The special issue on “Situated agency in digitally artifacted social interactions”
(Ibnelkaïd & Avgustis, 2023) is a timely and highly important publication in studies
of action and sense-making practices, with a focus on how materials can achieve
agency within unfolding situations. Studying situated agency with an analytical
sensitivity to how humans, nonhumans, materials, objects, nature and
technologies assemble with humans in and through activities reflects a research
interest omitted by language-centric or even human-centric (anthropocentric)
analysis. It indicates an interest in unpacking multimodal actions, the senses or
the bodies in intercorporeal interactions, which EMCA scholars in general deem
highly important (e.g., Cekaite & Goodwin, 2021; Meyer et al., 2017; Mondada,
2021, 2022), but also emphasizes a stronger commitment to producing
understandings of how exhibited meaning is indexically tied to material
circumstances and an openness towards other-than-human forms of agency.