The 2002 ‘glonacal’ paper described higher education as a multi-scalar sector where individual and institutional agents have open possibilities and causation flows from any of the interacting local, national and global scales. None have permanent primacy: global activity is growing; the nation-state is crucial in policy, regulation and funding; and like the other scales, the local scale in higher education and knowledge is continually being remade and newly invented. The glonacal paper has been widely used in higher education studies, though single-scale nation-bound methods still have a strong hold. Drawing on insights from human geography and selected empirical studies, the present paper builds on the glonacal paper in a larger theorization of space and scale. It describes how material elements, imagination and social practices interact in making space, which is the sphere of social relations; it discusses multiplicity in higher education space and sameness/different tensions; and it takes further the investigation of one kind of constructed space in higher education, its heterogenous scales . The paper reviews the intersections between scales, especially between national and global, the ever-changing ordering of scales, and how agents in higher education mix and match scales. It also critiques ideas of fixed scalar primacy such as methodological nationalism and methodological globalism—influential in studies of higher education but radically limiting of what can be imagined and practised. Ideas matter. The single-scale visions and scale-driven universals must be cleared away to bring a fuller geography of higher education to life. Higher Education published a paper by Simon Marginson and Gary Rhoades titled ‘Beyond national states, markets, and systems of higher education: a glonacal agency heuristic’, hereafter titled ‘the glonacal paper’. The authorsTwo decades ago glonacal = global + national + local. This new geo-spatial theory became commonplace in higher education studies , and from time to time there are blockages in student mobility and to a lesser extent in the flow of messages and knowledge, there is no sign of a general retreat from cross-border activity in higher education and knowledge akin to that in manufacturing, trade and politics. On the contrary, in higher education, there has been continuing strong growth in global activity, without diminishing the nation-state, again as stated in 2002.Global convergence and integration have three modes: global connections, global diffusion of models and practices and global systems  and consequently, a widespread inability to grasp the multi-scalar character of the sector.Yes and no. It helped to bring spatiality to higher education studies. However, some see ‘glonacal’ merely as a synonym for ‘global’, with the multi-scalar idea a bridge too far. In a summary of literature on international and global higher education, Lee and Stensaker  note thrThe standard nation-bound understanding of higher education is still largely intact despite the growth of global science and two decades of research on cross-border higher education. Comparative education studies are mostly still nationally bordered, though some draw on the glonacal heuristic . In spaces, human agents encounter ‘coeval’ (coexistent) others with their own distinctive trajectories, in a ‘meeting up of histories’ (p. 4). There are also gaps, missed intersections. Space is ‘the sphere of relations, negotiations, practices of engagement, power in all its forms’. ‘Space is the dimension which poses the question of the social, and thus of the political’ . There are multiple themes and strands in domain C: programmes focused on openness, diversity Rizvi, , broad iLeague table rankings were first conceived in domain B by scholars in Shanghai and journalists in London, drawing on norms of scientific production and economic competition respectively. This simulated a worldwide–higher education sector in the form of a global market of ‘World-Class Universities’ (domain C). The simulation became real, guiding investment and strategy, becoming reproduced in domain A with structural force as organizational priorities and resource allocations. Across the world universities and countries became locked into incentives and models that they would never have chosen for themselves. For example, in sub-Saharan Africa, global rankings can hardly be ignored but are felt as coercive, pressuring institutions ‘to do things not necessarily within the realm of burning institutional needs’ Teferra, . Global The above examples refer largely to global space-making in higher education, but Fig. Space making is ‘a shared historical process that differentiates the world as it connects it’ Massey, , p. 139.In his account of the political economy of expanding communicative networks, Castells  explainsFor long global science was dominated by US scientists, underpinned by national science funding and the concentrated resources and inherited legitimacy of the leading universities. Both grass-roots American science and national policy favoured free global expansion of collaborative science on the basis of open networked cooperation. The policies favouring cross-national collaboration inside Europe helped regional science, including the smaller national science infrastructures in the South and East, to accumulate national and regional weight and build global impact. The EU countries supported free networked association outside Europe, including partnerships, while region-building at the same time. Up to the early 2000s, global science functioned largely as a Euro-American duopoly with outliers in countries such as Japan, Israel and Australia. North America was the leading component of the duopoly. Euro-American norms and institutions, and the English language, regulated inclusion: both epistemic content and professional norms were closed to other cultures and languages, including endogenous knowledge from the global South  but not necessarily ‘contextualized’ (embedded in context) Xu, , p. 134.Institutions can be locked into national systems and in that respect more confined than are persons or the nations themselves. Where there is institutional autonomy in mission and strategy it often seems to be under-utilized. Still, from time to time institutions break the mimetic mould. Friedman  notes UKThis section discusses geo-cognitive scale as one kind of constructed space in higher education. It expands on the multiple scales, imagined and practised, and on scalar heterogeneity and primacy, cross-scalar movement, and the national/global coupling.There are many definitions of geo-cognitive scale  to the list of scales. To adequately understand China, and perhaps the US, requires a scalar concept with a cultural reach that is larger than the nation-state but distinct from the territorial conquest form of imperialism.The first of the scales, the single ‘interrelated, interconnected and interdependent’ world as a whole Rizvi,  is surprThe distinction between the national and global scales leads to the identification of two different kinds of cross-border relations. On one hand there are ‘inter-national’ relations between nations, or between organisations or other agents located in two or more nations. On the other hand, there are ‘global’ relations that pass over nations and integrate agents at planetary level.‘Scaled social processes perpetuate specific productions of space’  in the vertical sense. While the paper is focused on space and scale rather than on relations of power per se, the paper’s examples indicate that space-making is not only joined to power but is itself an act of power. Agents’ scope for effective action in space-making is calibrated on the basis of their economic and cultural resources, the location of their organisations and systems within positional hierarchies and their relation to the cultural-linguistic hegemony of the Anglophone zone (for more discussion see Marginson, Space is one of the primary coordinates of the higher education world. It is continually made and remade in encounters between agents. However, the single-scale visions and scale-driven universals must be cleared away to bring a fuller geography of higher education to life. ‘There are no rules of space and place’, states Massey . What ma


The work of automation in education is not automatic but needs to be ‘done’. Grounded in an ethnographic study which followed a Grade 9/10 class through their daily activities in a ‘regular’ high school for a year, this paper asks how automation is enacted by students and teachers, and what these practices imply for forms of knowledge and relationality. Inspired by feminist technoscience, and drawing on recent work on everyday automation, the paper suggests that the ‘auto-’ of automation in practice is very often more of a ‘sym-’, a ‘with’, in which students and machines co-produce something that looks like automation. Rather than ‘automation’, observing practices in classrooms shows practices of ‘symmation’. The paper elaborates on symmation scenes of realigning, revising and reworking relations. Automation is, in these scenes, deeply embedded in social relations, involving the processing of ability, difference and hierarchy. Rather than the industry hype of automation, these sets of socio-technical practices alert us to the messy, non-linear, contested, warm realities of education (and not just learning) in schools today. The paper identifies specific aspects of how these socio-technical realities impact knowledge and teacher-student relations. Sympoiesis is a simple word; it means ‘making-with’. Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing. In the words of the Inupiat computer ‘world game’, earthlings are never alone. Haraway 11A key promise of automation is that machines will take tasks off our (human) hands, and complete them by themselves. In a very basic sense, the ‘auto-’ of automation refers to operating by yourself, independently, without the help of people. In this paper, drawing on observations of apparently automatic technology-driven moments in classrooms, we suggest that the ‘auto-’ of automation in educational practice is very often more of a ‘sym-’, a ‘with’ Haraway : 58, in Critical approaches to automation and education have analysed the impact and implications of, for instance, facial recognition systems Selwyn , automatYet at the same time, a research programme into the ‘scrappy realities’ , trouble-shooting, logging in, dealing with conflicts, etc. Cone . Reflectsym-mation, in the sense of ‘made-with’, than simply auto-mation. The following sections first outline the study and methodology from which our analysis emerges before exploring three enactments of ‘symmation’ in the classroom. The final section reflects on key issues emerging from the analysis, including the destabilising of clear-cut roles and predetermined practices in front of the screen, and the specifics of these students in this classroom. It also opens further questions for future research on processes that look like automation in education.Contributing to this emerging interest in the mundane, everyday settings of automation, this paper centres a secondary-school classroom. Our focus is primarily on students, and their use of the most everyday of automated technologies, such as search engines, translation websites and quizzes. Here, rather than