Everyday Interactions Research Articles

Social and romantic experiences of banter: perspectives of gay men

AbstractBanter, a form of social communication, is used to facilitate social bonding in friendships and romantic relationships. However, associations between homosocial banter and “lad culture” and potential links to sexual violence and lower wellbeing have highlighted a problematic side to such interactions, especially among males during emerging adulthood. Despite male banter often involving homophobic comments and homosocial behaviour, banter experiences of gay men have to date largely been ignored in the literature. The aim of this study was to explore how gay men in a university setting understand and perceive banter. The data were devised from semi-structured interviews (n = 6, 20–22 years; male). An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) explored the participants’ experiences of banter in their everyday interactions, including within their same-sex friendships and romantic relationships. Themes highlighted how language and behaviours typical of homosocial banter often created a sense of unease when engaging with heterosexual friends, but banter use and perception could be influenced by context and social relationship. Complexities of navigating the ambiguity of banter are discussed.

EXPRESS: Individual control of input rate improves recall of spoken discourse by adult users of cochlear implants: An exploratory study.

Although cochlear implants (CI) successfully replace the sense of hearing, they do not restore natural hearing. Still, CI users adapt to this novel signal, reaching meaningful levels of speech recognition in clinical tests that focus on repetition of words and short sentences. However, many patients who score above average in clinical speech perception tests complain that everyday speech interactions are both difficult and cognitively draining. In part this difficulty may be due to the naturally rapid pace of everyday discourse. We report a study in which 12 CI users aged 23 to 77, recalled multi-sentence discourse presented without interruption, or in the condition of interest, when passages were paused at major linguistic boundaries, with participants given control of when to initiate the next segment. Comprehension of the discourse structure was based on a formalized representational system that organizes discourse elements hierarchically to index the relative importance of different elements to the overall understanding of the discourse. Results showed (a) better recall when CI users were allowed to control the discourse pace, (b) an overall effect of aging, with older CI users recalling discourse less accurately, (c) better recall for passages with higher average inter-word predictability, (d) a "semantic hierarchy effect" reflected by better recall of main ideas versus minor details, (e) an attenuation of the semantic hierarchy effect for low predictability passages. Results underscore the benefits of extra processing time in addressing CI listening challenges and highlight the limited ecological validity of single-word or single-sentence speech recognition tests.

Algorithmic experiences of Netflix’s users in the Arab world: Implications for agency and social practice

Netflix has significantly reshaped the global production, distribution, and consumption of audiovisual content. While Netflix claims its algorithm-driven platform provides superior services and limitless choices, it raises concerns about human agency, autonomy, and data justice. These concerns are especially pressing in the Global South, where predatory data extraction practices are prevalent. Research on this issue faces challenges, including a dichotomy between algorithmic power and human agency, limited exploration of user perspectives, and a lack of studies in non-Western contexts. This paper addresses these gaps using a socio-constructivist lens, centering users’ experiences in understanding algorithms as sociotechnical systems. Through reflexive in-depth interviews, it examines Netflix users in Egypt, UAE, Morocco, and Jordan. Drawing on Domestication Theory and a relational view of agency, it explores how users engage with, interpret, and resist algorithmic impacts. The paper argues that while users interact with these systems, their engagement is shaped by asymmetrical power, where algorithms control the parameters of user agency. It highlights the often-overlooked relational nature of agency, co-constructed through everyday interactions with these systems.

Managing operational resilience during the implementation of digital transformation in healthcare organisational practices.

