ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we show how visually impaired people employ embodied practices to locate and identify objects. We show how the “invisible features” of objects are made salient, relevant, and understandable for co-participants through the visibility of the visually impaired persons’ actions, in particular the transition from embodied scanning of the environment using a white cane or an arm, to using the hand for detailed tactile inspection of the object to achieve understanding of it. We show how co-participants respond to these multimodal actions by providing a characterization of the object. The chapter builds on video-based ethnographic methodology and multimodal EM/CA analyses of video data from Japan and Denmark and contributes to our understanding of objects-in-interaction in general.
