Semiotica 191–1/4 (2012), 117 – 135	 0037–1998/12/0191–0117
DOI 10.1515/sem-2012-0058	 © Walter de Gruyter
What it means to change lanes:
Actions, emotions and wayfinding
in the family car*
ERIC LAURIER, BARRY BROWN, and HAYDEN LORIMER
Abstract
In this paper we investigate how the sequential organization and settlement of
disagreements comes to shape, and be shaped by, navigation. Using extracts of
in-car interaction, we examine the gestalt of projectable aspects of road travel,
car movements, and driver-navigator talk. Navigation when accomplished without
maps relies on making sense of streets, landmarks, and signs, activities that
are displayed through passengers and drivers giving directions to each other,
alongside embodied references to passing roadside features and the movement of
the vehicle. More broadly, “finding the way” is bound up with the social relationships
between passengers — in particular families caring for one another and
showing their epistemic and emotional stance on particular matters. To examine
this we draw on existing conversation analytic work on epistemics, stance, and
emotion to explore the potentially argumentative character of direction-giving
and direction-receiving and how this comes to be combined with the task at hand.
Keywords:	 driving; conversation analysis; wayfinding; epistemics; emotion
1.	 Introduction
Families know their way around their world as families, their shared knowledge
of places and routes binding them together. Many of us will remember
our experiences as children sitting in the backseat of the family car while our
parents debated with rising passions the quickest way to get from one part of
town to another. Perhaps many of us are now those parents — claiming to
know a better way, making accusations, being criticized for the insufficiency of
our directions, gritting our teeth as we make a U-turn in busy traffic, and other
troubles that go with driving in the family car. In the research on navigation,
however, these familiar situations in which navigation takes place have often
been overlooked. Navigation, even where it is placed into a group setting
(Hutchins 1993), continues to be treated as a problem of the intellect puzzling
118  E. Laurier et al.
through charts and maps. It is perhaps the absence of groups like families in
navigation research that explains a lack of attention to its emotional aspects.
In research based on models of mental spatial representations, the family’s
familiarity with the layout of their neighborhood has usually been treated as
two or more individuals consulting two or more cognitive maps instead of the
knowing we have “as we go” (Ingold 2000: 239). As should already be clear
from thinking about families in cars even for a moment, that we know where
we are going as we go does not result in an absence of agreements and disagreements,
disputes, and resolutions. Instead we come upon how family
members display their stance in relation to the route they are taking and their
stance toward one another. In this article we will document and describe a family’s
wayfinding as a matter of standing and understandings. Each of which are
then versed and reversed through the relationship between directional talk and
ordinary features of the road system. We will examine how the way is found in
the braiding of conversation’s sequential organization and the journey’s onward
orientations (Haddington 2010; Nevile 2004; Psathas 1991).
Ingold (2000) provides an invaluable start to rethinking wayfinding beyond
the shadow cast by the concepts of mental maps and spatial cognition (e.g.,
Golledge 1999; MacEachren 2001; Roy 2005). In describing human movement
through a landscape Ingold makes a clear break from a long tradition of
cognitive modelling, arguing that how we find our way through the familiar is
quite unlike how we explore the unfamiliar. When a family goes down to their
local supermarket they do not unfold the map, apply their compass and look for
landmarks on the horizon. Nor do they scan the environment for indicators,
consult their mental spatial representation, plot an optimizing A-B route and
set off executing the plan. The family’s habitual navigation in the world is
something quite different to planned map-based spatial navigation. Routes to
the supermarket go unquestioned and overlooked, a family expects that it can
get other things done on the way rather than having to work out the way. As the
family drives to the supermarket they find themselves instead in traffic, weaving
between potholes, caught in a downpour, noticing a new cafe opening up,
and all manner of other environmental possibilities.
When we are finding the way with others the relationships between those in
the car reshapes how we navigate. In our earlier work on in-car interaction we
studied drivers who car-pool and share their car rides to work, travelling the
same route on a daily basis. We found that car-sharers formed a distinct intimate
relationship through being with each other every day — something that
bears many resemblances to being members of a family with daily exposure to
one another’s moods, stories, troubles, and successes (Laurier and Lorimer
2012). In particular, car-poolers take any departure from their usual route as an
“accountable matter.” The route that car-poolers took to work was agreed
upon, carefully established through learning shortcuts, getting caught in slow
What it means to change lanes  119
moving traffic, the character of particular roads as more or less dangerous or
aggressive, and so on. Any change to that route would be justified or e­xplained.
