ABSTRACT
Nursing interns systematically walk behind senior staff members when moving through hospital corridors with them. This chapter examines multimodal practices contributing to the participants’ production of this interactional mobile configuration, in situ and in real time. The analysis is grounded on a corpus of video recordings, supplemented by ethnographic material, collected at the outpatient clinic of a hospital in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. First, we present some basic features of the intern's moves through the clinic's corridors when walking alone, in a pair, or in a group, with or without talking. Second, we describe several mobility practices that contribute to establishing and maintaining the “walking-with-someone-following-them” configuration: (1) keeping the way clear, (2) adopting the mill position, (3) yielding the right-of-way, and (4) minding the distance. Third and last, we account for the serial order “senior member walks ahead, intern follows” by referring to the internal organization of the activities at hand, in contrast to an external system such as deference rules based on status. The intern is interactionally included in the clinic's activities in a specific spatial and interactional configuration (behind senior members) that orients their respective potential contributions.