The aim of this study is to investigate ways in which healthcare organisations can successfully maintain operational resilience within intricate and varied engagements during digital transformation processes. The present research applied cultural-historical activity theory as the theoretical framework and the ethnographic account as an approach and strategy to interpret and understand theoperational resilience of digital transformation tools in daily practices. Fieldwork was based on the research technique of shadowing, whereby the researcher closely accompanied the participants to record their conduct, activities and exchanges. Research results propose that effective operational resilience management in the implementation of digital transformation projects is based on (1) identifying and interpreting internal contradictions in everyday interactions as opportunities for capability developments; (2) navigating through multiple sites in fast and improvised movements, which derives in distributed and emergent practices; (3) interplaying between dyadic interactions and networked dependencies, which is achieved through the articulation of varied interests and (4)implementing novel intermediary tools, roles and regulations that facilitate the reduction of disturbances. The propositions of the present study indicate that the management of operational resilience extends beyond conventional adaptive and socio-technical models in healthcare services. The study emphasises the significance of expressing and converting differing interests into mutual advantages. It additionally demonstrates the intricacy of this obstacle, as it entails navigating through uncertain information, concealed interpretations and conflicting interests.

Doing Virtual Companionship with Alexa

Technologists often claim that virtual assistants, e.g., smart speakers, can offer 'smart companionship for independent older people'. However, the concept of companionship manifested by such technologies is rarely explained further. Studies of virtual assistants as assistive technologies have tended to conceptualise companionship as a 'special form of friendship' or as a way of strengthening 'psychological wellbeing' and 'emotional resilience'. While these abstractions can be measured using psychological indices or self-report, they are not necessarily informative about how 'virtual companionship' may be performed in everyday interaction. This case study focuses on how a virtual assistant is used by a person living with dementia and asks to what extent it takes on a role recognizable, from interactional studies, as 'doing companionship'. We draw on naturalistic video data featuring a person living with dementia in her own home using a smart speaker. Our results show how actions such as complaints about and blamings directed towards the device are achieved through shifts of ‘footing’ between turns that are ostensibly ‘talk to oneself’ and turns designed to occasion a response. Our findings have implications for the design, feasibility, and ethics of virtual assistants as companions, and for our understanding of the embedded ontological assumptions, interactive participation frameworks, and conversational roles involved in doing companionship with machines.

‘It's not just a matter of taking the drug. It's about changing the way you function in your society too’: Narratives of power and resistance in the lived experiences of opioid agonist therapy consumers in regional Victoria, Australia

Opioid Agonist Therapy (OAT) has initiated extensive discussion regarding its efficacy, cost-effectiveness and best practice delivery. Although this discussion has been dominated by pharmacologists, clinicians, pharmacists and public policy-makers, there is increasing interest in examining OAT consumer experience and voice, particularly regarding consumers’ navigation and experience of the social field of their treatment. Concerned with the expression and circulation of power and resistance, Michel Foucault's work offers rich resources for examining OAT consumers’ experience and navigation of the social field of their treatment, including the administration of OAT as a harm reduction and social welfare intervention and consumers’ efforts to shape their relationships with medical and allied health professionals and other stakeholders. In the case of this study, Foucault's conceptions of power provide a productive means to critically interrogate the experience of 16 OAT consumers participating in pharmacotherapy treatments within a community pharmacy model in regional Victoria, Australia. Through the application of Foucauldian analyses of subjects and power to OAT participant accounts, precisely what the participant responses in our study have shown is that the relationship between OAT practitioners and consumers is neither always oppositional nor binary. Findings suggest that practitioners must pay attention to the everyday interactions they have with consumers (and others)—to how they communicate, listen, understand, present and provide solutions. Interactions with consumers should be treated as sites that produce complex power relations with moral and ethical implications for subjects, including consumers, practitioners and other stakeholders. Both practitioner and consumers need to remember that they are both productive subjects locked in a complex assemblage of practices and social discourses that circumscribe the social field of opioid treatments.