In our data the criteria used for route selection became visible when routes had
to be changed because of roadworks or there was a requirement to pass by
another place, and when a new route was suggested that route would be evaluated
in terms of the car-sharers’ standing toward one another as commuters.
Similarly, for families, most of the time the route goes uncommented upon, just
as correct turns at junctions can be taken as correct by an absence of response. It
is when difficulties with a route arise that the unsaid becomes said (Haddington
2010) and it is an instance of one such difficulty that we examine here.
2.	 Approaching semiosis
Our connection to more traditional semiotic concerns is through an ethnomethodological
and conversation analytic turn toward social semiosis and away from
more formalist semiotics (McHoul 1996). In such an approach analysts no longer
establish and interpret the relationship between sign and object, i­nstead, they investigate
the logics of signification as they are realized through practical activities
— such as the assignment of color in a chemistry lab (Goodwin 1997). Two particularly
pertinent earlier articles, which draw on wayfinding examples, show how
the reading of signs is embedded in and only intelligible through an understanding
of the sequence of activities in which it occurs, whether it is simply “getting there”
(Sharrock and Anderson 1979) or “being seen to read the signs” as part of identifying
what sort of legitimate person one is within a space (McHoul 1984).
Within conversation analysis (CA), Schegloff (1972) carried out a significant
study of the uses of place terms. In that early work he provided a sketch of
the relationship between formulating place and navigation that was taken up
later by others in the field. Psathas and Henlin’s ethnographies of cab d­rivers
preceded Schegloff’s study and is intriguing as a proto-CA ethno-­inquiry into
“locating activities” using the case of the dispatch order (Psathas and Henslin
1967). Psathas’s later work (1986, 1991) differentiated between “how to get
to” and “where are you” sequences, the former generally producing complex
steps to be followed and the latter often being dealt with through one place
formulation. Wayfinding draws not only on the linguistic resources highlighted
by Psathas, but also the multimodal communicative resources of gesture, artefacts,
and spatial arrangement (Goodwin 1986; and see also Norris 2004).
Havilland, by defamiliarizing conventions of directional gestures through anthropological
work in the languages of Zinacantan (Haviland 2005), Tzotzil
(Haviland 2000), and Guugu Yimidhirr (Haviland 1998) revealed background
assumptions underlying left and right in both speech and gesture.
More recently, these CA studies have been supplemented by a number of
authors with an interest in gesture, body orientation, and environmental features
120  E. Laurier et al.
in situations where participants are mobile. Through examining situations where
unacquainted pedestrians seek directions, Mondada (2009) brought out the preliminary
work that is required to establish a shared orientation relative to the
surrounding city (see also Laurier and Brown 2008). It is only once gaze and
bodily indexicals, such as left and right, are aligned that direction-sequences can
be initiated. Closely related to the analysis that we will present, Haddington and
Keisanen (2009) show how features of car journeys occasion route negotiations
and provide temporal boundaries that require negotiation to be undertaken. Following
Haddington (2010), we aim to describe direction-giving and wayfinding
as forms of social semiosis in the midst of a mobile road environment. To this
we add an examination of the affective qualities of wayfinding. Even in o­ffering
directions or choosing a route it is an area ripe with possibilities for disagreement
and blame, and in our earlier work we have attended to the preparatory
work oriented around sharing responsibility for route selections (Brown and
Laurier 2005; Laurier and Brown 2008). What we will tease apart later in the
article is what happens when wayfinding goes wrong. What is also of i­nterest in
examining such a moment is whether there are qualities that occur that are particular
to the family rather than commuters or friends. Moreover when the relationship-generated
categories of family members meet those vehicle-generated
categories of driver and passenger there is further i­nterest in how entitlements
and responsibilities shift and move between them on a moment-by-moment basis.
From Goodwin’s work on family disputes it becomes also clear that shifts in
what he calls participation frameworks also restructure affect (Goodwin 2007).
