Interaction with Food in a Multicultural Cooking Class

Abstract

This dissertation investigates how participants make edible objects interactionally relevant in instructional cooking activities as they discuss, manipulate, and sense them in a multicultural cooking class. There is a growing interest in the role object mobilization plays in interactions, and previous research has demonstrated fruitful insights on human sociality gained from this field of pursuit (see Day & Wagner, 2019 and Nevile et al., 2014 for an overview). However, three research areas remain underexplored and deserve more attention: how language use shapes and is shaped by object manipulation, how object sensing is interactionally organized and becomes consequential to participants’ activities, and how participants’ cultural categories emerge as they interact with objects in intercultural encounters. To begin filling these gaps, the current study examines one of the most perspicuous yet little-researched object-rich settings, cooking instruction. Applying multimodal conversation analysis to investigate video-recorded spontaneous cooking class interactions, this research addresses three main topics. First, it explicates how cooking teachers organize demonstrations to draw students’ attention to their manual actions or object materiality using Chinese manner demonstratives (e.g., zheyang(zi) ‘like this’) together with various embodied resources. Second, it delineates how participants explore unfamiliar food through sensing, focusing on the initiation of sensing actions, sensorial practices, and multimodal ways to share sensorial outcomes. Third, it reveals how participants multimodally construct cultural categories that manifest their orientation to and help achieve the institutional goal of teaching and learning authentic food practices. By investigating these three topics, the dissertation aspires to demonstrate how participants skillfully combine languages, bodies, cultures, and object mobilization in forming and interpreting social actions to accomplish their activities. The findings can contribute to the research fields of interactional linguistics, multisensoriality, membership categorization analysis, and intercultural communication. With regard to interactional linguistic research, this study fills important gaps in the research of Chinese manner demonstratives by detailing their distinct interactional functions that were under-addressed in previous research based on fabric examples, written texts, or audio-recorded conversational data alone. The study further contributes to cross-linguistic deixis research, as it reveals both universality and diversity in the use of manner demonstratives in Chinese and other languages. As for multisensorial interaction, the current study adds new insights to this body of knowledge as it uncovers both context-specific and context-transcending object sensing practices. The findings demonstrate how sensorial practices embody participants’ orientation to the specific exploratory activity and institutional context, pointing out a new direction for researching institutional interactions. The discovered context-transcending practices resonate with previous interactional research showing how object sensing is treated and organized as a socially accountable, intersubjective interactional phenomenon. Finally, this study expands the analytic scope of membership categorization analysis and advances intercultural communication research by showing how cultural categories are constructed through participants’ use of multimodal resources and how they are utilized to accomplish institutional business, which has not yet received much research attention. Based on the findings, the current research provides practical suggestions for promoting cultural learning.