Interaction, communication, and mundane AI: The fundamentals in naturalistic studies of practical action
- 3-4 ECTS credits
- Academic year 2025-2026
- DP00BE19
Education information
Implementation date
16.04.2026 - 17.04.2026
Enrollment period
-
Education type
Field-specific studies
Alternativity of education
Optional
Location
Venue location
The course will be held at Lasaretti (Kasarmintie 13b, 90130 Oulu)
Enrollment and further information
The course is open for a multidisciplinary audience with a broad background and interest in social sciences and humanities. No preliminary knowledge of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis is required. The participants’ own engagement with naturalistic audiovisual materials is also not a prerequisite for the course.
The course is intended for PhD researchers. We can accept max. 25 participants. If the number of registrations exceeds 25, priority will first be given to Oulu-based PhD researchers and then to PhD researchers.
Education description
The course revisits foundational themes in naturalistic studies of practical action and practical reasoning, examining how these concepts are being reconfigured in everyday encounters with AI‑based technologies. Through a combination of theoretical discussion and empirical analysis, participants will explore how EM/CA can illuminate the interactional organization of human–AI communication.
1. Agency and accountability in Human–AI Interaction
A central theme of the course is the question of agency: how is it attributed, negotiated, and displayed in interactions with technologies such as humanoid robots and large language models? Participants will examine how classic EM/CA concepts – such as accountability, recipient design, and membership categorization – are transformed when one party to the interaction is a non-human agent. Special attention will be given to the ways users treat AI systems as capable, limited, predictable, or opaque, and how these orientations shape the unfolding of practical action.
2. Sequentiality, temporality, and interactional histories
The course will explore how human–AI interaction differs from human–human interaction in its temporal and sequential organization. While human conversation relies on turn-by-turn contingencies and embodied displays of understanding, AI systems often operate through utterance-by-utterance processing or history-sensitive but non-sequential mechanisms. Participants will consider how these differences affect the construction of interactional histories, the management of timing, and the establishment of coherence across turns.
3. Intersubjectivity and the achievement of shared understanding
Building on the procedural conception of intersubjectivity in CA, the course investigates whether and how “shared understanding” can be meaningfully applied to human–AI encounters. Rather than treating intersubjectivity as a cognitive or machinic state, participants will analyze how it is displayed, repaired, or challenged in interaction. This includes examining practices such as repair, clarification, and alignment, and assessing the extent to which AI systems can participate in these practices in ways recognizable to human interactants.
4. Transformations of EM/CA concepts in the age of mundane AI
Throughout the course, participants will reflect on how the increasing presence of AI in everyday life invites a re-examination of foundational EM/CA concepts. The aim is to identify both continuities and discontinuities between human–human and human–AI interaction, and to consider what new practices, competencies, and limitations emerge in technologically mediated encounters. This includes exploring what is gained, what is lost, and what becomes newly visible when AI is treated as a communicative companion.