ABSTRACT
There are multiple ways of trying to organize movement from one activity space to another when participants have competing interests. In addition to verbal directives, shepherding (Cekaite, 2010), or the use of touch to move the child from one space to another, and thereby to orchestrate their participation to get things done, provides one solution. Adults can use touch or haptic action to initiate, monitor, or, alternatively, to stop the child from engaging in particular embodied actions. Control touch is also used to summon and enforce the child’s attention. The chapter demonstrates various forms of touch, linking multiple bodies in courses of action that adults use to enforce the child’s compliance and to make transitions from one activity to another possible. Control touch in embodied directives attests to the systematicity and sociocultural significance of corporeal involvement with the world and social relations through sense and motion (Merleau-Ponty, 1962).
