This book is about touching as a situated practice. Rooted in multimodal conversation analysis and based on video recordings of naturally occurring social interactions, it contributes in a novel way to the growing interest in the study of touch and its relation to the body, socio-material activity contexts, language and other communicative resources. The proposed approach on touch in social interaction is inspired by social, interactional, and phenomenological perspectives conceptualizing human action as embodied, situated and lively experienced within the social and material world.

The book examines the social and communicative features of corporeal engagements, conceptualizing touch as an interactional phenomenon, and proposes a methodology for studying touch in a multimodal ethnomethodological and conversation analytic perspective. Attention is directed to social situations where touching features as a naturally occurring part of everyday and institutional life. The analyses of this book propose to examine how touching is temporally and sequentially organized; how it is coordinated by the co-participants with various multimodal resources, such as talk, gaze, body movements. They show how these forms of organization secure and make recognizable the legitimacy, accountability, morality, and normativity of touch conduct. The collection of studies highlights the social meaning of touch for the participants in social interaction in families between caregivers and children, in leisure activities, such as martial arts and dance, in health care, between patients and health practitioners; and ways of touching and sensing objects as a part of professional practices of geologists, cheese shop sellers or surgeons.