Mind, Culture, and Activity

Doing (Un)Availability: Co-Presence as Mediated Activity at the Interface of Focused and Unfocused Interaction

How participants organise their availability to one another is fundamental to social interaction. Across institutional and everyday settings, collective activity depends on how participants continuously negotiate when, how, and to whom they are available. The ways in which participants accomplish (un)availability shape opportunities for participation, coordination of joint activities, and social relationships. Yet, despite its crucial role in organising social life, (un)availability has remained understudied. Existing research has documented practices through which participants initiate, sustain, and withdraw from social encounters, including greetings and tactile boundary intertwinings (Goffman, 1971; Goodwin & Cekaite, 2018). However, relatively little attention has been paid to how participants make themselves available to, or unavailable for one another across the shifting boundaries of focused and unfocused interaction (but see, e.g., Rasmussen et al., 2019). From a cultural-historical perspective, this special issue approaches (un)availability as emerging within ongoing social activity, where participation is accomplished through talk, embodied conduct, and engagement with the material, spatial, and technological resources that mediate historically developed forms of practice (Murphy, 2004; Laurier et al., 2006).  

Building on Goffman's (1963) concept of co-presence, this special issue examines the ways in which participants accomplish (un)availability across the shifting boundaries of focused and unfocused interaction. Goffman defined focused interaction as encounters in which participants jointly sustain a common focus of attention and interactional engagement, whereas in unfocused interaction participants remain mutually perceptible without orienting to a shared interactional project. While this distinction has provided a powerful framework for understanding co-present encounters, it leaves open the question of how participants manage their availability as they move between or simultaneously sustain focused and unfocused forms of participation. 

Examining how participants manage (un)availability has become increasingly relevant as contemporary forms of work, education, and everyday life require participants to coordinate multiple, partially overlapping activities across physical and technologically mediated environments, where attention and participation are often distributed rather than organised as discrete encounters (Bergmann & Peräkylä, 2024). Rather than simply alternating between focused and unfocused interaction, participants often sustain simultaneous forms of availability while engaging with people, objects, and technologies. In this sense, (un)availability is not merely a matter of entering or leaving interaction but an ongoing accomplishment through which participation is organised. 

We invite contributions that examine (un)availability across a wide range of institutional and everyday settings. Situated within a cultural-historical perspective on mediated action and drawing on EMCA and multimodal conversation analysis, the studies demonstrate how (un)availability is accomplished through embodied action, material environments, institutional practices, and culturally organised forms of participation.  

The contributions can address (but are not limited to) questions such as: 

• How is (un)availability accomplished through verbal, embodied, spatial and material resources?  

• How do participants coordinate the timing and organisation of focused interaction? 

• How do participants manage each others’ displays of (un)availability? 

• What happens when participants’ displays of (un)availability misalign? 

Together, the contributions will reconceptualise co-presence not simply as a condition of mutual perceptibility but as an ongoing accomplishment. In doing so, they bring Goffman's interactional insights into dialogue with cultural-historical perspectives on mediated action (Murphy, 2004; Laurier et al., 2006), demonstrating how attention, engagement, and (un)availability are accomplished through embodied action, artefacts, technologies, and spatial arrangements. The special issue therefore contributes not only to the study of co-presence but also to broader discussions within Mind, Culture, and Activity by demonstrating how mind, culture, and social interaction are co-constituted through embodied, material, and socially organised action. 

References  

Bergmann, J. R., & Peräkylä, A. (2024). The social organization of (in-)attention. In L. Mondada & A. Peräkylä (Eds.), New perspectives on Goffman in language and interaction (pp. 299-322). Taylor & Francis.  

Goffman, E. (1963). Behavior in public places. Notes on the social organization of gatherings. The Free Press. 

Goffman, E. (197I). Relations in public. Basic Books.  

Goodwin, M. H., & Cekaite, A. (2018). Embodied family choreography: practices of control, care, and mundane creativity. Routledge.  

Laurier, E., Maze, R., & Lundin, J. (2006). Putting the dog back in the park: Animal and human mind-in-action. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 13(1), 2–24. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327884mca1301_2 

Murphy, K. M. (2004). Imagination as joint activity: The case of architectural interaction. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 11(4), 267–278. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327884mca1104_3 

Rasmussen, G., Kristiansen, E. D., & Andersen, E. M. (2019). Working out availability, unavailability and awayness in social face-to-face encounters: The case of dementia. Discourse Studies, 21(3), 258-279. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445619829238