The episode we will present comes from a three year project “Habitable
Cars: the collective organization of private travel” (Laurier et al. 2007). During
the project we collected over one hundred hours of video recordings of journeys
made by different social groups in cars. The groups were a contrasting
mix of car-poolers, families, and friends. We used a follow-and-film approach:
the project ethnographer would spend a week travelling with each car learning
about its occupants’ routes, elements of the history of each group of travellers
and asking various other questions inspired by the particularities of each journey.
At the end of the week a pair of camcorders were handed over to the travellers
and they were asked to record half a dozen of their typical journeys over
the next week. Many of the groups recorded a great deal more than six journeys,
retaining the camcorders for up to a month. For a fortnight or more, after
the DV tapes were returned, the project ethnographer then sifted through the
footage provided by the project participants selecting up to sixty clips per
v­ehicle for further detailed analysis. These clips were returned to the participants
on DVD to secure their informed consent for re-use in data sessions,
conference papers, and academic publications.
From the corpus of these clips assembled by the project a number were
s­elected for transcription according to conversation analysis conventions
What it means to change lanes  121
(J­efferson 1984) and more detailed analysis during data sessions (Heath 1997).
The latter allow for the repeated viewing of fragments of various human practices
in order to begin to describe the witnessable social orders to be found there
(Lynch and Bogen 1996). Where some practitioners of conversation a­nalysis
emphasize gathering together large collections of instances to look for recurrent
features of talking together (Have 1999), our approach has been to dwell
on only a handful of data fragments. Indeed, in this the interests of brevity in
this paper we focus on just one extract. The demands of presenting audio-visual
materials in sufficient detail for analysis that tracks talk, g­estures, objects,
and environment require more space, so the same solution works here of tracking
one episode rather than gathering a collection of comparative instances.
However, as we hope the reader will discover it is a particularly rich fragment.
3.	 Failures in family wayfinding
The family that we will join here are at a classic occasion for a family argument.
They have taken a detour around the center of London to avoid the Congestion
Charging Zone. At the outset, Jess, the mother, confidently claimed
knowledge of a “right turn” that would allow them to travel a route between
two hospitals avoiding the “Zone.” The journey between two hospitals is being
made in o­rder to track down the belongings of a chronically-ill grandmother.
The reason and responsibility for the journey thus connects in a particular fashion
to each occupant of the car through a familial logic — in particular morally
locating Jess because the grandmother is her mother. Part of the background to
what is happening is also that Jess has, by dint of living closest to the hospitals,
b­ecome the primary carer for her seriously ill mother. Most of the visits to
grandmother in the old and new hospitals were done using the family car.
From the outset of this journey, a key question for Jess and Steve (the father)
was the existence of “the right turn” that could be made to connect to the h­ospital.
Steve although having expressed skepticism over the existence of this right turn,
has nevertheless continued driving the family along the route. After a lengthy
discussion earlier, Jess has an increased stake in finding “the right” that she had
been so certain about. One of the questions that travelling together in the car as a
family produces is the potential categories in play — in this case father/driver/
route-follower and mother/passenger/navigator. These categories are not definitively
decided, rather they are potential categories made relevant in talk, though
here we will not be focusing on settling which of those are in play.
The family, having successfully skirted the congestion charging zone, arrive
at the road in question, at which point, of course, they will discover whether
they can turn right or not. Jess in the front passenger seat, says be careful and,
almost as she says this, the car drives past a right turn. Jess rejects that turn
as being the correct right and they continue up the road. As they progress it
122  E. Laurier et al.
becomes less and less likely there is another right turn that they can take. Having
been certain of her route Jess faces the impossibility of making such a right
turn. At the top end of the street there is a barrier in the middle of the road that
prevents any possibility of a right turn. Jess who has been looking less and less
confident gets upset. For Steve, his early doubt about a right turn has seemingly
been vindicated and this now leads to a situation ripe for blame, scoresettling
and more. The route was not one they had both known and been confident
about, it was Jess’ route — in turn Jess holds the responsibility of having
taken them on a route that she either misremembered or which had always been
impossible. A simplistic reading from the outside would be to see Steve vindicated
and Jess shown wrong. Events point otherwise, when Jess’ claim collapses
and she becomes upset, Steve steers both her — and the car — out of
trouble. In doing so we begin to catch elements of how the family exists in its
intimacy, its long histories of faults and forgiveness and its caring for and of its
members. From the transcripts what we can pursue more closely is how, in this
specific case, a number of complex actions, emotions and emergent features of
wayfinding are related to one another.
