My working life is dedicated to studying face-to-face communication, mainly among humans, but lately also including other animals. I am fascinated by the ways in which our senses make sense of the world and how the sense we make of it is articulated in bodily actions, language, and visual and musical imagery.
In my research, I film people in their everyday life and analyze their bodily actions and speech in slow motion. For example, in my book Self-Making Man. A Day of Action, Life, and Language (2017), I have investigated every interaction that the owner of an auto-repair shop conducted during one workday to document his entire communicative equipment, the tools and practices that he has acquired and invented to cope with the innumerable, constantly changing interaction demands made on him.
2017 Self-Making Man. A Day of Action, Life and Language. New York: Cambridge University Press. (Paperback edition 2019)