EWS Communicative impairment in interaction. A Nordic perspective on the social organisation of disordered talk

The workshops series consists of three follow up workshops held in Finland, Denmark and Sweden. The workshops will concentrate on recent Nordic research on communicative impairment within talk-in-interaction that shift the traditional (cognitive) perspect ive of impairment as a bodily (dys-)function within the individual, towards an interactionist and contextualist understanding of sense-making as an emergent product of interaction. Most studies on interactional management of communicative impairment are u ndertaken within the field of conversation analysis (CA). These studies enrich the theoretical debate with astonishing new insights about the communicative abilities of the individual suffering from communicative impairment, which are much more complex th an the former perspective on cognitive processes. The special quality of CA is to provide a detailed analysis of the emergent and situated production of meaning by looking at the sequential organization of talk-in-interaction based on data of natural occu rring interactions of adults and/or children. The workshops will initiate an interdisciplinary discussion of sociologists, linguists and speech scientist/therapist working with a conversation analytical background on empirical data of interactions involvi ng one or more participants with communicative impairment. As the past has shown these disciplines enable a fruitful discussion and enrich each other's perspective. The interacting parties can suffer from aphasia or other language impairments resulting fr om trauma to the brain, or other communicative disabilities that affect interaction. As the workshops concentrate on everyday interactional practices of the suffering parties the setting will be both institutional and home environments with a focus on mul timodal, embodied and materially situated practices. The discussion will be complemented by selected experts from non-Nordic countries.