramaturgic perspectives – Goffman presents battles and conflicts as inherent in our lived experiences of social life. Bakhtin and Goffman have both highlighted subversive and hidden battles, and not only open disputes and infractions. They have also been deeply concerned with the detailed fabrics of collusion and questions of who speaks for whom, as in Bakhtin’s (1981) discussion on double-voiced talk, and Goffman's (1981) discussion of speakers’ participation frameworks and production formats (e.g. animator and say-for). Double-voiced talk can be seen as part of ordinary family life disciplining as when mothers in Italian families deploy endearment terms as ways of mitigating or calibrating upgraded directives (Pauletto et al. 2017) or when parents in Swedish families uphold the local food morality of dinnertime activities through a combination of upgraded directives, softened voices and caresses (Aronsson and Gottzén 2011).

The contributors to this special issue analyse aggravated displays of emotion (Bateman; Cekaite; Evaldsson & Melander Bowden; Goodwin & Lloyd; Kyratzis & Köymen) and deploy concepts from Goffman in ways that open our eyes to the dynamics of social dramas in mundane interaction – for instance, character contests (Goffman 1967), response cries, comebacks and most importantly, remedial action (Goffman 1971), a concept that it is closely related to moral order and emotion work. Thereby, emotion is positioned as a phenomenon that is partly related to how emotions are “done”; how they are negotiated in social interaction. The present contributions invoke Goffman in different ways, opening up toward novel and inventive ways of combining the detailed analyses of conversation analysis with a deep concern for emotion work and moral order in human interaction. The analyses offered concern the diplomatic work of everyday life in situations where participants have to mobilize their savoir-faire, aplomb and remedial resources (e.g. apologies, accounts or polite requests), in navigating around territorial offenses, face threats or other social infringements.

2 Multimodality, multiparty talk, and action trajectories

All the contributors to this special issue (Bateman; Cekaite; Evaldsson & Melander Bowden; M. H. Goodwin & Loyd, Kyratzis & Köymen) draw on video ethnographic data. The papers offer rich multimodal analyses, analysing both talk and other modalities in social interaction – such as gaze, gesture, posture, and locomotion – in great detail, and on a moment-to-moment basis, attending to the complexities of multimodal interaction.

Over the last 10 years, much research within conversation analysis (CA) and linguistic ethnography has taken a turn toward multimodality. Several of the contributors to this special issue are senior scholars who have shaped the field of multimodal analysis of video ethnographic data (see for instance: Evaldsson and Melander 2016; Goodwin and Cekaite 2018; Goodwin and Kyratzis 2012). In several ways, this special issue can be seen as the auspicious outcome of a union of conversation analysis and language socialization theorizing with a focus on emotion talk (Capps and Ochs 1995; Ochs et al. 1996; Ochs and Schieffelin 1989). A focus in this special issue is on trajectories of situated interaction over time – as in directives, apologies, remorse, social accounts, and other aspects of remedial interchanges – rather than merely turn-taking or adjacency pairs in a social vacuum, can be seen as part of a heritage from both Goffman and language socialization theorizing.

3 Remedial action in children’s encounters with other children and adults

Even in democratic modern families, there are basic asymmetries between parents and children, and this special issue foregrounds children’s agency, showing subtle and sophisticated ways in which children may resist adult authority. It situates the emotion work involved in adults’ requests for children’s remedial actions (apologies, expressions of remorse, and compliance) as a site of contestation in the lives of children and their caretakers, such as parents and teachers. In their focus on emotion, the contributors to this special issue document emotions in family life, drawing both on conversation analysis (CA) and a language socialization paradigm, an important research tradition within linguistic anthropology (for an overview, see Duranti et al. 2012). Moreover, they contribute to a broader view of education in examining emotion work between teachers and children, as well as among the children, moving beyond the cognitive bias of much work in education.

The contributions present detailed analyses of some of the ways in which moral order is talked into being in encounters between an adult and one or several children as parts of mundane everyday interchanges. Moral order is cast as a collaborative affair, and as a partial outcome of these very practices, rather than as something that is primarily seen as a “background factor” to everyday conversational practices. Drawing on video ethnographic data from Italy, New Zealand, Sweden, and the US, the contributions document how preschool and school settings feature encounters where adults can be seen to monitor children’s affect displays in a number of ways. An important contribution of this special issue is that it covers what teachers and other adults, within specific social cultural environments, cast as children’s “appropriate” emotions. Some affect displays – of sadness, longing, empathy – are endorsed or at least acknowledged, whereas anger, touchiness, smiling, laughing (see Cekaite, this issue) or threats are at times cast as inappropriate through teachers’ critical comments or through their demands for what Goffman (1971) has called remedial action (here: apologies, accounts or confessions).

