Cultural and Linguistic Practices in the Internationalised University
Interactional competence in the institutional setting of the international university – talk and embodied action as multimodal aggregates in institutional interaction
This project has investigated social practices in co-present encounters between administrative staff and students at an internationalizing university. The project utilized audiovisual data of interactions, recorded at a number of sites at a Danish university. These concerned service encounters at the International Office help desk, and study guidance counselling meetings both at the central administrative offices and a number of university departments.
The research angle for the project has focused on how co-participants coordinate collaborative institutional activities through the deployment of a range of embodied resources, including talk, bodily conduct and the material surround. Analyses focus on how co-participants in talk-in-interaction orient to their co-participants’ situated embodied actions produced in conjunction with linguistic utterances, and reflexively produce their turns within the sequential organization as multimodally constituted social action in interaction. Leading on from this, the analyses sought to explore whether situated embodied practices serve to enact-into-being the institution of the international university. Research into these dynamically multilingual and culturally hybrid settings has often emphasized the linguistic component of such encounters. The current project adds to this by considering participants’ interactional competencies, denoting their situated methods and interactive practices through which they are able to co-construct in situ their social world.
For information on the Research Centre for Cultural and Linguistic Practices in the Internationalized University – CALPIU, Roskilde University, Denmark see below