Inés Olza
From
In residence at
Loire Linguistics Laboratory (LLL) / University of Orléans, CNRS, University of Tours - FR
Host scientist
Biagio Ursi
PROJECT
Narratives-in-interaction: A multimodal approach to the use and negotiation of narratives in (in)formal mediation (NarratIM)
The NarratIM project explores how personal narratives, as a ubiquitous multimodal resource in various forms of face-to-face interaction, contribute to the development and purposes of mediation, that is, the interactional practices aimed at resolving or transforming a prior conflict between two or more parties. To this end, the proposed project will integrate research approaches and tools from the Laboratoire Ligérien de Linguistique (LLL) at the University of Orléans, which has been, for decades, responsible for ESLO, one of the largest sociolinguistic oral corpora in French. A significant number of recent studies on oral and multimodal corpora conducted at the LLL have specifically focused on the interactional analysis of narratives within various communicative genres.
In this vein, the central objective of NarratIM is to build an integrated model for the pragmatic-linguistic, multimodal, and cognitive study of narratives in mediation. This model will emerge from the results of a multidimensional analysis of a corpus of audiovisual recordings of penal and family mediation sessions, conducted primarily in Spanish, with a comparative perspective with other languages such as French and English. The corpus analysis will involve phases of segmentation and structural examination of the narratives present in the sessions; the identification and description of the multimodal patterns most frequently shaping these narratives; and the cognitive and pragmatic grounding, as well as the motivations and effects of using narratives during professional mediation. Simultaneously, the project will reflect on mediation as an emergent phenomenon in spontaneous interaction, evolving toward formal and institutionalized mediation along a pragmatic-interactional continuum.
The project's findings will contribute to advancing knowledge about the multimodal interactional strategies involved in the de-escalation and resolution of conflicts, with implications of direct relevance to the professional practice of mediation.