Embodied interaction with face masks and social distancing: Brazilian health care workers’ daily routines in pandemic times
UlrikeSchröder and SineideGonçalves
Federal University of Minas Gerais | Federal Institute of Minas Gerais
Abstract
In this article, we ask how interlocutors proceed with their daily activities in the first months of the Covid-19
pandemic when faced with new ways of communication due to social distancing and the use of face masks. We carried out a
fine-grained analysis of different micropractices from daily work in a healthcare center in Brazil and built our analysis on
multimodal conversation analysis (MCA), interactional linguistics (IC), as well as gesture studies (GS). The analysis revealed
that particularly the following recurrent patterns seem to be characteristic for communication during the pandemic in the given
microcontexts: (a) a high use of deictic gestures, (b) an intensification of prosodic means, (c) verbal strategies such as
reformulation and repetition, (d) the integration of object manipulation and (e) mitigation strategies in case of new formats that
imply intrusion such as controls at travel checkpoints.
The Covid-19 pandemic has not only provoked a global health crisis but has also brought about severe bio-social consequences
with regard to the interactional space people inhabit, where they routinely enact their daily practices and communicate with other
individuals. Some of the most crucial public policies people have experienced particularly over the first two years of the pandemic
due to the high infectivity of SARS-CoV-2 have been lockdowns, social distancing and the wearing of face masks. As a consequence, the
pandemic has deeply changed the multisensorial ways through which people have engaged with each other: Our proxemic orientation in
focused gatherings, displayed by body position, posture, gaze, addressed gestures and shared attention (Mondada 2013), has shifted significantly. Studies have shown that face-to-face communication between
interlocutors wearing a face mask obstructs understanding each other at least partially, especially with regard to higher pitched
voices; in addition to that, it covers the middle and lower face as a field of gestural expression (Mheidly et al. 2020).
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