One of our PhD students, Yoonjoo Cho, recently presented at the ‘Intersubjectivity in Interaction’ conference, held at the University of Helsinki. Here’s what she had to say about it:
The conferences was held to celebrate the last year of the Centre for Excellence in Intersubjectivity in Interaction, and its contribution to the EMCA field, by inviting interactionalists from a range of disciplines to present and discuss their research on intersubjectivity.
120 papers were selected for the individual presentations including various themes in relation to “intersubjectivity” (Formulations and Definitions, Repair, Therapy and Counselling, Asymmetric Participation, Classroom and Learning, Touch and Taste, Theatre Rehearsals, Institutional Phone Calls, Silence and Turn-taking and so forth). Also 6 excellent plenarists (Lorenza Mondada, Federico Rossano, Leelo Keevallik, Jörg Bergmann, Paul Drew & Kobin Kendrick) delivered fascinating and insightful talk, all linked with the issues of mutual understanding, shared experiences and empathy embedded in human interaction.
My presentation was about “candidate understanding” uttered by the interviewer, especially how it displays intersubjectivity between the interviewer and interviewee who do not share their first language. The analysis that I presented in the conference specifically focuses on how the candidate understanding packaged with embodiment foreground the meaning of utterances turn by turn. Additionally, how the formulation of candidate understanding incrementally develops a sequential movement to the interviewer’s self-disclosure and affiliative responses. I highlighted that the aforementioned phenomena are closely related to either the interviewer’s epistemic status as L1, or the interviewer and interviewee’s shared identity as L2.
It was an intellectually stimulating event, which gave me networking opportunities as well as great inspiration for my PhD research.