Interaction Between Road Users: Offering Space in Traffic

In: Space and Culture, Band 17, Heft 2, S. 176-190

Abstract

This article studies how drivers offer space to other road users. The article builds on cases of space-offering collected from an audio-video corpus of real-life and real-time traffic recorded in Britain. It draws on Goffman's research on mobile encounters, Mondada's concept of "interactional space," and a methodology used to study the organization of multimodal and embodied social interaction. Space-offering is a practice through which road users negotiate their spatial and mobile copresence. They may communicate this by positioning themselves in space in different ways or by drawing on mutual gaze, gestures, the car's technology, or other multimodal resources. As road users offer space to one another, they create "space" as a members' phenomenon and construct the flow of traffic collaboratively and in situ.