User practices in dealing with trouble in interactions with virtual assistants in German: Repeating, altering and insisting

Moments of trouble and miscommunication occur regularly when users interact with virtual assistants like smart speakers. To add to the understanding of how users treat moments of trouble in everyday interactions with a virtual assistant (VA) in German, this paper reports on a conversation analytic study of practices that users deploy after a request to a VA has failed. The repair sequences that we analyse show users orienting to different trouble sources and employing a range of practices to resolve trouble, including repeating, altering their formulations and formulating related (new) requests. Most often, troubles are resolved after one instance of repair. Other repair sequences include several instances of repair and show more complex and diverse practices being employed. In some of these sequences, users ‘insist’ on their initial goal and/or strategy and do not always observably orient to the VA’s local reactions. In these cases, the interactional history with the VA and previously successful requests seem to play a role as well in the users’ local conduct.

Everyday practices of administrative ambiguation and the labour of de-ambiguation: Struggling for water infrastructure in Mumbai

In this paper, we use the notion of administrative precarity to refer to the vulnerability and insecurity experienced by marginalised and disadvantaged groups as a result of their interactions with ambiguous administrative procedures. Using the example of water infrastructure administration in Mumbai, specifically the experiences of ‘Pani Haq Samiti’– the ‘Right to Water campaign’– we formulate how administrative precarity and infrastructural violence intersect in transcalar practices of ambiguation in urban governance. We build on a nascent set of literature that illustrates how ambiguity in administrative processes is used as a tactic to avoid or deny the impacts of bureaucratic process of water and sanitation governance in Mumbai. We work through several examples of the ambiguous practices and paperwork involved in implementing the universal right to water in urban Mumbai with a specific focus on the challenges in non-notified slums. We demonstrate that the practices of ambiguation, are often entrenched in everyday interactions between citizens or activists and administrators on the ground. In enabling the continued withholding of water infrastructure these ambiguous bureaucracies create an administrative precarity and are thus constitutive to persistent infrastructural violence against marginalised groups. We show that everyday practices of activists and administrators provoke the labours of de-ambiguation as a pre-requisite to the implementation of infrastructural solutions to achieve the ‘Right to Water’ under administrative precarity. We call for more research on everyday practices of (de-)ambiguation, including highlighting the potentially transformative role that urban scholarship may take to support the labour of de-ambiguation.

Orangutans and chimpanzees produce morphologically varied laugh faces in response to the age and sex of their social partners

Laugh faces of humans play a key role in everyday social interactions as a pervasive tool of communication across contexts. Humans often vary the degree of mouth opening and teeth exposure when producing these facial expressions, which may depend on who their social partner is (e.g., their gender and age as well as their social relationship), serving this way different functions. Although it was found that laugh faces show evolutionary continuity across humans and non-human great apes according to the Principle of Maximum Parsimony, little is known about the function of laugh face variations from an evolutionary perspective. Hence, the present work examined the morphology of laugh faces in orangutan and chimpanzee dyadic play to test if they are modified with dependence on the playmate’s characteristics (sex, age and social relationship). In total, we analysed over 600 facial expressions of 14 orangutans and 17 chimpanzees by coding the specific muscle activations (Action Units, i.e. AUs) contributing to these expressions, using OrangFACS and ChimpFACS, respectively. Our results suggest that age difference and, to a lesser extent, playmate sex influence laugh face morphology in both taxa, but in opposite ways. While the orangutans of our study seem to expose their upper teeth (with AU10) and to pull the mouth corners (with AU12) more towards weaker partners (younger and female), possibly to communicate non-hostility, the chimpanzees showed both upper and lower teeth exposure (with AU10 and AU16) more often when interacting with the stronger partners (older individuals), possibly to communicate submissiveness. These findings suggest that the ability of humans to modify laugh faces with dependence on social partner characteristics has most likely evolved from pre-existing traits, going back at least to the last common ancestor of today’s great apes, including humans.

