Social interaction

We investigate how technologies—from everyday objects to advanced AI systems—become active co-creators of social situations. The focus is on how humans and technologies coexist and co-constitute each other in practice. We analyze how natural phenomena such as weather, plants, landscapes, and climate conditions actively participate in social action. We explore how social situations emerge through interactions between humans and other species—for example, in collaborations between blind people and guide dogs or in agricultural contexts where animals act as co-participants in practice.

We work with crip-theoretical and sociomaterial perspectives on functional variation and approaches to inclusion. The focus is on how environments, senses, technologies, and temporal rhythms create specific conditions for participation and competence in social situations. We study how moods, atmospheres, and sensory qualities shape social situations, with particular attention to places and physical surroundings. This includes the analysis of soundscapes, smell, light, temperature, and affective intensities as mediating forces in interaction that can be observed and described. We approach emotions as place-bound practices that occur not solely within the individual but are formed through relations between bodies, materiality, places, and atmospheres. To feel is to act: grief, joy, or safety are practiced through concrete actions and social routines that are always situated. Such a perspective also expands the concept of health by showing how well-being emerges in and through the emotional practices that unfold in the spaces of everyday life.

Interpersonal trust and credibility are fundamental to achieving intersubjectivity, meaningful relationships, and cooperation. We understand trust not as a mental or abstract etic concept, but as a situated practice. We study trust and related social phenomena such as credibility, vulnerability and trustworthiness as social, interactional phenomena. Analyzing video- and audio-ethnographic data we examine how interpersonal trust is ‘done’ and show how trust is negotiated and achieved in situ in various institutional contexts—often in highly asymmetric interactions from social psychological resiedences and prisons to unions and the executive floors.

We examine and co-develop communicative roles among professionals—including leaders, consultants, educators, and frontline workers—as they engage with employees, colleagues, clients, citizens, partners, and other stakeholders in physical, hybrid, and mediated environments. We explore these interactions as sites for the co-creation of inclusion, meaning, participation, professional and personal authority, equality, community, and recognition—both within organizations and in relations with clients, customers, suppliers, and external partners. In extension, we are interested in how professionals work with citizens’ physical and mental health, self-care, and compliance.