Chuck Goodwin’s Two Ground-Breaking Contributions to the Study of Social Interaction: Simultaneities in Multimodal Interaction and Professional Vision
Chuck Goodwin’s Two Ground-Breaking Contributions to the Study of Social Interaction: Simultaneities in Multimodal Interaction and Professional Vision

Summary/Abstract: Over the past 40 years Candy and Chuck Goodwin have provided groundbreaking findings and theoretical developments in a breath-taking number of fi elds of research. It is hard to find any other scholar (or couple) who has made authoritative contributions to such a wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, conversation analysis, interactional linguistics, sociolinguistics, professional discourse, sociology of work, sociology of knowledge, gesture studies, psychology of rehabilitation, aphasiology, pedagogy… Since I cannot claim to be a polymath, I must restrict my contribution to the point of view of an analyst of social interaction. Next to Harvey Sacks, Emmanuel Schegloff , Gail Jefferson and John Heritage, Chuck Goodwin has been the most important representative of the world-wide leading approach to social interaction, i.e. conversation analysis (CA). From an American, “classical” conversation analytic perspective, it may seem to be questionable to include Goodwin in CA. From a European perspective, however, the Goodwinian approach complements the focus on sequential analysis and talk-in-interaction developed in classical conversation analysis in important ways with its emphasis on the importance of the simultaneous orders of multimodal conduct, being crucial for the organization of participation, action and understanding in interaction.

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