THE DIPLOMAT WITHIN: LEADING WITH UNITY IN A MULTIPOLAR WORLD

AbstractThe authors, who have varied and extensive experience in areas such as business and law, note that their “article leverages our collective experiences worldwide as leaders, lecturers, coaches, and speakers, that underscore the increasingly urgent need for diplomacy skills in everyday human interactions.” They further discuss the importance of diplomacy and diplomatic skills in modern workplaces. The authors “introduce the following three‐tiered Personal – Organizational ‐ External Diplomacy Framework, inspired by modern diplomatic thought. It cuts through dense literature on diplomacy and provides a navigational tool on how to add diplomacy skills into the organization’s DNA to nurture peaceful coexistence and achievement of goals, from interpersonal to global engagements.” They discuss three steps in detail, which in their words are (1) Mastering Personal Diplomacy, (2) Developing Organizational Diplomacy, (3) Developing External Diplomacy. For instance, core skills in step 1 are, in their words, self‐awareness, emotional intelligence, systems thinking, positive regard for others, effective communication, and trust building skills. Step 2 includes, in their words, Leadership Diplomatic Composure, Psychological Safety and Performance, Learning and Development, Engagement and Dialogue, Diversity and Teamwork, and Strategic Implementation. Step 3 includes, in their words, Engagement with External Stakeholders, Leadership in Global Challenges, and Public Diplomacy and Policy Advocacy.

Agroecology for migrant ‘emplacement’ in the left‐behind European countryside

AbstractWe explore the nexus between the green and demographic transitions in the European Union (EU) through the analysis of the challenges and opportunities that agroecology offers for the settlement and socioeconomic participation of Italian city‐dwellers‐turned agroecological farmers and non‐EU agroecological farmworkers in ageing and marginalised rural areas in Italy. Many such areas in Italy have recently experienced an influx of newcomers, including non‐EU labour migrants, refugees and asylum seekers and Italian city‐dwellers looking for a different lifestyle. Municipalities and NGOs have developed initiatives, like agroecology, for newcomers to participate in local societies while simultaneously contributing to sustainable rural (re)development in the context of the EU Green Deal. We discuss the potential of agroecology for the ‘emplacement’ of diverse groups of newcomers in these unlikely places through the analysis of the interpersonal, cultural, economic and institutional relations between newcomers and long‐time residents, and across different groups of newcomers, in two Italian villages. Our findings suggest that everyday interactions among long‐time residents and newcomers contribute to the emplacement of the latter. The analysed agroecological initiatives show potential for the emplacement of newcomers through their strong ethical stance and aspirations for environmental sustainability and improved life quality. However, short‐term contracts for the non‐EU farmworkers combined with tight economic returns for the Italian agroecological farmers may lead to distributional and procedural injustices, including the hyper‐exploitation of migrant farmworkers in the name of environmental sustainability.

Practice research in free improvisation

This article focuses on interaction processes during the performance of free improvisation in the jazz idiom, and their correlation to the construction of individual musical identities. In this article, I regard musical identity as an artistic, dynamic and personal process characterized by continual communication, construction and negotiation with the surrounding social and cultural environment. Interaction, just like improvisation, is a fundamental defining element in jazz and free improvisation, playing a crucial role in shaping the musical identity of each musician during their performance. This is presented here as analogous to the moulding of individual identity in our everyday social interactions. This research is based on the author’s active participation in improvisation sessions and interviews with professional jazz musicians based in Lisbon, Portugal. Additionally, it explores how the context of free improvisation, when musical restrictions are minimized, intensifies the focus on the interactive improvisational process. This attribute makes free improvisation an ideal terrain for research on interaction and its relation with musical identity.