asking ‘what automation does to people’, we initially aimed to explore ‘what people do with automation’ . What at first glance hardly seemed like automation—given contemporary discussions of AI or automated decision-making systems (ADMs)—caught our interest by its very inconspicuousness. In the sense of ‘everyday automation’, the use of Google Translator, Google Search or quizzes and other apps proved to be regular practices in the everyday life of the class during lessons and breaks. As noted above, these small and incidental practices in front of the screen are rarely part of academic analysis and reflection, yet they can open up crucial insights into the creativity, care and repair involved in enacting automation together, i.e. symmation, in today’s schools. These practices go some way towards contesting dominant narratives about the potentials or dangers of automated futures.The following analyses of these apparently mundane, yet deeply generative moments bring forth small but relevant aspects of how school, teaching and learning are changing alongside new technologies. Our goal is not to provide a typology, heuristic, conceptual map or universalising theory of symmation. Instead, rooted in ethnographic traditions, we aim to tell stories about the complexities of situated practice. These stories will, we hope, resonate with other research on lived experiences with automation, and thus, re-orient priorities and expectations of these kinds of technologies. Since we pick up the well-established observation here that social life is messy, it becomes interesting to explore how mess plays out in specific situations as auto-/symmation and how these moments work. In order to avoid the temptation to tidy the heterogeneous observations into a heuristic or typology, we present these stories as a ‘list’, which is by definition provisional and unfinished, ‘since there’s no reason to suppose that any list will ever be complete’  ‘with’ Google’s autocomplete algorithms to trial several options, until—together—they identify a search term sufficiently useful to find the information Mara considers relevant.Carla: If a student says they want to create one [a Kahoot!] (.) I say send it to me beforehand and then (.) I had that for a presentation, I remember Noah, I corrected it like (.) five times and because it was in English, so every time you saved it, it became wrong somehow ... there were just wrong words. ... It was madness. ... I told him the things that were wrong and every time something else came up that was wrong. ... Then someone told me that it was because it was originally in English and that’s why it was always erm incorrectly corrected. It was a presentation in science [and there were] all these nonsense words or words were missing or, so it was so completely (.) well so I identified that (sighs) and then when he showed it here it was still wrong, right? I don’t know how often I wrote back and forth with him about what was wrong. Well, he is super, he always wants to do everything correctly and he was very enthusiastic, right? But until I understood I was wondering why on earth has he got a mistake there again? And that it wasn’t him, it wasn’t him, but that it was because of the program and the app. (Interview_teacher_08)The friction becomes even clearer in the following interview excerpt, when a teacher, we’ll call her ‘Carla Oras’, describes her experiences when a student, ‘Noah’, created a Kahoot, an online quiz for game-based learning, for his science presentation. He prepared his presentation and the Kahoot in the local language, German.While talking about integrating apps and devices into her daily teaching routines, Carla tells us this story of how Kahoot developed a life of its own. One of her students created a quiz for his science presentation. The spelling in the quiz is all over the place, there are nonsense words and misspellings. Carla tells us that she corrected it with him in multiple iterations, but his final presentation in class still contained some spelling mistakes. Only when another student alerted her to the probable cause—that the autocorrect is set to the programming language, English, and was thus correcting German words to English words that are similarly spelt—did she understand why this student, who she describes as someone who always wants to get everything right, was making these kinds of repeated mistakes.Three interlinked forms of recursive revision become visible in this scene: Kahoot offers its automatic revision of what it detects as misspelt words. The teacher’s revisions consist of alerting the student to the spelling mistakes that she has noticed. And the student makes manual revisions by correcting those mistakes, simultaneously generating—sympoietically with Kahoot—further mistakes. This iteration happens several times, with revision leading to mistakes leading to revision leading to mistakes. Carla’s reflection includes an assessment of Noah’s learning capacities. But unlike the reconfigurations of teacher-student relations that have been identified in research on dashboards, learning systems or other automatic feedback systems which aim to provide teachers with insights on their students’ learning (see above), Carla integrates Noah’s mistakes into her prevailing view of his ‘enthusiasm’ and his desire to ‘get things right’. Her assessment of his ability does not seem to be affected by the auto-/symmatic mistake generation, but instead, she wonders why he continues to present a flawed presentation.Presentations and other tasks are not usually corrected by the teacher in advance but are done for assessment in class. In this narrative, Carla invests extra time and effort into helping to revise Noah’s work. Key for us, given scholarly concerns about automation, is that despite the potential for Kahoot’s autocorrect to sabotage not just the student’s attempt to achieve a good result, but also the teacher’s view of her student, Carla’s narrative integrates the autocorrections into existing relations of respect. She describes the process as ‘madness’. But this is not the madness in which automated systems usurp her impression of Noah or in which her pedagogy becomes more machine-like. Nor is this an instance of ‘auto’-mation making work more effortless, efficient or seamless. Instead, it is the sociomaterial ‘with’ of ‘sym’-mation across the student–teacher-algorithmic-linguistic work of revising that creates the presentation in its final form and the story of autocorrect-madness which Carla relates to us.During our year-long stay in class, we attended several ‘project days’ in which students worked on cross-subject issues. The school has regular project days to dedicate time to specific learning settings to foster self-determined learning. In addition, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Ministry of Education had opened up possibilities for schools to go beyond conventional subject-specific instruction to help students readjust after the schools had been closed for months. The following vignette, the final of three, presents a longer scene from one of these project days. The students were supposed to be testing and improving their basic skills in German, English and History.Ben sits down at the table directly opposite the teacher’s table where the teacher is sitting. Ben has taken his tablet with him. ‘Mr Friedemann’, he starts in his charming and teasing way, which is always a little cheeky. ‘Ben’, Mr Friedemann looks up at him as he sets aside the mobile phone in his hand. ‘Mr Friedemann’, Ben repeats, trying to give his voice a certain weight and thus, somehow playfully giving the situation seriousness and significance. He wants to test the tutor’s basic skills, he announces with a straight back and the tablet in his hand. Meanwhile his neighbour at the table, Johannes, comes up from behind. Anton, another student, sits down next to Ben. Ben explains that it is about history, he would expect a 1.0 [an A], because Mr Friedemann teaches them the subject. Mr Friedemann is moderately enthusiastic. He rests both arms on the teacher's desk, yes, he studied history, he sighs. A moment later he is confronted with the first question. (Fieldnote_class_35)One of the class’s two tutors and their history teacher, ‘Markus Friedemann’, had prepared some materials and apps for the day. One learning website attracted the most attention: ‘schlaukopf.de’ . We could see several students clicking through its topics. The website provides exercises for different year groups, ability levels and subjects. Each topic consists of a series of multiple-choice questions. Questions appear one by one, with users selecting one of the answers. If the answer is right, a green tick appears and a chime sounds, if it is wrong, a red cross appears and a different tone chimes. In both cases, the correct answer turns green. To the right of the multiple-choice answers, a segment shows an automated grade for the user’s responses. Starting with a grade based on the first answer, each following response has an impact on the grade, which appears in red below a bar measuring your progress (with the correct answers marked by green and wrong answers marked by red). With one wrong answer, the grade plummets. Subsequent correct answers increase the grade incrementally. This kind of performance measurement became crucial when one student came to the front of the classroom.‘Mr Friedemann, man, you got yourself down to a 2.3!’ Ben exclaims, his voice sounding like a quiz-master, in keeping with a certain game nature, which is, as I note, quite remarkable, because the website design is very restrained in this respect, compared to other apps. Ben reads out the questions, and Mr Friedemann responds. Back and forth it goes. One time, the history teacher points out that the sources for these questions are not always unambiguous. Another time he asks Ben to repeat the possible answers. Ben gives stage directions, e.g. you can give more than one answer, and he reads out Mr Friedemann’s ongoing grade which changes after each answer.Anton and Johannes are watching quietly but look on expectantly every time the teacher answers a question. When it comes to an economic question which includes the term subsistence, Ben gets muddled. He can’t pronounce the word correctly despite repeated attempts. Mr Friedemann, who in the meantime seems to be a bit annoyed by the quiz and especially by the way the question is being asked, wants to read for himself. He is leaning his upper body on the table by this point, and seems somewhat resigned. No no, he won the reading competition, he can read fine, Ben says and tries one last time. Mr Friedemann gives his answer to the question. The whole time Ben keeps the tablet in his hand.Then Mrs Oras, the other class tutor, enters the room and stands next to me for a short while, also watching the scene. For a moment, I cannot see what is happening. When my field of vision is free again, I hear Ben call out, ‘Now you can still get to 1.9!’ Mr Friedemann formulates his answer. ‘You have a 2.0.’ Mr Friedemann wants to know what kind of quiz it actually is. ‘Schlaukopf. German History Basic Knowledge, Advanced Level.’ Ben answers and adds, ‘so you would have passed the G-course ’. (Fieldnote_class_35)Ben goes to the front, addresses his teacher, and assigns him the role intended by the learning website for learners, i.e. in this school context primarily the students’ role. The teacher does not refuse but seems weary as he takes up the challenge. What happens here is a reworking of the relations in class through playing with an automated grading system. By initiating the challenge and changing his voice, Ben takes on the role of a teacher or moderator. The teacher, as the one who will respond to questions and be graded by the system in real-time for these responses, takes on the role of student or test-taker. The question-and-answer reversal could have the quality of a quiz-master and television show celebration, but the grading adds an extra dimension, especially on this project day, during which students are preparing for tests which will have significant consequences for their futures. The scene continues:The situation exudes playfulness. Ben shows himself to be cheeky and charming, inviting Mr Friedemann into a game situation. The students are not trying to show their teacher up; the other students, Anton and Johannes, look on expectantly; Ben encourages Mr Friedemann at the end that he can still get a 1.9 . And the teacher joins in, somewhat wearily, but he is being a good sport and joins the game in the role  that he has been assigned. Ben does not directly take on the inverse role of tester here; using his voice and bodily posture, and not letting go of his tablet or his speaking rights, even when Mr Friedemann tries to take over, Ben becomes the moderator. It is not Ben himself who is testing and evaluating Mr Friedemann, it is the system that is generating the questions, deciding if the answer is right or wrong and calculating the grade. This externalisation of the test situation, and in particular of the grading, to an automated system makes use of automation’s more general promise of objectivity.The grades, which Ben calls out after each question, symbolise ability: Is the teacher able to get consistently high grades throughout the series of questions? Grading, and the demonstration of ability, unfold in this scene within several specific contexts. Firstly, in this school, quantified grading is only introduced in year nine. This is the first year that these students have received numerical grades on a scale of 1–6  rather than written feedback. Secondly, this particular project day is explicitly oriented to the students practising tests, to testing themselves and being tested. They are invited on this day to evaluate themselves, using a range of media, and to consider the consequences for their future learning paths as they head towards more high-stakes tests at the end of year ten. Thirdly, the playfulness of the scene hints at the specific relations between students and tutors in this school. Each class has two tutors who accompany the class from Grade 5 to Grade 10. They teach specific subjects (here: history), but they have dedicated time available for social activities and to engage with the students’ well-being, family issues, etc. which in our observations meant that the tutors also shared a good deal of personal details about their lives, families, etc. with their students. Markus Friedemann and Carla Oras are thus embedded in relations with their students that go beyond a perhaps ‘classic’ teacherly position, with a longer history of developing mutual trust.sym-) a specific website, with a specific set of algorithms is what enacts something that seems to be automatic in a decidedly symmatic way.These specific contexts matter in how something is enacted as automation. Automation becomes visible here as deeply embedded in voice, bodily posture, the holding of devices, struggles over the right to voice and the position of the seats and the desks in long-term student–teacher relationships. The interweaving of these elements together with  in educational spaces.Though the relation between automation and education has been analysed critically at the level of systems and platform logics, the small and apparently mundane aspects of automation in the everyday lives of students and teachers have been investigated less frequently. As noted above, we set out to observe what people—especially students and teachers—do with Re-alignment refers to the often overlooked practices of working with Google’s autocomplete to find a search term that will find the relevant information. In this scene, perhaps the most minor in this paper, we see an everyday practice that may resonate with most readers. In a struggle with autocomplete over the ability to define the search, the student repeatedly realigns the search away from the system’s predictions. Together, student and autocomplete thus symcomplete the search. The act of revising highlights how automated processes pose a challenge to pedagogical settings, but in turn are embedded into existing relationships of care and respect. Before she understands how the mistakes are automatically generated, the teacher reads the repeated mistakes in her student’s work as peculiar, given her assessment of his abilities. Contrasting the promises and critiques of automation for education, her labour and his learning become neither more machine-like nor more efficient and effortless. The sociomaterial ‘with’ of symmation across student–teacher-algorithmic-linguistic enactments create the student’s presentation in its final, still incorrect, form. The reworking of relations in the final scene momentarily upends traditional expectations of teacher-student hierarchies and their respective roles in test-giving and test-taking, in grading and being graded. Cheekiness, charm and playacting work together with (sym-) websites, algorithms, desks and chairs to give the teacher real-time grades on his performance of knowing about history.The paper teased out three ways in which auto-/symmation was enacted and in doing so carved out automation’s deep involvement in social relations: In sum, the scenes analysed here point out how ability, difference and hierarchies—as essential aspects of sociality in the classroom—are reworked through symmation. Ways of knowing as well as ways of relating to each other shift slightly. However, the scenes are not in the first instance scenes of ‘resistance’ or ‘subversion’  providers to focus ethnographically on automation-in-the-making, i.e. focusing on the frictions that arise during the work of rendering processes ‘seamless’.Ethnographic studies often end with the conclusion that ‘it’s complicated’. Because when ethnographers look closely, it invariably is. The question is then where, in what way, and for whom everyday automation in educational settings is complicated. Google dominates this study, as it does many other contemporary studies of technologies in education. The way multinational corporations configure education needs deep critical analysis. At the same time, the messy practices of exceeding these configurations also require in-depth, close-up, and ‘slow’ analysis (Mountz et al. A final point to consider is how to refer to automation. Our ethnographic explorations suggest not thinking of automation as something outside the situation that is unfolding. Enacting automation is rather a ‘sym-mation’ in the sense of ‘with’ than an ‘auto-mation’ in the sense of ‘self’, on one’s own: This, the main argument of the paper, is therefore an attempt to decentralise automation in education. Not to attribute supremacy to the process of automation, but to focus instead on the mutual enactment of auto-/symmation in class, leads to further questions about the ongoing processes of automation, datafication and platformisation in education in particular, and postdigital classrooms in general.


This study investigated personal perceptions (involvements) and comprehensions (interpretations) of self-ascribed paranormal abilities. Twelve participants with supposed supernatural powers took part in semi-structured interviews exploring the origin, phenomenology, and nature of their powers. Interview transcripts were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis (RTA), a qualitative method that identifies patterns within data. Four major themes expressed meanings and representations held by participants: Formative Influences , (Inter) Subjective Paranormal Experience , Embodied Processes (sub-theme: Control), and Perception of Reality . Consideration of themes identified an inextricable link between perception, interpretation, and belief in ability. Within narratives, interviewees outlined, contextualised, and established the validity of their powers. They drew upon supporting autobiographical evidence from their life histories and obfuscated and/or discounted conventional explanations. Generally, accounts reflected individual attempts to comprehend and justify the nature and experience of professed abilities. The authors discuss these processes and suggest ways to extend and develop ensuing research. The present manuscript investigated personal perceptions (involvements) and comprehensions (interpretations) of self-ascribed paranormal abilities. Although, researchers have historically focused on supernatural “beliefs” and “experiences” rather than ability e.g., , this toCommonly self-ascribed paranormal abilities include, but are not restricted to mediumship, psychic power(s), spiritualism, and fortune-telling see, ,b. Mediutheir) supernatural realities  was used because it acknowledges the active role of the researcher in knowledge production and eschews positivistic ideas pertaining to data interpretation .Reflexive thematic analysis (RTA) is an interpretivist paradigm, which places an emphasis on understanding the subjective experiences of individuals. Since the authors were investigating the “meanings” that participants created and attributed to their paranormal ability-related experience, RTA was an appropriate analytical approach. RTA was selected because it can identify patterns within a data set, while permitting conceptually informed interpretation of meaning. Since RTA is not restricted by methodological commitments, analysts are able to draw on the theoretical framework of their choosing to make sense of data .Within the present study, the authors viewed self-processed paranormal ability as a “psychological” rather than parapsychological process, analysis was broadly informed by an attributional approach . This acMoreover, RTA allowed thematic examination of the construction of meaning and experience through narrative. To generate rich accounts, the researchers used semi-structured interviews. These focused on how individuals surround personal practice  with explanation and considered the role of belief. By examining individual perspectives, interviews provided insights into the thoughts, perceptions, and feelings that characterise self-ascription of paranormal ability. Particularly, how individuals make sense of their powers in terms of the self, society, and world. Subsequently, this research cultivated novel elucidations for perceived abilities.Twelve  individuals from the United Kingdom, United States, and Europe with self-ascribed paranormal abilities agreed to participate in interviews. They volunteered after taking part in self-report studies assessing paranormal features  and individual differences in cognitive perceptual processes and executive function. Debriefs in these studies, invited participants with supposed abilities to contact the principal investigator via email if they were willing to discuss their powers in a further research project. Twenty-six individuals followed up this invitation. Eighteen provided content and progressed to interview. Prior to interview, participants signed a consent form .The principal investigator, using a function in Excel, randomly selected twelve interviewees . Generally, this figure is regarded as appropriate for qualitative research see , MoreoveSemi-structured interviews were conducted between November 2020 to April 2021 by the lead author (KD). KD  has a Ph.D. in Psychology and is a Senior Lecturer. He is an established researcher, with 15 years of experience, who is well published in the areas of quantitative and qualitative psychology and parapsychology. KD possesses a good knowledge of the paranormal, and although sceptical about the existence of supernatural powers is compassionate to those who believe and report experiences and abilities. Subsequently, he is non-judgmental, and appreciates the impact that paranormal beliefs/experiences have on individuals, and is keen to learn more about personal encounters.Prior to commencement of interviews the researchers produced a semi-structured interview guide composed of questions pertaining to individual paranormal ability . These were piloted in advance with two of the researchers acting as naïve respondents.Interviews lasted approximately 57 mins (between 36 and 94 mins) and were audio recorded. Supplementary field notes were also taken by the interviewer. The protocol included a general introduction and concluded with a debrief. Interviews took place over Skype or Zoom  at times and dates agreed by both the lead author and individual participants. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and anonymised; to protect the identity of interviewees names were replaced with pseudonyms and personal identifying characteristics removed.This virtual environment provided a safe and secure formal setting, where meetings could occur without interruption. Specifically, it served as a friendly, relaxed environment, where interviewees could freely outline their personal perceptions and experiences. Each interview began with respondents reading the participant information sheet and listening to a short brief about the nature of the research. The interviewer (KD) explained the nature of the study and outlined the procedure, which included actions for data storage , anonymisation, and the transcription process. Prior to recording, interviewees were reminded of their right to terminate or withdrawn from the study at any time prior to the analysis phase and write up of the research study. These procedures established a shared understanding and empathy between researcher and participant. Although interviewees were offered the opportunity to view their final transcripts, none accepted this offer.Ethical approval was provided by the Manchester Metropolitan University, Faculty of Health, Psychology and Social Care Ethics Committee . The study adhered to British Psychological Society guidelines and ethics .Data analysis used RTA. RTA was selected because the present study focused on the unique and subjective experiences of individuals with self-ascribed possess paranormal abilities. By providing a framework for organising detailed data responses, RTA facilitated identification, analysis and reporting of patterns within the interview data , 2013. EMoreover, RTA was located with the researchers’ social-constructionist epistemological position  and provAs such, there is a deductive, or theory driven, aspect to the analysis. However, there is no expectation that researchers will connect these criteria in the same manner. Thus, codes or themes produced are likely to vary . NonetheWith RTA both coding and theme development are flexible, organic process that evolve during the analytical process . ProgresReflexive thematic analysis is a purely qualitative approach, this definition pushes the use of RTA into exclusivity under appropriate qualitative paradigms  , 2020. AReflexive thematic analysis employed the six-step process outlined by Analysis involved all five members of the research team, who each independently examined transcripts. They then, via in-person meetings and email exchanges, discussed transcripts to agree on themes.Following organic discussions and agreement within the research team, four themes, and sub-themes were discerned. For brevity, and consistent with other published academic papers, we selected pertinent examples, which were typical of “participants” e.g., .(1) Formative Influences . This theme was temporally focussed and identified how participants grounded their perceived ability in previous life history. (2) (Inter) Subjective paranormal experience . In this second theme, we noted how individuals described their sense of experience  of their abilities. (3) Embodied Processes (sub-theme: Control). This theme overlapped with the previous one, but was distinct because it emphasised how, individuals experienced their paranormal powers. There was an applied/agentic dimension intrinsic to this theme, which contrasted with the passivity of the subjective paranormal experience theme. (4) Perception of Reality . This theme identified the affect the expression of the ability had on the participants’ cognitions, perceptions, and sense of self.post hoc that the agreed themes aligned with a commonly used heuristic for the lifeworld. Explicitly, temporality (the experience of time), inter-subjectivity , embodiment (channelling and control), and perception of reality. Participants linked the latter with space .The researchers noted In the context of quote selection, citations are illustrative; they represent both themes and the range of abilities expressed. Subsequently, not all participants’ comments are utilised.This theme centred on formative influence(s). These were typically experienced during childhood and early adulthood. Interviewees outlined direct paranormal experiences and how they informed comprehension of their abilities. The grounding of perceptions in life histories indicated their profound personal importance. For example, James (psychic/medium) explained:“I’d have to say I’d more describe myself as a medium/clairvoyant because I’ve always had this ability of knowing there’s an afterlife, you know I’ve always felt it, knew it was there and being able to communicate it, with it, from being a very young child really.”Tony (psychic):“I had lots of P: experiences in my childhood of err, paranormal type nature. I mean, as a child, erm, growing up, I’d get a lot of erm, err, visions that would take place in the future.”This led him (Tony) to question what those encounters/experiences might be:“The experiences that I had and what might potentially happen, erm, upon and after death. I started to be more intrigued, I suppose have more conversations with certain family members around that sort of topic. And my mother, in her younger years had attended a spiritualist church and also seen different psychics and mediums for different things.”Interviewees outlined a wide range of self-professed paranormal abilities and methods of communication. ESP  with the living, psychics connected with energy, and spiritualists channelled and communicated with the deceased. Within these, sense of time was central and added significance. Jessica (sensitive) explained that she had:been gifted since I was a young child,”““I’ve always felt it…. from being a very young child really.”James (psychic/medium): Craig’s (psychic) initial experiences began in early childhood with sightings of apparitions:when I was three and half, four, we moved into this house and that about a year or two later a ghost started to appear. We started seeing ghosts.”“… Rebecca (medium) reflected on her distant past when thinking about the experience of mediumistic processes:“I used to see orbs as a child when I was in bed and it was dark and there were these lights in my room, and it was dark and the scared bejesus out of me, but the phenomenon started.”This sub-theme explored how interviewees’ belief in their abilities was influenced by family members. These acted as role models and normalised and legitimised paranormal powers. Interviewees described “gifted family members” possessing a range of supernatural powers . Jessica (sensitive) discussed how her relations were healers, mediums, psychics, witches etc. Suzanne (sensitive) described how she:did have a great grandmother who was from the Ukraine, and she too was very sensitive and a bit magical, so she read tea leaves and she also read regular playing decks of cards.”“For Sarah (clairvoyant/remote viewer), it was childhood experiences with her twin sister that convinced her that they possessed telepathic powers:“I have an identical twin sister and erm, and so, when we were really young, we would have…telepathic experiences, erm, but I would notice when I was a kid just like any, any time I was about to say something, I felt like I had to err, speak up really fast if I did want to say something or she’d say it first.”The second sub-theme identified how early anomalous occurrences encouraged participants to reflect on the nature of their experiences and abilities. These led to both mundane and frightening occurrences that shaped both their perception and subsequent interpretation of encounters. Jessica (sensitive) explained:“I was around [pause] 13 when I first started to experience, so I got, I used to get night terrors, which is erm, pretty scary, but I think it was kind of, erm, err, isolated issue.”Craig (psychic) narrated a difficult experience, he had from his early school days. This made him question his personal reality in relation to other school children. Consequently, Craig assessed whether others share alike experiences, and interpretation them in similar ways:“And I’m thinking maybe you see the same ghost I do so you see this one ghost and it was different, so I didn’t understand that everybody has different experiences I thought just I did, but then maybe she’s seen the same one I’m seeing.”Interviewees reported myriad subjective paranormal experiences (SPEs). Within these it was the individual philosophy of sensed experience that informed paranormal beliefs and justified perceptions of power. Reported phenomena included sensed presence, spirits of the deceased, and contact with the dead. SPEs were discussed in terms of personal significance and shared elements of relationality and inter-subjectivity:“I’ve numerous sorts of experiences myself where err, presences, or spirits, or loved ones, or family that are deceased whatever you wish to call them, have, erm, you know, came to me and given me very specific messages in some cases not only for me but also for other people and obviously for clients as well” .Rebecca (medium) similarly experienced others:“by the time I was 18 my father died, and it was really really sudden and I started seeing things at night, there would be things in my room I’ll be sleeping then I’d wake up and I called it the twilight stage between sleep and wake…things would often try and elicit reaction from me they’ll be throwing things at me…I’d wake up and find hats sitting on my pillow and think I was really startled.”This theme was intrinsically relational. Participants interacted and communicated with channelled forces, energies and sensed presences. These were often concomitant with vivid sensations and perceptual disturbance such as colours and feelings. Encounters also sometimes included the perception that something was moving through the participant. Elizabeth  explained her experience in terms of her “tuning in” to perform mediumship, and the subsequent disruption related to her perceiving a spirit who was confused and disorientated:“You tune in as if you were doing mediumship… the guy that was causing the disruption in this instance umm it was because he had had dementia at the end and he hadn’t realised what was happened/he hadn’t really realised that he’d passed over.”Jessica (sensitive) outlined her earliest transcendental experiences of seeing a spirit where the energy and range of colours evoked a perception of specific resolution/purpose of the spirit:“I would experience blue especially when I was a kid.” “this is what I’m talking about colours, they communicate through colours and feelings and sensations, and so the colour of the lights of the car in the front when they broke red, the red completely took up my vision.”