Let us start with tracking the course of Steve’s sensitivity around the projected
“way-failure” back to the beginning of their search for the right turn (the
location of the video grab is marked with a “[*]” [in red] in the transcripts that
follow and overlap with “+”):
What it means to change lanes  123
Jess reins in their attention to this immediate section of road, be careful, (line
1) the road thus becoming a territory of concern. Almost immediately Steve
points out a right turn (emerging in line 11 and completed in 16). There are
several points to note about this. First, that we have divergent perspectives on
the road. Jess is scanning the distant road ahead, while Steve immediately
b­egins glancing over to the right hand side of the road. Where one might want
to say that this is a feature of the car’s architecture because the driver is looking
out of his side of the front window and then the side window itself, what is
possibly more important here is that Jess knows where her right turn is and is
already looking toward that area. Steve, meantime, is taking the instructions at
their word and identifying candidate right turns. Second, the tense used to refer
to the opening: not “isn’t” but wasn’t (line 16). The change of tense comes not
even with having passed the exit — it is still on the right. Yet it is done with an
acute sense of the braking and indicating distance required to take the right in
question. The exit is seen as an object whose status is generated by its relationship
to their driving. It is not just “a road” that is being talked about here, but
“an exit,” that the car could be maneuvered onto. Third, Jess’a little bit further
up (line 9), which would have aligned Steve with the correct zone ahead to be
examining, was too late. Steve was already moving to point out the turning to
the right that they are approaching using his gearstick hand. This is the hand
that will most likely catch the attention of the passenger, his other being too
peripheral. Jess turns her head a little toward that side, and by the visibility of
her attending to his side of the car, Steve can now comment on the environmental
feature and its surrounds:
(2)
124  E. Laurier et al.
Jess then leans forward and across Steve, craning her neck to look deeper into
the right hand turn as they pass it. In leaning in she creates something close to
a “body torque” (Schegloff 1998) that will eventually have to be released.
Aside from positioning herself in this recognizably temporary state, it is done
so that she can peer into Steve’s candidate road exit. Along with what category
of looking is being produced (e.g., peering versus glancing), it is the sequencing
of the peering that interests us here. Jess’ body torque uncoils (line 24) as
she moves back into her standard seating position as a passenger. In her uncoiling,
Jess, while still leaning forward though no longer across Steve, does a
second peer at the road ahead. This second look right after the first is visibly
surveying the road ahead in comparison to the now passed right turn. All the
more so given that Jess while doing so is holding off a conclusion by using the
questioning-continuer ehm and only on completing the survey of the road
ahead does she say no don’t think so (lines 24 –25). Her peerings gather in the
perspectives required to be able to say it is not. Here, already, her epistemic
claims have weakened from a definite a little bit further up (line 9) to don’t
think so (lines 24 –25).
The nature of car travel in urban road traffic means that we are constantly
pushed on and cannot pause nor retrace our steps easily in the way that we can
on the pavement. The family is kept moving along the road and cannot return
to this first right hand turn to reconsider. The onwardness of traffic also means
that even as Jess is rejecting the first right as not the one that she remembers,
the forward movement of the traffic brings them to another street going the
wrong way (see also Haddington and Keisanen 2009). How Steve deals with
Jess’ weakened rejection of the turn is by providing a directional formulation
— that’s right hand turn (line 27), which provides a match with Jess’ route as
provided during her earlier directions.
Dunno how far down I came out (line 29) is placed at a moment when
the traffic is slow and they have the opportunity to look around without mov-
ing any further. Yet the road has not brought them fresh perspectives on the
situation. This surveying is again linked to Jess being able to say not this far
down (line 30). Ingold argues for the importance of the structuring of perspectives
in wayfinding and here, perhaps, we have the persistent absence of
a remembered perspective which would then link into the sequence of perspectives
that Jess is able to recall. It is a property of memory that it can be
tied  to reaching a location which delivers a perspective that matches what
the  person can recall. Prospectively we can say “I will recognize it when
I’m there” or we find ourselves walking around an area for a while before suddenly
we say “there it is!” I­nstead Jess and Steve edge a little further up the
road and have come upon two visible features of the road-scape — a no-entry
and a long set of railings down the middle of the road which prevent turning
right.
