Risk communicators recognize the importance of non-verbal communication in the elicitation of what stakeholders know and in the construction of risk messages, but they have not investigated how viewpoint and gesture function in cross-cultural institutional contexts of risk. Analysis of gesture in real-time workplace interactions shows that individuals employ gesture to represent spatial and temporal properties of experience not possible in speech alone (cf. McNeill & Duncan, 2000). Viewpoint is a critical feature of gestural representations in the workplace. The ability to move flexibly between analytic and local perspectives is necessary if individuals are to move into positions of authority (Sauer, 2003; cf. McNeill, 1992). Gestures may contribute to confusion, however, if the semantic content of speech and gesture conflicts or if the gestural viewpoint cannot be reconciled with workers' embodied experience (cf. Alibali & Goldin-Meadow 1993) and cultural background. The problem is particularly acute in South African mines where linguistic facility (in English or Afrikans) often provides the sole measure of workplace competence. Differences in gestural viewpoint and unscripted communication practices create conflicting and inaccurate risk messages that confuse workers during safety training and increase the potential for disaster (Sauer, forthcoming). These findings raise questions about the cultural and institutional dimensions of gesture in cross-cultural risk communication: What factors determine viewpoint and how do differences encoded in language and gesture impact on comprehension? What do these differences reveal, more generally, about the cultural dimensions of spatial and temporal understanding in cross- cultural communication in the context of risk?
The project has five objectives: (1) identify gestural forms and their relation to speech in previously collected data from SA coal mine safety training programs; (2) determine how viewpoint is related to speaker's prescribed and assumed roles in the interaction; (3) determine whether differences in gestural form, meaning, and viewpoint affect levels of understanding; (4) determine the extent to which different levels of understanding reflect differences in language, culture, education, institutional experience, and/or other paralinguistic and contextual factors of safety training; (5) draw conclusions about the role of gestural viewpoint and gesture as a communicative feature of specialized technical (risk) discourses and its implications for risk communication and related disciplines in multi- cultural environments. Using participant-centered methods, experts in gestural analysis, rhetoric, mining, and South African languages will (1) work with local informants to describe, analyze, and compare gestural meaning and viewpoint in video taped communicative interactions of mine safety programs across cultural and institutional dimensions (trainers, translators, and miners) and (2) elicit communicative representations of sites of communicative difficulty in cohorts of ten across each of the hypothesized parameters of difference: education v. uneducated, Afrikaans v. Zulu, and institutionally experienced v. inexperienced.
This study will help improve cross-cultural risk communication in conditions of profound technical uncertainty where language barriers prevent social and economic transformation and create the potential for disaster. The research also has more general implications for engineering and science education where individuals do not share similar languages or culture
