The “Curious Case” of an Unspoken Opening Speech Act: A Video-Ethnography of the Use of Video Communication in Courtroom Activities

Abstract

This article reports the results of an ethnographic study of court hearings in which participants are distributed across two distant sites, connected by videoconference. It focuses on the particulars of opening sequences in such mediated settings, and discusses in detail a “curious case,” in which the presiding judge did not open the hearing by the traditional, formulaic speech act (“The hearing is now open. You may be seated.”). Through a combination of ethnographic observation and sequential analysis, we show how the production of such an expected institutional speech act in courtroom hearings may have been made irrelevant at the sequential slot in which one might have expected its performance. What such a speech act does in a given activity-embedded sequential setting depends on and reveals the particular interplay of technology, talk- and gesture-in-interaction, and activity that is relevant to the ongoing production of a proper beginning for a court hearing conducted at a distance.

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