2020 EMCA Graduate Student Paper Award

The award committee—consisting of Sarah Hitzler (Chair), Christian Meier and Tanya Tyagunova—recommends

Joonas Råman’s paper “Budo Demonstrations as Shared Accomplishments: The modalities of guiding in the joint teaching of physical skills”, published in the Journal of Pragmatics in 2019,

for this year’s Best Student Paper Award of the ASA section Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis.

In his paper “Budo demonstrations as shared accomplishments: The modalities of guiding in the joint teaching of physical skills”, Joonas Råman aims to show how martial arts instructors rely on the knowledge, competence and compliance of assistants in order to make comprehensible physical skills to an audience. This very precise and levelled analysis opens up new perspectives on instruction and demonstration by conducting a shift away from instructors and making visible the work conducted by their partners. The work of instructing is practically accomplished via cooperative demonstration, so another shift is undertaken away from dyadic settings between teachers and students toward a triadic setting in which epistemic and deontic authority are unequally distributed, but flexibly so. In addition, Råman fruitfully calls into question the concept of ‘adjacency pairs’ and argues that rather than being necessarily adjacent, actions may be ‘paired’ and collaboratively geared towards the same end. Joonas Råman’s paper offers a detailed and rich empirical description of the phenomenon of “doing being a good uke”, by highlighting features of instructional work in budo demonstrations, which enable joint-teaching, i.e. the guiding demonstrations, in a way that substantively relies on displaying pedagogical competences on part of teacher’s assistants producing responses that might not necessarily be expected by their teachers. The study opens up avenues for further debate with regard to embodied cooperation, demonstrations, and the intertwinement of epistemics and authority in cooperative activities.