RELIGIOUS VOCABULARY OF EVERYDAY LANGUAGE OF THE ORTHODOX BELIEVERS OF UKRAINE

The article attempts to analyze the interaction of the religious language sphere with the Ukrainian language in the context of the religious discourse. Due to the ability of religious discourse to interact with other types of discourse, the speech activity of Orthodox believers is realized within institutional and personal discourses, the latter of which covers the sphere of interpersonal communication in the context of everyday interactions. The objective of the study is to find out the specifics of the functioning of lexical units expressing religious meanings in everyday language of Orthodox believers of Ukraine. The attributive and modus specificity of language of the religious sphere makes it possible to distinguish the language of religion as a representative of the meaning of the existence of religion and the religious language as the embodiment of manifestations of religion in the socio-cultural context. The religious language, which is objectified in the everyday language of Orthodox believers, includes a set of language units and lexical-semantic constructions peculiar to the church-religious sphere. At the same time, the everyday language of believers is characterized by coexistence of lexical units of sacred and national languages, an appeal to the emotional sphere of believers, and the use of verbal and non-verbal means of communication. The everyday language of Orthodox believers includes theological terms, church Slavonicisms, archaisms, historicisms, borrowed words. It also contains the phenomena of polysemy, homonymy, synonymy, antonymy and acts as an additional means of communication in the context of social interactions.

DyNamic Interactive Anticipation-Time for a Paradigmatic Shift.

Everyday human interactions require observers to anticipate the actions of others (e.g., when walking past another in a corridor or choosing where to hit a ground stroke in tennis). Yet, experimental paradigms that aim to examine anticipation continue to use simplistic designs that are not interactive and therefore fail to account for the real-life, social nature of these interactions. Here we propose a fundamental, paradigmatic shift toward a "dynamic interactive anticipation" paradigm that models real-life interactions. We propose that it will change the way behavioral experimentalists study anticipation and spark theory development by unravelling the mechanisms underlying anticipation in real-time interactions.

The construction of linguistic identities in talk about food among Tibetan heritage language learners

ABSTRACT This ethnographic article examines the interactional processes through which Tibetan-Canadian heritage language learners agentively construct their linguistic identities in everyday family interactions. Because food is centrally involved in family routines, as well as broader cultural practices and the articulation of individual tastes, talk about food provides a site for analyzing negotiations of individual agency amid expressions of shared identity. Drawing from previous language socialisation scholarship that approaches family meal times as a resource for constructing identity, this paper analyzes children’s conversations at meal-times, during food preparation, and about food preferences. Through interactional analysis of twelve months of longitudinal video ethnography in two Tibetan-Canadian families, I found that, in these activities centered on food, children used multilingual and multimodal resources to negotiate authority over their cultural and linguistic knowledge. Specifically, children agentively displayed their knowledge of Tibetan language forms, elaborated on their capacities to participate in cultural activities, and instructed parents about their individual preferences. By analyzing these interactional displays of knowledge through the concepts of agency and co-operative action, I argue that children construct their identities as speakers of Tibetan, despite the dominance of English in their language repertoires.

Disability and Consent in Everyday Interactions

Disability and Consent in Everyday Interactions

Comparative analysis of communication strategies impact on the effectiveness of interaction with an AI chatbot

Introduction. The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into everyday human interactions, particularly through chatbots, has significantly increased in recent years. AI-based chatbots successfully mimic human conversations by understanding user requests and responding appropriately. Improving the effectiveness of educational and professional activities related to text processing in these conditions seems extremely relevant and predetermines the goal of our study: comparing the effectiveness of interaction with ChatGPT when formulating queries in various communication strategies. Procedure and methods. The study on the effectiveness of interacting with ChatGPT was conducted using a natural experiment scheme with preliminary training. The subjects of the study were 34 employees (15 men, 19 women, aged 25-36; M = 31.6; SD = 1.8) from the marketing department of the company "Technologies of Trust". These employees performed rewriting tasks by interacting with ChatGPT within the framework of specially adapted communication strategies (persuasive and cooperative) and evaluated the chatbot's usability and the quality of the text generated by ChatGPT. The Wilcoxon signed-rank test for dependent samples was used to identify the effects of communication strategies on interaction efficiency, and exploratory factor analysis with subsequent varimax rotation was employed to identify latent variables of interaction under different communication strategies. Research Results. Comparison of the results of the ChatGPT interaction performance evaluation when using 2 strategies (cooperative and persuasive) showed that for all 11 usability indicators, there is a significant advantage of the cooperative communicative strategy at the significance level of p<0.05. However, on 6 indicators of text quality obtained through rewriting, the persuasive strategy shows advantages and on 4 of them at a significance level of p<0.05. In the course of the study it was found that the factor solutions for the studied communicative strategies differ significantly: the key factor in using the persuasive strategy is speed and accuracy in achieving goals, while in the cooperative strategy the adequate response of chatbots to objections is critical. Conclusion. The results obtained in the study contribute significantly to the understanding of communication with AI chatbots, highlighting the nuances of interacting through linguistic means typical for human communication. The findings demonstrate the complexity of choosing the optimal strategy for interacting with ChatGPT and uncover the factors that determine the features of subjective evaluation of the interaction.