Asta Cekaite presents extracts from how a teacher tries to recruit a student’s verbal confessions or admissions of risky or inappropriate behavior. In her analysis of the student’s resistant compliance – or what one could call staged compliance – Cekaite highlights ways in which children may act compliantly within one modality (speaking) and non-compliantly or with resistance within another modality or the other way around. For instance, a child may signal compliance in talk, while simultaneously signaling resistance or non-compliance through mimicry or posture. Within clinical discourse, emitting a ‘yes’ in speech but signaling a ‘no’ through aversive gesture, mimicry, or posture is seen as a type of paradoxical conversational device that may destabilize the listener, particularly if deployed recurrently over time. In a school context, teachers might similarly get frustrated when a child acts compliant in what s/he says, but not in how things are said. Cekaite’s analyses are presented within the format of a micro drama, where a teacher tries to recruit remorse, apologies or other verbal accounts from a young boy who deploys substantial agency in providing minimal verbal versions of such preferred responses, but accompanied by smiles, laughter or other conversational resources that defy his verbalizations or put them under brackets, as it were, thus subverting the local ethos of appropriate emotion talk between the teacher and the child.

In the paper on caregivers and quite young children in a preschool context, Amy Kyratzis and Bahar Köymen show how the caregivers try to teach the toddlers (12–30 months) to verbalize their emotions – e.g. through verbalizing their feelings of infringements – through, for instance, firmly saying ‘no’, ‘stop it’ or through mobilizing the other child’s attention, instead of hitting the other child, grabbing things or just crying out loud. In several instances, the young children do verbalize their emotions, but through loud screams or by packaging their verbal protests in other aggravated formats (such as intent repetitions). When one toddler protests against another toddler’s screaming, the culprit does indeed frame his remedial action in a verbalized form, but through screaming out anew (I SAID – I SAI:D – I SAID “NO”). The conflicts are exacerbated or toned down in minute ways, as parts of the toddlers’ inventive ways of complying with the caregivers’ requests for verbalized dispute formats, by recycling verbalizations into aggravated formats (through shouting or through accompanying postures and gestures), yet complying with the local ethos of emotion talk, rather than crying, fighting or shouting. In quite interesting ways, the children show substantial agency in their improvisations of delicately calibrated emotion talk.

Verbalizations, including the children’s ‘telling on someone’, are cast by the teachers as appropriate action. In the paper concerning two children’s divergent narrative accounts of the “same” specific events, Ann-Carita Evaldsson and Helen Melander Bowden highlight the role of reported speech in the two children’s and a teacher’s calibration of the symbolic magnitude of an affront, showing how the complainant, Maria (examples 1–3), builds up her complaint of her “mean” classmate Sebastian, how the teacher (Ex.4) responds to Maria’s reports of what Sebastian had “apparently told her” and, lastly (Ex.5) how Sebastian responds to the teacher and her demand for an apology (directed to Maria), by stressing that Maria should first apologize (for having told on him; ‘but how did you know this’?). Telling on a peer is thus judged quite differently by the teacher and the two children. The girl who filed an initial complaint about a classmate being “mean” deployed direct reported speech as an epistemic resource, validating the authenticity of the antagonist’s infractions, that is, what her classmate Sebastian did to her (‘he said ‘don’t ever b- come ba:ck’) and indirect reported speech where she also tried to build up epistemic evidence for why Sebastian is indeed credible as someone who is actually “mean” (’Henri an’Adam an’ Malik say so .h too even though they’re his buddies they say .hh he’s mea:n’). When failing to mobilize the teacher’s alignment, Maria instead refuses to answer and does a ‘walk-out’, leaving the room and the teacher. She simultaneously verbalizes her protest, but in the conflicts between the two parties, social accounts do not necessarily constitute a magical resource, as the mediator is cast in an in-between-position (see also Buttny 1996; Edwards 1995).

Conversation analysis has originally focused on conversations marked by consensus, such as talk between equals (e.g., telephone calls between friends) and the negotiation of minor trouble, such as mishearings, self-repairs and participants’ attention to delayed responses or pauses. In contrast, emotion work, conflicts, and the escalation of disputes are at the heart of Goffman’s theorizing. In their contribution, Marjorie Goodwin and Heather Lloyd document and analyse verbal disputes between the parents and the children in two different sociocultural settings, integrating the detailed analyses of conversation analysis with analyses of the ways in which character contests (Goffman 1971) assume different formats in the two settings, marked by different types of local ethos for emotion talk. The analyses show that the mother in one setting (Los Angeles) tries to make the child apologize or show remorse after a minor infringement in everyday life, whereas the mother in another setting (Napoli, Italy) instead primarily pursues verbal accounts, engaging the child in a lively verbal improvisation. In both cases, the embodied interchanges are presented sequentially, both on a turn-by-turn basis and as trajectories over time. Thereby the parties (mother, child, and children) build up sequences of heated exchanges in the form of micro dramas, i.e. social dramas where disagreements are highlighted and handled in ways that reflect a local moral order.