…”like a lighter and then the top of the flame is like that kind of energy, like you can see it in the air”…”it was almost that [pause] combined with [sic] like a slight light and then was coloured depending on the intentions of the spirit. And that would, it would normally be blue.”James (psychic/medium) expressed specific experiences from messages and communication with spirit. These involved feelings, receive, and hearing voices:“I’ve numerous sorts of experiences myself where err, presences, or spirits, or loved ones, or family that are deceased, whatever you wish to call them, have, erm, you know, came to me and given me very specific messages in some cases not only for me but also for other people and obviously for clients as well.”The extra-sensory perception (ESP) sub-theme related to specific telepathic connections. These varied as a function of the type and range of ESP-related powers explained. Tony (psychic): described how he connected telepathically and created the tuning event:“really it’s this sort of tuning my thoughts in, in, in a very subtle way in to connecting to telepathically to some other consciousness…it’s a bit like tuning in to a radio station really. People often say how do you create that connection and my answer’s well I don’t feel I create it, it’s always there, I’m just sort of tuning in to it.”Stephanie (psychic/medium) encountered mechanical abnormalities and items teleporting:“Things being moved. Things being moved to umm a different place in my house and I’m living alone, and I did not move them, and my cat could not have moved them or we’re sitting together…the lights going on…my nephew died first and then my father died. My TVs started to turn on, on their own, which was driving me crazy.”Although there were variations in the way in which processes were experienced , interviewees generally agreed on their purpose and outcome. Particularly, that their paranormal powers provided a sense of control. James (psychic/medium), Tony (psychic), and Rebecca (medium) for example, who are specific practitioners, expressed a sense of importance, along with a belief that they controlled the mediation and channelling process. Additionally, juxtaposing their professional psychic careers, alongside regular clients’ forums and events in order to communicate, provided dialogue, and generated informal discussion, which enabled them to explore the nature of paranormal abilities.For those who were not practitioners , embodied processes and a sense of control were also important. Their abilities were defined by the ability to directly regulate incoming information. Suzanne (sensitive) presented the procedure as a constant:I always feel like there is an on switch and it’s kind of always on.” Moreover, she describes the source that flows through her.““I used to be a professional ballet dancer, and this is how I like to explain it to people, so if you have a certain body type you know, anybody can dance right… And that’s how I see the skill that I have, and I feel like everybody has senses obviously I feel it’s on a spectrum.”Jessica (sensitive) expressed her thoughts about the control she has, and how she employs meditation to regulate the communication and messages received.“Meditation is so key to controlling, erm, your ability and gifts. Erm, so, I come into like a state of meditation and then I kind of, err, I communicate with the spirit and say, I’m gonna open my channel, please can my loved ones and my guise help me through.”Some embodied processes were, however, difficult to explain. These were experienced as feelings and streams of information.“I don’t really think it comes from outside of me, whether it’s coming through me, I don’t/I’m not sure, but I know if I just/if I listen, like I’m listening, but I’m not listening to any voices outside, I’m just listening/it’s more like a feeling. And then the information just comes out” Jessica (sensitive).Louise (psychic) explained the process of communication, where she tried to make sense of her ability whilst receiving information from within.“For instance, when I’m umm/when I’m communicating with someone who is departed, I don’t visually see them, I get an impression of you know what colour hair they had, their stature, their personality, that kind of stuff, like my grandmother came through one time, umm, and I didn’t know her, she had died probably 6 or 7 years prior to my birth, she died/I think she was only 40, and so stuff like that, yes, when I see/I don’t visually see them, I just get impressions” .Some interviewees had professional careers within the psychic world, where they conducted individual or groups sessions with clients. These often involved examining messages from deceased loved ones and family members . Other interviewees “merely” classed themselves as being either psychic or preferred the term sensitive . The self-ascribed terms often crossed over between interviewees. Despite this, the range of abilities were wide ranging and diverse.“I’ve numerous sort of experiences myself where err, presences, or spirits, or loved ones, or family that are deceased whatever you wish to call them, have, erm, you know, came to me and given me very specific messages in some cases not only for me but also for other people and obviously for clients as well” .This sub-theme outlined being in control of the self-professed ability. Explicitly, that control was an integral part of the power that required moderation and management. James (medium/clairvoyant) discussing the process of mediumship:“have to control sometimes, is that emotion as I call it, because you can get somebody coming through quite emotional you know especially if you’ve just passed, or their loved ones there who wants to communicate so badly, and you’ve got to control that…”Jessica (sensitive) described acting as a sensitive:“yeah, it’s like control through meditation…it’s all about the power you have within yourself. You’re the stronger person as the living person, you’re, you are the one who has the say of whether like you wanna be in that or not. Erm you are the control. An aura of protection’…sometimes I can’t even control it. Like, especially when a spirit is… has a very urgent message.”… “I used to see spirits walking around the room because my channel was open constantly. Because. I didn’t know how to control it, but now I know how to control it.”This final theme revealed several encounters that participants had during visits. In this context, this theme explored self-awareness and lived space. Particularly, it was the countenance of abilities, and what impact these had on the participants’ thoughts, insights, and self-image. For example, Rebecca (medium) struggled with making sense of her reality given what she had witnessed/encountered. This was also apparent within transcripts where interviewees outlined distortions , heightened emotions, and metaphysical occurrences. For instance, Rebecca (medium):It appeared in the corner of this room, image and then disappeared through the corner of the window and we were on the second or third floor and there’s no way to get out of the window and it was winter, so in the winter was closed and all that so at that point I started wondering if there’s some truth to what I was seeing if other people were seeing that too.”“…James (psychic/medium) explained how his encounters involved a meditation technique that involved telepathic connections and extending boundaries. This perception of truth, as it was experienced, helped to elucidate personal perceptions. Additionally, a connection within his own mind enabled him to make sense of both his conscious and subconscious thoughts from the world around him.“it’s when I go into my own self in a way, through the meditation, erm, and then essentially what I’m doing with the meditation is like I’m going into myself, quietening my own mind down and then I’m sort of stretching my consciousness out and I’m sort of then reaching out in a way in my mind to connecting to some other consciousness in that, in that strong as way as possible telepathically.”This final sub-theme illustrates how the experience of psychic/mediums/sensitives is framed in the lived experience of space. In both of the following quotes, there is a spatial immanency that is intrinsically entwined with the experience of space and proximity. Proximity to the point of centrality.“this anonymous voice that all of a sudden speaks out in your mind…it can be difficult to differentiate between what is maybe your own thoughts coming in, erm, a thought maybe on your part, maybe something from your subconsciousness” Tony (psychic).“I’m going into an intentional state because I’m usually going into a mediative state first.”