From understanding to participation:A relational approach to communicative and embodied practices

The paper presents some methodological considerations around the topic of the AFinLA 2012 Autumn Symposium: Multimodal discourses of participation. The aim is to shed theoretical and analytical light on embodied participation in material settings. The research is placed in a relational perspective in which entities (for example, the world, culture, society, organization and identities) emerge through entangled, layered practices in concrete circumstances. Understanding is not treated as a philosophical puzzle or as a purely linguistic phenomenon. Rather, it is conceptualized as an embodied, multimodal process in which language together with bodily senses (vision, hearing, touch, smell and taste) and a sense of place contribute to a phenomenon being recognized (as shared). Participation can result in inclusion or exclusion, a claim which is discussed with the help of a pilot study from a residential home where mutual understanding is an everyday challenge, namely the Danish Acquired Brain Injury Centre North