Affect, Participation Structure and Occasioned Knowledge Exploration
in Family Interaction
Marjorie Harness Goodwin
UCLA
This paper investigates how family members collaboratively structure activities of occasioned knowledge exploration, moments when opportunities for exploring new ideas and vocabulary spontaneously arise in the midst of everyday activity. Central to this process is the ability of participants to develop a next move in ways that expand possibilities of responses to it. As family members work together to jointly produce the meaningful events of their lives, alternative forms of participation and interactively organized affect emerge. Family members have options for treating the talk of others as consequential and implicative for further talk or as largely irrelevant. These ideas will be explored using videotapes of family interaction across a variety of settings.