What it means to change lanes  125
(3)
It is here where Jess’ certainty unravels further. Having looked around and not
been able to offer any noticings about where they are, she now switches from
an uncertain rejection to a reconsideration of that exit as possibly having been
the one she took.
The car here provides for the sort of side-by-side alignment noted by Mondada
(2009) as key in undertaking direction-giving. Yet at the same time certain
views are relatively restricted or/and obstructed because of traffic’s visual properties,
the car’s fixed seating and the passenger and driver themselves blocking
one another’s views. In the above transcript, Jess is craning her neck (line 38) in
order to gain the perspective of the driver. The camera’s view in the video still
is roughly the view of the passenger relaxed in their seat. Stretching up allows
Jess to see along the fence a little farther, and to draw conclusions about which
“right” is which. Her next turn-beginning although (line 39) thus gains its sense
from following after her inspection (line 38), which has provided fresh evidence
of the impossibility of the right turn, even if not of a feature or landmark that she
can recollect. Just by itself, a second visual inquiry of the surroundings provides
the warrant for a revised statement to be made. Added to this in the moving car
there can be greater or lesser visual access to the buildings, trees, and streets
surrounding the road we are on as we travel further along it.
What follows Jess’ second thoughts is an agitated biting of her fingers (line
41). She also looks in alignment with Steve (line 42) at the street exit the car is
126  E. Laurier et al.
currently sitting beside, this is a street they cannot enter either due to the fence,
so their gaze is settled upon an impossible right turn rather than continuing to
search for other options. Steve’s response (lines 44 – 45) is intonationally softened
although this time matched with Jess’ and thus coming to an agreement
about having missed their right turn.
What happens next is closely related to the opening up of the view down the
middle of the road as the car drives another hundred meters or so forward. It has
been travelling beside the railings that continue to extend into a vanishing point.
(4)
In extract 4, the car has moved alongside the central railings that preclude right
turns. Steve has given them one look before saying I’m pretty sure (line 52). The
sense of marking out how much anyone can see and thus what their epistemic
claims are is reminiscent, if in a scaled-down sense of, classic studies of visual
a­ccess and knowledge claims in airport organization (Goodwin and Goodwin
1996). In those studies, where there is a spread-out ground-crew with differential
visual access to what was happening across the landing strips, gates, and apron,
there was an ongoing need to mark out what each can plainly see, and what can be
inferred, what is based on someone else’s view, and so on. In the above extract,
Steve shifts from claiming some degree of certainty about the absence of a right
exit to certainty (lines 62– 63). Similar to the inspections being done earlier, the car
has moved forward another hundred meters and he can finally see the traffic lights
at the end of the fenced road section that have a no-right-turn sign at their base.
Between those shifts in his claims to certainty Jess continues to be anxious
and provide no amended proposals as to where the right could be, or instruc-
What it means to change lanes  127
tions, or anything else. Again Steve’s we’ve got a problem now (line 57)
­handles the absence of the right hand turn, not as assigning blame to Jess, but
rather uses we to gather them together and perhaps shift himself into place as
a potential agent of an upcoming solution. His phrasing of who the problem
belongs to as we not “you,” is of course not beyond Jess making further
­inferences — yet it does still remain a problem that was generated by her
­wayfinding. However we suggest here that it is Steve as driver who is pursuing
a response from Jess as navigator. After re-iterating — I’m pretty sure you
can’t throw a right up here (lines 52–53) — though now with an increase in
certainty over the absence of the right turn Steve only gets a note of dismay
from Jess. His upshot is formulated in such a way that he still does not say what
should be done, or indeed appropriate blame for the “problem.” Jess could still
offer a solution, however she provides instead a further marker of her distress
by only making a muted tisk (line 60).
In his last turn in Excerpt 4, Steve’s self-confirmation — yeah no right turn
(lines 62– 63) — warrants a departure from the driver-navigator pairing of Jess
and Steve. The lane change is a significant action for a number of reasons
b­ecause, first it stops them being boxed into the right hand lane, second, it ends
the search for the right hand turn and, third, it is initiating a new driving course
of action that has yet to be established. The delivery of the self-confirmation is
economical, thus it also expresses the rapid response needed to change lanes in
the approach to a box junction at traffic lights. If we imagine some alternative
expressions here: we can’t throw a right or I can’t bloody throw a right, each
of these continue the previous fruitless search and tend toward a complaint and
potentially an argument. What we do see here instead is how his close-packed
turn at talk, which is also tightly coupled with indicating and beginning to
maneuver the car (see comparable moves in Haddington 2010), is directed toward
a new course of action.
