Panel: Interactions with infants: Multisensoriality, affect and embodiment in co-production of sociality in the early years

In this panel, we will explore interactions with and among 0-18 -months-old children in non-institutional contexts, including peer- sibling- and adult-infant interactions. Bringing together studies across a variety of languages, developmental stages, abilities, participant constellations, and activities, the aim is to discuss method and build a collective understanding of how we come to be interacting humans. More specifically, we will zoom in how participants in these interactions can make sense of and accomplish action with pre-verbal co-participants. With such a view, we address issues that might normally be explored through developmental approaches, such as early speech, multiple language learning, mobility, baby-led weaning (crawling and walking), emotions-in-interaction. Furthermore, the wide field of previous interaction studies on children to date, have focused on adult or older child interactions, where verbal language is often already established.
Focusing on very early life has merits in its own right. Human sociality is primarily multisensorial and embodied, and even more so in early stages of life: when born, multisensorial and -modal means such as touch and vocalization, are the primary mediums of communication among humans from infancy (e.g. de León 1998; Katila, 2018; Rączaszek-Leonardi, Nomikou, & Rohlfing 2013). Arguably, such primordially embodied interaction is characteristically affective, including the infant expressing and the caregiver responding to an infant’s basic needs, such as for closeness and nutrition. At the same time, during such early stages of human life, people acquire a multitude of life skills via interaction with others, such as understanding response relevance; gaze orientation and joint attention; physical skills like chewing, object manipulation, and verbal language. Given that infants still produce no or minimal talk, studying such early socialization and learning interactions requires special emphasis on multimodal and multisensorial understanding, making these interactions perspicuous settings to examine the social organization of touch, gaze, gesture, non-lexical vocalizations, and environment.

We wish to forefront the early years of human life as a form of unique – embodied, multisensorial, and affective – human sociality in its own right, by celebrating the small but growing field of EMCA based studies on infancy. Along the way, the papers of this panel may also address the potential methodological challenges that appear when studying pre-lingual interaction, from transcription to agency. We suggest that the intentionality-agnostic, action-focused EMCA provides a highly suitable method to empirically managing such difficulties.

The contributions can address (but are not limited to) topics and context such as

• Affective engagement and touch
• Neurodiverse infant interactions
• Infant interaction with digital tech
• Transitions
• Sensorial experiences
• CA transcription issues regarding infant contributions