Sharing Experiences of Intercountry Adoption:Multimodality, Embodiment and Affect

In recent years, fields such as discursive psychology have paid attention to the social, instead of solely individual, character of emotions, bringing to the fore the interactional organisation of affect displays. In the same vein, other ‘inner’ processes, such as memory, are studied from the perspective of the kinds of work that talking about the past does in a specific interaction. Middleton & Brown (2005) extend this interactional perspective to include, on the one hand, the experience of being in the world (ie. duration), and, on the other hand, the use of mediational means (eg. language, signs, artefacts) to actualise this experience and enable action in the world. Intercountry adoption can be approached as a nexus of local and global practices which are mediated in talk, text and other modalities of discourse. We use mediated discourse analysis combined with conversation analysis to investigate the ways in which the experience of adoption is negotiated and shared in embodied interaction, drawing upon a variety of multimodal resources and mediational means. We are particularly interested in how experiences of adoption are localised, collected and dispersed. One of the aims of this research is to better understand the relationships between multimodality, embodiment, interaction and affect. We present the results of our analysis of how the experiences of adoptive parents are (re)mediated in a Danish television documentary series following five prospective adoptive couples, not all of whom succeed in their 'quest' to adopt from abroad. One key feature of the series was the unintrusive use of consumer video cameras to record the emotionally charged moment when one or both of the partners receive news regarding their case over the telephone in their home (or workplace). In this setting, the participants use language and other mediational means (eg. telephone, speakerphone, written details about the child, photograph, pen, paper) to accomplish the joint receipt of news about the child-to-be-adopted. In the analysis, we concentrate on how the parents’ affective displays are interactionally occasioned. Our special concern is with how the past is built into the present through memory work that is actualised and performed not just through language but also through embodied attention such as body posture, gaze and gestures. In other words, we study how the past is folded into the now through embodied affect and alignment