This path-breaking collection of papers is a major step into a new era of studies of situated and embodied social interaction. Rather than looking at talk only, or single activities among participants, the authors describe how interactional multiactivities – when participants do more than one thing at the same time – are combined and coordinated in different ways in situations with multiple demands. Some papers go on to identify general types of multiactivities, with regard to sequentiality, dominant vs subordinated constituent activities, etc. At the same time, readers are ushered into sophisticated video-based analyses of interaction that look at the full multimodal (linguistic and bodily) complexity of these multiactivities in their physical and social circumstances. The authors have established themselves as leading experts in this new area of interaction studies.

- Per Linell, Linköping University & Göteborg University,

This important collection takes research on collective human action from the singular interaction to the interaction of interactions. Through a series of careful studies it shows people to be artful jugglers of their courses of action. Artful because people are able to suspend, accelerate, reverse, interrupt and adjust the actions that they have up in the air. Scholars of cognition, sociology and linguistic will delight in the findings and surprises delivered by this book.

- Eric Laurier, University of Edinburgh,