Violation of the Principle of Cooperation in the Film Hangout by Raditya Dika

This study aims to identify violations of the principles of politeness in the film "Hangout" by Raditya Dika. This study uses a qualitative descriptive approach and a pragmatic analysis method based on Grice's cooperative principle theory. The main focus of this study is to explore the forms of violations of the cooperative principle in the film's dialogues, by examining several violated maxims. Referential matching and Dell Hymess' SPEAKING approach are used in data analysis, which are collected through observation and analysis of film documents using the Free Listening and Speaking (SBLC) technique. According to the findings of the analysis, there are 46 violations of the cooperative principle covering several maxims such as quantity, quality, relevance and implementation. The film "Hangout" has several examples of significant violations of the cooperative principle, which highlights the need to understand and apply these rules in everyday interactions to avoid miscommunication.

How Sexism in Institutions and Everyday Interactions Shapes Early Childbearing

Early childbearing is associated with poor outcomes for parents and children, potentially exacerbating inequality within and across generations. Building on the structural sexism and health perspective, we argue that systemic gender inequality is a conceptually important—and understudied—factor in early childbearing. Using survey data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health ( N = 5,052 female respondents and 32,595 person-years) merged to state, county, and school characteristics, we investigate how exposure to structural sexism during adolescence shapes early childbearing. We measure structural sexism in institutional domains with state and county-level measures of economic, cultural, and reproductive health. We also generate a novel measure of structural sexism in interactional domains, capturing gendered expectations, power dynamics, and conservative religious beliefs among school peers. We find that institutional sexism is associated with a higher likelihood of early childbearing among young women racialized as Black, but not among those racialized as White. Interactional sexism is also a significant predictor of early childbearing, and is especially salient for adolescents as they turn to peers for social cues about gender roles. Our results underscore the importance of institutional and interactional forces for shaping families and raise questions about increasingly polarized gender climates post- Dobbs.

Domesticating Property: Moral Economies of Post‐Socialist Homeownership Through Rental and Neighbour Relations

This article analyses property relations in post‐socialism through the analytical lens of housing studies and moral economy, specifically in the context of rental and neighbour relations in urban apartment buildings. It draws on 50 in‐depth residential biographies of residents of St. Petersburg, Russia, collected between 2017 and 2021. The interviews represent a diversity of tenures, as well as direct and indirect voices of homeowners and non‐owners. The article begins by introducing the socio‐historical context of the privatisation and commodification of housing in post‐socialist Russia. Then, based on the stories of the origin of property and the intensity of attachment to it, I analyse owners’ homemaking through daily interactions with other owners and non‐owners who act as their tenants and neighbours. Focusing on privatised, mortgaged, and inherited residential property, I identify three trajectories of complex relationships between owners and non‐owners in urban buildings and modes of homemaking, at the intersection of monetary and non‐monetary relations and imaginaries of counterparts. I argue that despite everyday interactions in the housing market and in apartment blocks, both the owners of privatised Soviet property and new owner‐occupiers tend to avoid the total commercialisation of the home and to challenge the dominance of homeownership as the only socially sanctioned tenure.