In a situation we are all surely familiar with, facing the mundane reality of
the road system (Pollner 1987), Jess restates that what now appears not to be
possible was once done.
(5)
Preceded by her nail-biting and in the face of the absence of the once certain
right turn, Jess now expresses distress and puzzlement in its emphatic tone —
but we did (line 66) — as Steve shifts lanes. Her claim fails, once again, to
128  E. Laurier et al.
provide new directions to the driver, attending instead to the undercurrent of
inferred error or, indeed, blame. Of pertinence to what will happen in a m­oment
she remains oriented to the road ahead, searching for that “right” even if it is
now a last-chance look. Her claim also shifts to its remaining ground, that is no
longer of an epistemic nature and is now trimmed down to an accomplishment.
Steve’s work is cut-out here because he has to both change lanes and then
a­ttend to Jess’ distress. Under other less time-pressed circumstances perhaps
he might have been able to supply scenarios through which Jess could have
made a right hand turn, as she continues to claim, and thus avoid a family argument.
Indeed, Steve shifts to the present tense preface, which is one that contrasts
with Jess’ past tense and also marks a direct conflict here. As Steve says
— You can’t (line 68) — Jess responds with a crestfallen expression, which,
while visible from the camera’s perspective, is quite lost on the driver:
The crestfallen look prefigures what will come. Meantime, Steve reiterates his
account for the lane-changing actions by dint of which a right does not exist
there’s no right turn. An account that is about to provide an upshot in terms of
what he will do next when:
(6)
What it means to change lanes  129
In the upshot, the shift in agency, already of course established by the lanechange,
is marked with an I (line 69). However, before Steve can add what his
next course of action will be, Jess does an overlapped cut-off (line 71) and
seemingly instead gives up the whole mission with: OH JUST GO home, go
home. Although she appears, from a literal interpretation, to be giving up, she
does this in a contextually-sensitive fashion by belatedly providing directions
(home) to the driver. These directives are, then, the response that his previous
reports on the absence of their next step in the journey had been expecting.
There is something more subtle and complex happening here though. If we
examine the video-still below: as her turn begins Jess looks-away from the
road, shifting her whole head toward the passenger side while raising and waving
her hand in frustration. If we recall her earlier leaning and craning, these
were body postures arising in and out of the requirement of navigating. Her
shift in bodily orientation then is a significant shift in her stance toward the
wayfinding itself as a task (similar to Goodwin 2007). In as much as one can
within a car, she is backing-off from it. Where in the midst of cooking in the
kitchen one might raise one’s hands and walk away from the cooker shouting
oh just phone the pizza delivery company! here her gestures are tailored toward
what can be done within the car-space and what can be seen by the driver. The
hand that expresses this frustration is the one that is in the middle of the car
and thus the one that is visible to the driver ( Nevile 2007). If we look at the
video-still again we can see her other arm remains un-moved on the passenger
window-frame.
(7)
130  E. Laurier et al.
Expressive in their pitch of Jess’ despair at having lead the family up a blind
alley, the formulation of place — home — is one that re-ignites “family” as the
group struggling to find a way through the city. Home is a place formulation
identifiable to, and by them, as family members (Schegloff 1972). Using home
collects them all as a family even as it also marks its opposition onward and is
the place where the mum, as distressed family member, would want to retreat
to. The spontaneity of this emotional occurrence is evident in the timing of its
interruption of Steve’s proposal before he has finished. By following the
p­receding course of action we can see how this upset does not come out of
nowhere. Although this is apprehensibly how she feels at this moment, it is a
feeling that comes after a stepwise progression first from confidence as she
began with be careful, (line 1) then to nail-biting agitation and finally nailbiting
withdrawal. Throughout Steve has been displaying his orientation to her
changed emotional displays and tailoring his epistemic claims toward a nonconfrontational
stance.
