Summer School 2013 "Situating Media" - Participants

Ilham Messaoudi (Siegen)

Multimodal Production of Emotionality within Situated Interactions

There are many stereotypes regarding the way people communicate and interact with each other. Especially nonverbal communication seems to be a favored topic of these preconceptions. For example, Germans are said to make scarce use of nonverbal communication means, which gives them the reputation of being cold and distant conversation partners. Assuming there is some truth in these prejudices, emotionality seems to be a) culturally dependent and b) also communicated nonverbally. In my research I want to challenge these assumptions and analyze: How do we produce emotionality in everyday interactions?

Although the multimodal aspects of language are getting more and more attention in the field of linguistics, these nonverbal elements, like gestures, are mostly seen as signs which are analyzed regarding their shape and meaning or as discourse structuring elements, for example gaze behavior in the context of turn-taking. But still, there is a lack of understanding concerning the nonverbal aspects of language. The existing linguistic research merely touches the topic of gestures in relation to expressed emotionality. For this reason, I would like to start right at this point with my holistic, interdisciplinary research, in which I will study the multimodal production of emotionality in situated interactions. The data will be collected following the principles of the postgraduate program Locating Media in locative and situational field studies in Turkey and Germany.

Ilham Messaoudi is a  Ph.D. Candidate of Linguistics at the University Siegen and a member of the Locating Media research group. She is currently writing her Ph.D. thesis “Hand’s on Heart – The Multimodal Production of Emotionality in Everyday Interactions. A Cross-Cultural Examination of German and Turkish Conversations”. She studied Linguistics, Psychology and German Literature at the University of Bonn. In her Magister thesis she analyzed Gestures from a speech act theoretic perspective.

messaoudi@locatingmedia.uni-siegen.de

Recent Publications:

2013: “Die Mediatisierung des Feldes und des Labors in der linguistischen Gestenforschung – Zur Rolle technischer Aufzeichnungsmedien in der Datenerhebung,“ in: Navigationen 12/2, Raphaela Knipp, Johannes Paßmann, and Nadine Taha (ed.), Vom Feld zum Labor und zurück (forthcoming).