Keel2025a

Keel2025a
BibType	ARTICLE
Key	Keel2025a
Author(s)	Sara Keel
Title	Unpacking physiotherapy exercise instructions with Sacks’s sociological approach to indexical expressions
Editor(s)
Tag(s)	EMCA, conversation analysis, ethnomethodology, exercise instructions, indexical expressions, physiotherapist-patient interactions
Publisher
Year	2025
Language	English
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Month
Journal	Przegląd Socjologiczny
Volume	74
Number	3
Pages	55–82
URL	Link
DOI	10.26485/PS/2025/74.3/5
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Institution
School
Type
Edition
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Howpublished
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Abstract

This contribution addresses a topic of investigation that receives considerable attention in Sacks’s lectures but is otherwise underexamined in sociology: members’ methodical use of indexical expressions, for example “now” and “here”, to achieve the intelligibility of activities for what they are from within a given setting. Drawing on Sacks’s approach to indexicality, our contribution is based on synchronized video-recordings that feature therapeutic exercise instructions given during two physiotherapy consultations, one face-to-face and one remote. More specifically, it investigates uses of the Swiss German indexical expression “do; here” occurring within embodied instruction sequences in the two distinct settings. Our descriptions of the exercise instruction sequences reveal how members’ methodical use of “do; here” relies on and at the same time constitutes its embeddedness in physiotherapists’ and patients’ distinct instructional practices. In the face-to-face setting, the practices involve the precise articulation of “do; here” with touching-being touched to monitor, assess, correct, etc. the patient’s instructed actions. In the remote setting, the practices are accomplished through the skillful embedding of “do; here” in contrastive chains of embodied instructional demonstrations that the physiotherapist provides for the patient, who is sitting in front of the laptop watching her.

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