… “But sometimes it’s the physical like, I’ll just start to look at someone and I’ll see they’re only wearing one sock… There are physical things that come up and sometimes that seems to be a big challenge for all erm, people doing this, is, erm, knowing the difference between the symbols, is it symbolic or is it literal, others where it’s vaguer and you never quite understand what, you never get to the meaning of it” .The research set out herein investigated the experience, and interpretation, of self-ascribed paranormal abilities. Intrinsically, data and analysis provided insights into complex interactions between what individuals believe, their experiences, and their behaviour (abilities). At a practical level, this type of scholarly work, and these types of findings, are necessary, since paranormal ascriptions are associated with both adaptive  and maladaptive  functioning . ConsequParanormal beliefs are intimately linked with culture . Mind, iRelatedly, Linking the reported experiences of our participants to the epistemological underpinnings of the present report: Our constructionist frame, as set out in the introduction, is deductive. Within this constructionist frame, we, the authors, set out to identify how participants construed their paranormal experiences and abilities. Inductively, we noted that the identified themes “meshed” with components of a commonly used heuristic for the lifeworld. As such, themes incorporated bottom-up and top-down considerations, or aspects. A key findings was that the experience of paranormal perceptions and abilities is central to our participant’s lived experiences, and essential to their life-worlds. The evidence presented in this report supports the idea that experience of paranormal perceptions and abilities sit easily within a heuristic, phenomenological, framework that applies to life-worlds generally. The experience of time, space, embodiment and inter-subjectivity is at the heart of what it is for a human being to “be,” and demonstrably fundamental to the experience of paranormal abilities.Drawing on To understand more about how individuals regard and experience their professed capabilities the authors explored whether self-designated capabilities shared mutual themes and patterns see . To dateConsideration of general ability, like analysis of subjective paranormal experiences see , produceIn this context, thematic analysis of interview transcripts produced a range of autobiographical references that delineated inextricable associations between life histories and possession of paranormal ability. These coalesced into meaningful and intelligible themes. Conceptually themes embodied connections between ability, experience, and belief. Psychologically, this suggested that self-ascription of ability, like experiences is explicable via the perception of an event/occurrence and the attribution (designation) of causation to paranormal powers or entities .Central to these processes is belief, which provides a framework for making sense of anomalous occurrences. Regarding ability, interpretation reciprocally reinforces supernatural credence and lived experiences. This view is commensurate with quantitative studies that report strong positive relationships between these distinct constructs. In the case of abilities this typically manifests as misattribution of external events to internal, dispositional paranormal forces. With experiences the ascription is general to external, supernatural agency .Narratives demonstrated conviction and faith in the cogency of abilities. Interviews progressed through a series of typical phases. Initially, individuals delineated their abilities by drawing on background influences and then progressed to providing anecdotal, subjective supporting evidence. For instance, Alison (tarot card reader/divination/psychic) outlined stories about her grandfather who she felt influenced her:“My grandfather he died/I was in my early 20s when he died. He was quite a prankster and so in my house I have pictures all over the walls. Every once in a while, you know, there would be like straight picture, straight picture, a little askew, straight picture, straight picture and I think it was my grandfather because he would be the kind you know if you wanted things perfect he would just put a little bit off just to you know just agitate you and he’s done the pictures that you know you can’t even get to.”“Powerful locations.”This was also true of Elizabeth  who spoke about “There’s also a tradition of following older spiritual practices. If you go to Wellington in Somerset, you can look along/walk along the streets and some of them are literally/there’s witch sort of logos in the window, followed by a gap, followed by a Born-Again-Christian…so it’s like that end of the woods is very much there’s a lot more sort of pagan stuff goes on as well.”Consistent with Though this manuscript followed recommended principles of best practice for qualitative research, issues pertaining to quality must still be considered. This study used the six-step thematic analysis approach of n = 917 and n = 499, respectively) and indicated that professed ability was relatively common. This figure is difficult to quantify because of the paucity of empirical work using general samples. However, Consistent with the guidelines of There were, however, limitations in sampling. Interviewees comprised respondents who followed up invitations from self-report studies to volunteer participation. In this context, they were self-selecting and motivated to discuss and outline their professed supernatural powers. Accordingly, the interviewees were likely to have strong conventions about the validity of their powers. Additionally, the number of males volunteering was significantly lower than females . Although, this gender imbalance was typically of psychological studies of paranormal constructs see , there rRegarding epistemically unwarranted beliefs, research has failed to report consistent gender differences . HoweverAlthough, interviewees were self-selecting there was no reason to believe that these were atypical to respondents who typically report supernatural facilities. Clearly, this is something that subsequent research should investigate further since willingness to discuss abilities may be related to level of self-ascription. Hence, interviews could represent individuals who are most confident in their facilities and therefore extreme in terms of personal experience. The sample of interviewees were also representative of core abilities.The alleged powers  corresponded closely with frequently reported paranormal experiences see , and aliDespite the identification of common themes, accounts were idiosyncratic and personal. This reflected variations in individual perception and interpretation. Thus, apparently comparable phenomena seem to have been experienced differently. For example, respondents claiming the ability to contact the deceased were involved in a variety of processes and practices. Additionally, profound formative influences impacted upon interviewees in myriad ways. Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) is one method particularly well suited to further exploring these idiosyncrasies see , the livFindings within this study are credible to the extent that three of the authors possessed expertise in qualitative analysis. Furthermore, the analytical process involved triangulation of researcher interpretations and acknowledgement of divergent narratives. Furthermore, participants were sampled from a range of backgrounds and levels of professed ability. This included paranormal practitioners  and laypersons with less formalised abilities. The interviewer possessed good knowledge of the paranormal, and hence, although a compassionate sceptic, was able to appreciate the content and nature of narratives. This ensured that interviewees were able to express themselves in an open manner.The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by Manchester Metropolitan University Faculty of Health, Psychology and Social Care Ethics Committee. The patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.KD and ND provided the theoretical focus, developed content, and produced the initial article. KD was responsible for data collection and initial analysis. LS, MP, and SW performed the RTA. AD reviewed the data analysis and wrote up the results. All authors were involved in the final proofs and subsequent submission of the article.AD was employed by Adelphi Values Ltd. The remaining authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.


We aim to contribute to recent situational approaches to the study of interpersonal violence by elaborating the concept of trajectories. Trajectories are communicative processes in which antagonists act upon each other’s bodily and verbal actions to project a direction for the interaction to take, which is then (con) tested in the exchanges that follow. We use the notion of trajectories to gain insight in how participants turn an antagonistic situation into a violent encounter, which we contrast to interactionist and micro-sociological understandings. Using ethnomethodological and conversation analytical tools, we detail the trajectories of three violent encounters, captured on phone camera recordings to answer the question how verbal and bodily exchanges project physical violence. Methodologically, our contribution shows how bodily actions can be studied in visual data. Our cases show how antagonists move the interaction toward violence by creating a metaconflict revolving around the conditions under which the interaction will become a physical confrontation; what we call the contested projection of violence. We conclude that the concept of trajectories offers a useful analytical tool to detail the shifts and turns of the interactive process—notably it’s bodily dimensions— that characterize antagonism and violence. Substantially, our analysis raises questions about conceptualizations of the emotional dynamics (notably the role of dominance) of violence, as proposed by earlier micro-sociological and interactionist work. We therefore suggest that future studies engage with these issues in more detail and in larger datasets. In the past decade, interactionist and phenomenological approaches have provided new understandings of what happens in situations of interpersonal violence. Especially Collins’s  micro-so1Our contribution aims to advance these situationalist perspectives both theoretically and methodologically by considering interpersonal violence as a communicative process, a trajectory in which the antagonists use each other’s’ bodily movements, gestures, gazes, and verbal utterances to move the interaction toward (and away from) a physical confrontation. We use the notion of trajectories in granular analyses of video recordings of three incidents of “street violence” sourced from the internet to answer the question: How do people turn an antagonistic interaction into a violent encounter? More specifically, we consider how sequences of verbal and bodily exchanges project physical violence. As we will show, the paths toward violence are not unidirectional but are marked by turning points at which the interaction could have taken a different direction.Our study is informed by ethnomethodologically oriented studies of violence , notions from symbolic interaction, most notably the idea of trajectories, as well as ideas taken from communicative constructivism . Turning points mark a noticeable change in the type of actions; they introduce a segment of actions which orient the interaction more markedly toward physical violence or away from it.Trajectories of violence are probably not unidirectional, with all actions oriented toward the looming prospect of a physical confrontation. They are likely characterized by what we call The term trajectory can be applied to various forms of violence; for instance, Reichertz  uses theWe analyzed three phone-camera video recordings of violent incidents which are part of a larger dataset comprising 131 clips obtained from freely available video uploading websites such as YouTube, Liveleaks and WorldStarHiphop, using search terms with the English keywords “assault,” “brawl,” “street fight,” and “violence”  using the researchers’ everyday embodied knowledge as a necessary resource  the spoken language representing the verbal transcript; (b) the organization of turn-taking ; (c) bodily movements; and (d) bodily gestures and contacts. The conjuncture of several of those aspects indicated turning points, which mark the start of a new segment. The trajectories we found are based on the analysis of typical segments connected to one another through turning points. Our analysis did not focus on bystanders. However, the presence of an audience probably provides additional salience to the antagonists’ claims to be able to live up to their projections.https://osf.io/9j53w/.In our report of the analyses below, we use fictitious names for the antagonists