Co-Operative Action

Charles Goodwin, Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies at University of California, Los Angeles, has received honorary doctorates from universities in Sweden and Denmark, and is the author of 'Professional Vision', the most cited article published to date in the American Anthropologist.

• 1. Introduction; Part I. Co-operative Accumulative Action: 2. Co-operative accumulation as a pervasive feature of the organization of action; 3. The co-operative organization of emerging action; 4. Chil and his resources; 5. Building complex meaning and action with a three word vocabulary: inhabiting and reshaping the actions of others through accumulative transformation; 6. The distributed speaker; Part II. Intertwined Semiosis: 7. Intertwined knowing; 8. Building action by combining different kinds of materials; 9. Intertwined actors; 10. Projection and the interactive organization of unfolding experience; 11. Projecting upcoming events to accomplish co-operative action; Part III. Embodied Interaction: 12. Action and co-operative embodiment in girls' hopscotch; 13. Practices of color classification; 14. Creating professional vision co-operatively; 15. Environmentally coupled gestures; Part IV. Co-operative Action with Predecessors: Sedimented Landscapes for Knowledge and Action: 16. Co-operative action with predecessors; 17. The accumulation of diversity through co-operative action; 18. Seeing in depth; 19. Co-operative action as the source of, and solution to, the task faced by every community of creating new, culturally competent members with specific forms of knowledge and skill; Part V. Professional Vision, Transforming Sensory Experience into Types, and the Creation of Competent Inhabitants: 20. The emergence of conventionalized signs within the natural world; 21. Calibrating experience and knowledge by touching the world; 22. The blackness of black: color categories as situated practice; 23. Environmentally coupled gestures and the social calibration of professional vision; 24. Professional vision; 25. Conclusion.

'With Co-Operative Action, Charles Goodwin has cemented his legacy as one of the most creative, insightful, and unfettered scholars of human social action in interaction. The effects of his research over four decades are felt in fields from linguistic anthropology to cognitive science to microsociology to digital ethnography to communications. He leaves us with the tools to see how that vision - and, in particular, its core concept, culture - can be causally grounded in the temporally framed experience of co-operative, copresent life.' N. J. Enfield, American Anthropologist