Given that it is publicly available that an upset is in the offing, it should be
no surprise to us that Steve does not take Jess’ directive literally and head
home. Along with being pre-figured, her distressed instructions, when they do
arrive, are an “extreme case formulation” of what to do next. In other words,
she is not providing anything that could be taken as a reasonable next step in
reaching the hospital, all the more so because within the journey itself as unit,
they have almost completed it.After driving for several miles around the center
of London, their final destination, the hospital, is only a block away. Here the
extreme case formulation is being used in an unusual fashion against its issuer.
One of Pomerantz’s (1986: 219) identified uses of extreme case formulations
is to “counter challenges to the legitimacy of complaints, accusations, justifications,
and defenses.” While Jess is succeeding in countering the lane-change as
a potential accusation she uses it against herself (and to some extent the father
and daughter) in its outcome. Were they to go home Jess would be the one who
stands to lose most by this action since it is her trip. Her directive is thus also
analyzable in terms of how it affects those in the car differently. Clearly for the
husband and daughter there is only a limited loss because it is not really their
trip that is being given up. It is Jess as the primary carer for the grandmother
who would suffer were her directive to be acted upon by Steve. We can imagine
the atmosphere on the journey home should he have taken her at her word.
What Steve does is to mark a repair with no no (line 75 above). This is a
repair that then attends to Jess having taken his lane-change as abandoning her
directions, giving up on her as a navigator and, of course, an accusation that
she had been wrong all along. Once he has the floor: I’ll go left and back round
(2.0) Yeah. Coz then you’ll have lights in your favor won’t ya (line 77 in the
transcript excerpt 6). Steve is able to repair the sense of the lane change from a
criticism of Jess’ directions to being about doing a road maneuver that allows
What it means to change lanes  131
them to take the right after all. There is a marvelous adjustment in what then
follows to a more explicit support and encouragement of Jess in the switch
from I to you in saying the traffic lights will be in your favor (line 80 below).
It is striking because it combines helping Jess to see the good side of having to
do an extra maneuver with simultaneously handing agency for the journey
back to Jess by switching from I to you. Should Jess come back at this point
Steve will return to being merely the driver again, following directions. Because
the car is at rest he is also able to turn to Jess to pursue a response:
(8)
Jess shows her understanding of having been made responsible for the journey
again by restating why she has asked them to make this trip in the first place
and indeed placing that responsibility outside of her direct desires by waving
the envelope. The envelope that contains the list of items lost between the hospitals
and that has indeed been the reason for the journey.
As we leave the family sitting at the traffic lights in London let us remind
ourselves of the short journey we have taken with them. We have revisited how
we read signs, treating looking at them as an action that is thoroughly interwoven
with the unfolding of sequences of other actions. A sign is looked for
by the driver, at a certain point it is found and at that point it provides a basis
for his next move. More centrally to the issues here we have seen how route
132  E. Laurier et al.
epistemics shift from certainty to uncertainty to a bare recall of actions accomplished
( but we did ) in the ongoing inspection of the road environment. This
gives us the grounds to understand aspects of the particularities of the car as a
device for seeing from and being propelled by. In its movement it generates
projectable sequences of the environment ahead and behind. If we compare it
to how we can move through a city as pedestrians or as a passenger on a bus
these are quite distinct. Indeed the most dramatic contract would be with the
orienteer in an open landscape with not even a path to follow. Finally we have
here a small yet rich instance of the accountability of a driver’s actions when
collaborating with a passenger who is also a family member.
4.	 Conclusion
To return to our opening arguments around the nature of navigating the familiar
by those who are also familiar to each other, we can begin to see that Ingold
(2000), while providing a valuable critique of cognitive psychology, perhaps
starts to miss the human relationships lived out in wayfinding. Moreover that
there may also still be navigational puzzles that remain even in familiar territories.
What we have been reminded of in the episode, and which is central to
this article, is that wayfinding often fails although in a manner that is not cataclysmic.
We think we know how to get from the supermarket to the train station
but find ourselves stuck in a dead end. We are happily driving along a
country road toward our favorite picnic site when we realize we have driven
past it. We take the usual route to work forgetting that it is closed because of
roadworks. Even when we are alone we may start cursing ourselves or shouting
aloud about the absurdity of the road system. With our loved ones, as we
noted when we began, this can easily descend into angry recriminations, but
often will not.