for ease of understanding our argument. Antagonists used offensive language, mainly in the form of racial and gendered slurs. We discussed whether we should censor these utterances to avoid reproducing stereotypes . We decided to keep the original utterances because they are analytically significant; participants use them as communicative resources to move the trajectory into a certain direction  standing in front of his opponent, a light-skinned male sitting on a bench  .The first segment we observed lasted five seconds. At the beginning of the clip, Reginald projects a line of action that renders violence possible, provocatively saying, “Touch me”. While not explicitly communicated, Reginald draws on a repertoire of provocation, in which touch me means that the one who is hit first, is rightfully provided with an opportunity to strike back: if you touch me, I can hit you in self-defense. Shawn declines the offer based on his own projection of what will happen if he accepts the offer: “That won’t do you no good”. Both participants repeat these utterances several times, taking turns without interrupting each other. However, at each turn, hand gesturing  and the prosody of their utterances change. This indicates that the interactional sequences in this segment seem to be driven by each participant making variations in their own prior actions rather than using the other’s actions to ground their next move. The conflict seems stuck because the antagonists are not able to take the interaction toward a new, shared direction.The start of a new segment is marked at the moment Shawn introduces his condition that projects physical violence (he might be using a prior unrecorded insult). Moving closer to Reginald, he proposes, “Call me a nigger again”. Reginald sticks to “touch me” as before, but turn-taking is now characterized by overlaps in utterances and proceeds with provocative insults and further threats . However, at 11 s into the clip, we noticed a turning away from the potentiality of violence, which indicates to us the start of a third segment. Again, it is Shawn who reorients the trajectory. In response to Reginald’s threat, he takes a step back. Then he says, “Tough guy” . Instead of staying with the conditional proposal for action, Shawn chooses to classify, out of a universe of possible identifiers, his adversary as “tough”. The stepping away and the dismissive head movement  indicate to us that Shawn portrays Reginald as someone who is actually not so tough and that Shawn does not want to remain in this confrontation. Reginald reacts by raising his chin, moving his hand and slightly lifting his body to an upright position, thereby taking up more space, and in a more confrontational manner.We argue the situation could have ended here because Shawn’s ambiguous “tough guy” and his stepping back offer a way out of the conflict. However, Reginald’s response to Shawn’s distancing brings the latter back into the conflict. This marks the start of a fourth segment. Reginald gets up slightly and moves his arms forward onto his knees, making more expressive bodily movements, which, given his sitting on the bench, can be seen as a more outspoken attempt to approach Shawn .Reginald seems to prepare himself to act upon Shawn’s earlier condition for violence and provocatively raises his chin, uttering “touch me” again . Shawn replies by raising his arms in the air with palms open (shrugging), which to us displays puzzlement . Then, building on two prior interactional resources, Reginald repeats “touch me” for the ninth time and adds the n-word. It takes Shawn a short moment to realize what just happened. He moves slightly backward and then uses the space to charge forward, severely punching Reginald. After a series of blows, Shawn jumps back and utters “what” several times. Then after some more punching, he says, “I told you,” pointing his finger at Reginald in a similar way as he did earlier  three times until bystanders intervene.At first sight, this case seems to follow Luckenbill’s and Athens’ interactional models; we can observe indications of a contest revolving around saving face (Luckenbill), as well as sparring, role claiming and rejection (Athens). We also find indications of Luckenbill’s “working agreement” about when to use violence, and the violence starts the moment the antagonists “agree” (saying the n-word). However, a closer look shows that “the working agreement” is actually a conflict. The antagonists develop a meta-conflict about what the conditions are under which violence can be used; which line should be crossed. While violence is not a necessary outcome of the interaction, the antagonists contest each other’s projected lines toward a physical confrontation. Furthermore, Shawn’s violence is one-sided and he continues to punch Reginald after he is already subdued, whereas Luckenbill’s and Athens’ suggest proportionality; in their models, violence is instrumental to decide who is dominant. Furthermore, we did not observe signs of Collins’s confrontational tension and fear in the antagonists. While the confrontation turned stuck for a moment and Shawn was about to withdrawn from the encounter at some point (his stepping back), this was not due to emotional inhibitions but to the antagonists’ inability to find a way to move the confrontation further. Moreover, a shift toward dominance, in the sense of a situational asymmetry in which one party no longer poses a threat to the other, did not precede violence, as Collins’ theory indicates. Instead, Reginald saying the n-word, his final “acceptance” of Shawn’s condition for violence, precipitated the latter’s assault. Moreover, throughout the confrontation, Shawn was in a much better position to attack then Reginald, but the asymmetry was apparently not sufficient to make the former turn to violence.In this, case, two men from the U.S. had an argument in a McDonalds restaurant at a Chinese airport. Bodily actions figure more prominently as interactional resources in this case, enabling us to demonstrate how bodily forms of communication can be studied using our approach. Our identification of segments is therefore mainly based on bodily transformations . We focus again on the two main antagonists. The two are Gary (older white man wearing glasses) and Will (younger white man wearing white shorts). The clip starts with the antagonists standing very close to each other. Gary indicates that his age does not prevent him from giving his opponent a beating: “[I’m] 50 fucking years old, but I’m fucking your ass (up?)”) . While Gary aggresses, pushing his chest forward and coming closer to Will, the latter holds up his arms, a gesture we interpret as unwillingness to fight . However, Gary continues pushing forward and sternly faces Will, who then puts his flat hand with fingers stretched onto Gary´s chest, gently pushing him away while saying “bro” several times in an appeasing manner, while Gary threats to “fuck you up”. After pushing Gary aside, Will presents a smile that can be read as disdainful. There is ambiguity in Will’s smiling and touching of Gary’s chest; on the one hand, they seem to signal “nonaggressiveness”; on the other hand, these actions are understood as disrespectful by Gary, providing him with a reason to further the escalation.The approaching-touching-distancing pattern provides the main interactional resource for the segments to follow. For Gary to turn his projection “to fuck [Will] up” into bodily action, he needs Will to act upon the encroachment of his body space. In the ensuing segments, we observe an increased intensity of approaching-touching-distancing movements, with Gary initiating subsequent rounds of the pattern. Will, on his part, contributes to the eventual accomplishment of Gary’s projection. By holding his ground rather than leaving, he continues to provide Gary with the opportunity to encroach his body space. Will’s body thus provides an interactional resource to continue antagonism.In the next segment we identified, Gary approaches again, but now Will is prepared and directly puts his hand onto Gary’s chest , pushing him away with slightly increased intensity . Moreover, he keeps his arms stretched out as a barrier preventing Gary from coming closer. The latter again utters threats to fight  and insults Will for not fighting him (“you wanna fucking be a bitch”) . From that moment, both parties are distanced again and argue (as we infer from their gesturing) for a moment .This pattern is repeated with increased intensity in the next segments , and we identify a turning point when Gary elaborates the touching of prior segments into grabbing . Now, the movement pattern has become approaching-grabbing-distancing, which is repeated two times with increasing intensity . The grabbing provides Gary with an opportunity to elicit a more aggressive reaction from Will. As Gary holds Will’s arm, he provokes the latter to free it with force .The next segment starts when Gary pushes forward and “charges” at Will with the full weight of his body . Whereas in the former segments bodily confrontations were followed by momentary retreats in which both parties stepped back and exchanged verbal utterances, we now observe continuous bodily engagement without talking . From this point, each action of the other is used to gain advantage in the bodily struggle. Thus, as Will turns to the side and tries to avoid Gary grabbing his neck, he loses his balance. Gary seizes the opportunity and throws Will against the wall .A last transformation can be identified, when Will, for the first time, introduces a new line of action. He changes the mode of the physical confrontation from grabbing and pushing to punching. In response to Gary’s pushing, Will punches Gary’s head, hitting Gary’s glasses, which fly away . As Gary stumbles, Will pushes him into a corner. Gary bends forward, with his head close to the ground. Will, who now has unhampered opportunity to strike, seizes the opportunity and unleashes a series of blows on Gary, who is in a vulnerable position .In this case as well, important elements of Luckenbill’s and Athens’ interactional models appear; the case could be interpreted in terms of a dominance contest, including a bodily version of Athens’ role claiming, rejection and sparring as Gary probes Will’s “line” by repeatedly encroaching the latter’s body space. And whereas Will displayed unwillingness to participate in escalation at the beginning, he stood his ground, thus providing Gary with the interactional resource to continue the antagonism and gradually increase the intensity of bodily contact. In this case, there is not a clear-cut line that demarcates the start of a physical confrontation. Rather, there is ambiguity; the antagonists disagree about whether and when the situation should be understood as a fight. They thus develop a new conflict that revolves around the conditions under which two-sided violent engagement starts. For his part, Gary provokes Will, using series of approaching-touching-distancing and then approaching-grabbing-distancing moves . And once Will eventually engages in a physical, non-verbal confrontation, he introduces a new modality of violent action, from wrestling to punching . So, in this case as well, the projected lines of action toward and of physical violence are contested. Moreover, as in the first case, violence is not just a