Oral comunication
A. P. Carlin, J. B. V. Marques, R. Moutinho
Abstract
Recent research on astronomy outreach activities (Marques et al., 2022, 2021; Carlin et al. 2021) has
explored the work that members jointly produce to make sense of objects and patterns seen through
telescopes, and how these astronomical objects are discussed in settings such as observatories and
planetariums. However, so far there are no dedicated explorations of how members (i.e., guides and
visitors) shape their talk according to the categorial organisation of the interaction. In this paper, we
argue that guides and visitors, even with different levels of astronomy competence, engage in
activities that are dependent on each other’s view of the same object under observation. We elaborate
upon advances in MCA including “turn-informed categories” (Watson 2015) and “turn-allocated
categories” (Moutinho and Carlin 2021), through participants’ displays of knowledge. In so doing, we
look at astronomy outreach sessions as“category partitioning” events. Our data show that guides and
visitors orient to each other through (what we call) turn-allocational categories, i.e. turn or activity
distribution is not unidirectional (guide to visitors) but is collaborative and/or self-administered. Our
data show a more refined notion of category pair; and this refinement takes into account the
reflexivity of categorial and sequential aspects of the instruction.
International Institute for Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis conference – IIEMCA 2024
Seoul, South Korea
2024 June