In an article on family arguments Goodwin (2006) shows to useful ends for
those who continue to assume the omnirelevance of the car as a space for interaction
within it how the fact that people are in a car on a journey has limited
relevance to the matter at hand:
For parties involved in the dispute, faced with the task of building, sustaining, and arguing
for their positions, while countering the proposals of others, the detailed structure of
the talk in progress is a far more relevant and consequential environment for action than
the SUV they are sitting in, the freeway, and the landscape that is passing by. (Goodwin
2006: 449)
In the larger project out of which this article arises (Laurier et al. 2007) there
are numerous incidences where this is indeed the case. In fact, the time spent
What it means to change lanes  133
in conversations that arise out of, and are related to, driving and the journey is
greatly outweighed by other matters. However these situations still do occur
regularly enough and are of great consequence because so much of the r­esearch
on way-finding on foot or in the car appears to excise it from the social units
and activities in which it is embedded. In contrast to Goodwin’s analysis the
journey here is relevant to and provides a resource for the task of building,
sustaining, and arguing for positions. As we have seen, the movement of the
car itself plays a key role in the argumentative and discursive moves underway.
What we have also opened up in the article is the place of affect in wayfinding,
which is again perhaps surprisingly overlooked given the likely emotional
contours of getting lost and the disputatious possibilities of direction-seeking
and direction-giving. Jack Katz (1999) in his sociological study of the emotions
opened up in the moments of rage between drivers and other drivers on
the road, laying out the affective qualities of actions such as tailgating and how
they lead to outbursts on the roads of Los Angeles. Here we take that emotional
life of driving inside the car. As Katz noted, although emotions rise up and
overwhelm us with their violence, there is a logic to their occurrence. What we
have sought to do here is show how the known-in-common grammars of the
emergence, rise, and fall of distress helps the parties involved in the situation
both try to head them-off or calm them down. If and when someone does get
upset over the trouble during wayfinding, their degree of dismay can also be
considered as reasonable or not in terms of the circumstances of their arousal.
If we consider emotion as situated then we are taking the reverse perspective
on Austin’s felicitous conditions. For Austin, these were the many conditions
that had to be in place before a speech act such as “I bet” could be felicitous in
accomplishing its action. Here our play is instead upon whether there are conditions
in place that justify felicity or infelicity. However, as Cavell (2005)
points out there is no necessary link between conditions and feelings as there
was with conditions and speech acts. When we are in the realm of the passions,
any conditions for success of an emotional act, such as “I must declare myself
(explicitly or implicitly) to have standing with you ( be appropriate) in the
given case” (Cavell 2005: 181) can be denied, questioned, dismissed or postponed.
That this does not happen in the situation we have looked at is because
the mother and father affirm their standing with one another. It is in its own
small way, and if only for a short while, a happy ending.
Note
* We acknowledge the UK Economic Social Research Council, our project participants in “Habitable
Cars,” an invaluable data session with LINT in Gothenberg 2010, and Pentti Haddington,
Maurice Nevile, and Tiina Keisanen for helping us get back inside the car again.
134  E. Laurier et al.
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Eric Laurier ( b. 1968) is a senior lecturer in geography and interaction at University of Edinburgh
〈eric.laurier@ed.ac.uk〉. His research interests include visual aspects of interaction, public space,
mobility, and technology. His publications include “The spectacular showing: Houdini and the
wonder of ethnomethodology” (2004); “Putting the dog back in the park: animal and human mindin-action”
(with R. Maze & J. London, 2006); and “Rotating maps and readers: praxiological
­aspects of alignment and orientation” (with B. Brown, 2008).
Barry Brown ( b. 1972) is an associate professor at Mobile Life 〈barry@mobilelifecentre.org〉. His
research interests include technology, ethnomethodology, interaction, and human computer interaction.
His publications include “Place as a practical concern of mobile workers” (with K. O’Hara,
2003); “Unpacking the television: studies of a changing technology” (with L. Barkhuus, 2009);
and “Experts at play: Understanding skilled expertise” (with S. Reeves & E. Laurier, 2009).
Hayden Lorimer ( b. 1971) is a senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow 〈hlorimer@ges.gla.
ac.uk〉. His research interests include landscape, mobility, humans, and animals. His publications
include “Herding memories of humans and animals” (2006); and “Forces of nature, forms of life:
calibrating ethology and phenomenology” (2010).