means to decide who is dominant: when Gary is in a subdued position, Will’s violence continues and in fact becomes more fierce. Furthermore, Will’s reluctance to answer Gary’s proposals to engage does not seem to originate from confrontational tension and fear. Will stands steady, and shows signs of indignation and contempt rather than being tense or fearful. And whereas in Collins’s theory situational asymmetry is a precondition for violence to start, we observe that once Gary is subdued, the roles of the antagonists reverse: now Will uses one-sided and in fact more fierceful violence.Whereas the two prior cases show how the participants provide interactional resources for the other to move the trajectory toward a projected violent outcome, this result is attained much more one-sidedly in the following case. In this incident, a white Dutch boy (“Tobi”) had agreed to fight someone . The video footage starts at the moment Tobi indicates that fight is over due to his bleeding broken nose (according to documentation found on the internet). However, “Ben,” a Dutch boy of minority descent  then attempts to project a continuation of violence against the now unwilling and nonaggressive Tobi. In this more complex trajectory, the groups present form an audience which plays a crucial part; therefore we pay attention to group member’s actions, notably their bodily positioning and intermittent comments. The clip lasts 5 min, and it takes approximately 4 min until collective violence starts. We discuss a selection of the 18 segments we identified. They show how the group, lead by Ben, turns Tobi from an unwilling opponent into an offender.At the beginning of the recording, Tobi sits on his knees on the ground. Group members, assembled in a circle around the victim , cheer that he is not done yet and that he must continue fighting. The spatial formation allows the youth to focus on the spectacle, a.o. through the use of phone cameras.Tobi does not respond verbally. As he gets up from the ground, he draws attention to his body, wipes the blood from his nose, shakes it from his hands and spits. This bodily posturing is signaling that he is unwilling, or even unable, to continue .This segment already shows the main resources that will used to subsequently turn Tobi into someone who transgresses a norm, an “offender”: his refusal to continue the fight. After an intermittent segment in which Tobi walks away from the group, we identified the beginning of a new segment when one group member returns to the earlier theme that the fight is not over yet. This is taken up by other group members, who interrupt each other energetically and agree that the fight is not over and that Tobi should stay . Their overlapping comments create a sphere of excited expectation for a fight to come. A next shift can be identified when Tobi responds to the group; he stops walking away slowly, turns around and looks toward the group, his body posture straighter now. He says that the fight is over because of his hurt nose. His remark introduces material to revive antagonism, which is immediately taken up by Ben. Ben loudly announces the line of action to move the situation toward a physical confrontation: “come over here, or I will fight you”. Tobi and Ben engage in argumentative turn-taking, with Tobi explaining why he cannot fight (due to his hurt nose). Ben’s gesturing becomes more intense and his voice becomes louder in this segment. When he says he “did not come to watch a 30-s fight,” he not only defines the situation as an entertaining spectacle but also denotes Tobi as blameworthy for spoiling his time. The group then realigns with Ben and Tobi, focusing their attention on their antagonism, while group members say they “haven’t seen shit,” legitimizing Ben to continue his efforts.When Tobi does not respond, Ben picks up the prior theme of humiliation as a resource, saying Tobi is a “pussy” and “weak”. Ben thus portrays Tobi as “unworthy” to provoke a counteraction. The asymmetry between Tobi and Ben increases in this segment as Tobi returns to his earlier closed-in, inward-oriented bodily posturing while Ben adopts aggrandizing posturing and seeks support from the audience, which has formed a loose line between Ben and Tobi and the “neutral” group (we observed one of them inquiring about Tobi’s condition) at the playground in the back. As he humiliates Tobi, Ben tries to connect to the group several times. By pointing and “speeching,” he turns the conflict into a collective play. However, the group is not entirely focused, with group members having their own conversation about recording what is going on . Ben addresses the audience when he gestures ostensibly toward Tobi, urging him to fight again . Ben is supported by a younger group member who steps forward and adds denigration as a new form of humiliating Tobi .The asymmetry between Ben and Tobi is even more apparent when Ben switches from humiliation to a compelling projection of physical violence: he counts down, stating that he will use violence when the count is over. In response, Tobi again states that the fight is over. As the opponents reintroduce the earlier topic of disagreement, Ben becomes more angry. They start a dialogue in which they repeat their statements with variations, Tobi saying the fight is over, Ben saying it’s not .A marked shift occurs when the argumentative turn-taking is replaced by one-sided humiliation. Ben slaps Tobi and explicitly remarks that he slaps him with his flat hand and, to emphasize the humiliation, adds that his slapping indicates “disrespect” .The following segments again show increasing asymmetry: as Tobi tries to get away, Ben and another group member follow him, while Ben increases the intensity of violence from slapping to punching which is accompanied by more slurs and verbal abuse . Tobi no longer tries to get away. He now stands in the bushes, bending over and minimizing. Ben is again demanding to “fight with him now”. The more passive Tobi is, the more work Ben has to put into move the interaction further. One way to do so is to construct the ensuing aggression as a punishment.As Ben develops increasingly severe and painful violent actions, from slapping to striking at the back of Tobi’s head, he punctuates each violent act with exclamations, indicating that Tobi did something wrong: “I am sick and tired of this fucking shit of yours” . Here, Ben might refer to Tobi’s earlier plans to fight a group member; he previously stated that he “didn’t come here to watch a 30-s fight”.Ben has transformed Tobi from an unworthy opponent into an object of humiliation and punishment. While group members respected some distance from Tobi’s body space in earlier segments , they now follow Ben’s example and kick Tobi . When Tobi falls on the ground in the bushes, he is followed by Ben and another group member, who start to kick him fiercely on his back and head while group members cheer and shout with excitement. Two other group members also kick Tobi on his back, although less fiercely .To conclude, this case does not seem to fit so easily to the interactional models provided by Luckenbill and Athens. The most important element, a contest that revolves around attaining dominance, is missing. Instead, Tobi is reluctant to engage in a contest and does not propose conditions for starting a physical confrontation, which also means this case lacks a “working agreement”. Tobi’s reluctance creates an interactional problem for Ben: how to start a fight with an increasingly passive “opponent”. Eventually, Ben does not succeed in creating a fight. Instead, he performs “badness”; he demonstrates his ability to play a mean, one-sided humiliating game with Tobi with support of the audience produce shared cultural knowledge about what a “fight usually looks like”. Transitions from “nonviolence” to “violence” and vice versa consist of forms of physical contact that require interpretation. A "knock out" blow might be a clear result, but also the pushing away or grabbing of the other’s hand is produced as indicative of at least a small struggle. In that sense, the trajectories we described are a mutual accomplishment of disagreement but far from an agreement to disagree. The three cases revolved around a meta-conflict about how to start a fight; the antagonists contested each other’s projections toward a physical confrontation.However, our findings pertain to three cases only and it is not our intention to make generalizing statements about the wider population of violent encounters. Instead, we aimed to develop the notion of trajectories to advance earlier contributions by Luckenbill and Athens that present rather straightforward idealizations of violent interactions. Thus, based on thorough and detailed transduction of the video material, we could show the role that meta-conflicts play as precursors to violence, which has not been described in the literature before. Understanding violence as a trajectory also avoids a binary distinction between “nonviolence” and “violence” and allows to study the processual character of the phenomenon itself  nor an end to it (as in Luckenbill’s and Athens’s models). Second, in line with Whitehead et al. , we coulmodifications of the experiential dimensions” in the sense of the shifts and turns that can occur in the sequence of (pre-)violent actions  would make it possible to use the notion of trajectory to show how participants create a conflict as a interactional accomplishment. Also, with regard to the why of violence, one could object against video data more generally that it does not provide insight in the subjective motivations of participants. However, whatever motivations individuals may have, interpersonal conflicts only materialize when they engage in engaging in antagonistic turn-taking. Phrased in our terminology, for motivations to become part of social reality, individuals need to project a trajectory. A further objection against video data is that it lacks contextualization; from video material alone, it is impossible to know how historically developed social cleavages, moral meanings and social relationships enter a conflict situation. Adding ethnographic components  of non-violent and violent conflicts. More specifically, it is probably worthwhile to consider the transition to a bodily-only mode of communication in this respect, as our analysis of the second case shows.Fourth, whereas we noted the role of the audience in our third case, a more systematic conceptualization of the role of third parties in trajectories of violence is needed, as studies point to their importance in dampening and also encouraging violence (Levine et al., Finally, we focused on a specific form of violent interpersonal encounters in public space, especially public forms that are explicit, visible and situationally bound, ephemeral encounters. However, other forms of violence, embedded in more durable social relationships and organizational structures could be conceptually understood as comprising multilayered trajectories, with various temporal horizons, situational and longer lasting. We are confident that the detailed study of sequential unfolding, the attention to bodily actions and the use of the non-determining trajectory concept can, however, provide insights into other forms of violence as well, even if video-based studies exhibit a certain bias towards visible violence.