4 Micro dramas

In their examinations of trajectories of social action (such as directives – – compliance, affronts – – apologies), the contributors to this special issue present compelling analyses of the social dynamics of emotion work, in the form of micro dramas. Some of our research at Stockholm University has also dealt with the micro dramas of parents’ heightened affect displays, for instance, in adversarial stances in courtroom contexts (Aronsson 2018; Ingrids and Aronsson 2014; Sjöblom et al. 2018). In such an institutional context, there is much at stake (custody over the child). One of the contributions of this special issue is that it highlights the role of micro dramas as they unfold in the daily life of classrooms and families. The contributions shows how quite mundane conflicts in children’s lives still involve the display of strong emotion and successively heightened affect.

All the papers involve micro dramas, featuring the calibration of emotion in children’s everyday encounters with other children and adults; e.g., conflict––escalated conflict–– impasse (as in the walk-out of the complainant in the micro drama in Evaldsson & Melander Bowden). Part of such emotion work involves the joint calibration of heightened affect, where participants successively upgrade or downgrade reported offenses, as well as upgrade or downgrade apologies, accounts or other types of remedial work. Goodwin and Lloyd examine social micro dramas in home settings, in two different contexts, whereas three other contributions (Cekaite; Evaldsson & Melander Bowden; Kyratzis & Köymen) document and analyse micro dramas in school and preschool contexts. In all these settings, the adults can be seen monitoring – or attempting to monitor – the children’s displays of affect in the direction of consensus, compliance or at least social accounts for ascribed breaches of a local moral order.

The micro dramas may assume the form of different acts: for instance, (i) one child’s initial identification of an affront, warranting heightened affect; (ii) an adult’s attempt at mitigating the child’s display of affect; and (iii) another child’s divergent account. All the cases reported show ways in which the adult’s explicit or implicit demands for confessions, social accounts or apologies may instead lead to heightened affect displays or subversive actions, where the child engages in staged performances of remorse or compliance. The children’s agency and the subversive role of multimodal interaction is highlighted.

5 Facework and ambiguity

From the vantage point of Bakhtin’s (1981) polyphonic take on dialogue, a listener to a conversation between a parent and a child always has to ask who is speaking in a conversation, the speaker himself/herself or do we – through the voice of the parent and the child – hear the echoes of his or her parents, teachers and other models? And who speaks for whom on whose behalf? Much of this has also been taken up in Goffman’s (1981) theorizing on participation frameworks and production formats (such as speaker, animator, eaves dropper, by-stander, say-for). Multiparty talk recurrently involves various triangles of alignments, re-alignments and collusion as when two parties are seen to talk badly about a third party (e.g., Evaldsson & Melander Bowden, this issue; see also Evaldsson and Svahn 2017). Such alignments and disalignments are also analyzed by Amanda Batman (this issue; Ex.3) when she examines how a co-participant child reacts with response cries of revulsion (Goffman 1981:104) as one of the boys at the preschool talks about a boy who went into the girls’ toilet. The co-participant children express joint disalignment toward such behavior both verbally (‘e:::w::.’) and through a screwed up face and raised eyebrows, mutually attesting to their multimodal stance-taking in relation to what is appropriate or inappropriate within a local moral order.

Goffman’s (1967) and later (Brown and Levinson 1987) conceptualization of facework, can be re-interpreted or read as work on the regulation of social distance (see Aronsson 1998; Pauletto et al. 2017). In many social settings – including the preschool, school and family settings of this special issue – social distance can be seen as a part of ongoing negotiations in social life, gradually adjusted and calibrated in the direction of aggravation or mitigation through embodied social interaction, where participants deploy not only verbal, but also nonverbal resources (such as gaze, gesture, posture, walk-outs) in displaying their emotions and alignments in relation to their co-participants and third parties.

This special issue shows how a rich analysis of multimodal aspects may at times reveal interesting tensions between the verbal ethos of teachers (‘just talk’) and children’s local ethos (‘don’t tell on peers’, ‘don’t shout’; Evaldsson & Melander Bowden; Kyratzis & Köymen). This can also be seen in the double-voicedness in children’s staged remorse work (Cekaite) where students appear to respond “appropriately” in talking and verbalizations, but not through mimicry and body language. In Brown and Levinson’s (1987) terminology, such a double-voiced uptake of teachers’ demand for remorse could be seen as a type of off-record response, a response where the speaker is not fully accountable, as s/he does not verbalize his/her protest or non-compliant response. And in any case, the responses are ambiguous in a way that allows for different interpretations of the participants’ putative intentions. In line with Bakhtin (1981), such ambiguity can be seen as an important feature of social life.

Through combining the detailed work of conversation analysis, with an examination of accountabilities in relation to a local moral order, the micro dramas in this special issue document ways in which children are taught to talk about emotion and verbalize their accounts, but also – more indirectly – how they are taught to hide or play down the display of “inappropriate” emotions. This special issue convincingly documents ways in which rich multimodal analyses of emotion talk may reveal various types of subtle ambiguities in social life.