Focal social actions through which space is configured and reconfigured when orienting to a Finnish Sign Language class

This paper focuses on how signing students organise themselves spatially in social interactions in a university lecture hall. One may view space as a concrete location, a social construct, and a normative actor with historical trajectories. The study addresses the question, 'What are the mediated actions through which the students and teacher (re)configure space for participating in a class?' Following a methodological framework of Mediated Discourse Analysis and multimodal interaction analysis, I approach this question by examining the social actions occurring when entering a lecture hall. The primary data includes video recordings, photos, and participatory observations, documented by field notes. The analysis shows how the architectural specifications of a space pose restrictions on visual-embodied interactions. However, the participants configure and reconfigure the space to some extent to suit visual-embodied interaction through explicit and implicit negotiation.