Oskar Lindwall about his presentation
"Together with Michael Lynch (professor emeritus, Cornell University), I am editing a volume called “Instructed and Instructive Actions: The Situated Production, Reproduction, and Disruption of Social Order” that will be published by Routledge later this year.
I will begin the presentation by briefly talking about the volume as a whole, and then move on to the chapter in the book that I have co-authored with Gustav Lymer (Stockholm University).
YouTube tutorial on how to crochet
The overarching interest of this chapter is in the description of embodied courses of action. More specifically, we focus on the instructional descriptions of what sometimes is referred to as manual or instrumental actions.
The examples that we use are taken an introductory course in endodontics and a YouTube tutorial on how to crochet. These examples show distinct relationships between descriptions and embodied courses of actions.
Manual actions
Although the instructional descriptions are all occasioned by manual actions, they vary in the extent to which the sense of the descriptions relies on the details of the displayed actions; and while instrumental actions in some demonstrations are produced independently of their descriptions, there are other situations where descriptions and embodied courses of actions mutually elaborate each other. In addition to this interest in description as part of instructional demonstration, we also turn to our own practices of description.
Analysis produced by members themselves
Throughout the chapter, we discuss how professional sociological analysis trades on and differs from the analysis produced by members themselves in the course of demonstrations: how our analyses of action are shaped by the fact that “ordinary cultural members are the first analysts on the scene” (Macbeth 2000, 200), and how the visual and embodied details of “say-shown demonstrations” (Burns 2012, 184) unavoidably are different from those that fit the printed page."
