About

Morana Alač is a Professor in Communication and Science Studies at UC San Diego. She conducts ethnographic research of scientific laboratories and other settings of technology production and use, focusing on multimodal and multisensory aspects of ordinary interactional practice. Her areas of interest include ethnomethodology, interaction with technology, gesture, multimodality, and the senses. She holds a Ph.D. in Semiotics from the University of Bologna (2002) and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from UC San Diego (2006). Her work explores how social interactions are mediated through sensory and technological engagement, with a particular emphasis on the bodily and environmental continuities in laboratory settings, the sociality of robots and digital interactions, and the semiotic processes involved in scientific and everyday practices.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Psychology
• Philosophy
• Cognitive science
• Aesthetics
• Epistemology
• Neuroscience
• Social Science
• Communication
• Social psychology
• History
• Anthropology

Selected publications

• On body-environment continuities from a laboratory commensalism

  Social Studies of Science · 2022 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Social Science
  • Computer Science

  The article attends to everyday practices in a laboratory of neural genetics that studies olfaction, with the fruit fly as its model organism. Practices in neural genetics exhibit one of the 'post' aspects in post-genomic science - a turn to the environment. To get at how laboratory members engage body-environment continuities, I pay attention to an occasion of designing experimental chambers for an optogenetics study. As practitioners deal with the body's continuities with the world by engaging the spatial character of olfaction, their accounts exhibit qualities of feelings of immediate experience, relatable to C.S. Peirce's phenomenological category of Firstness. While these traces of Firstness inevitably manifest themselves in mixtures with the other two of Peirce's categories - namely, Secondness and Thirdness - noticing them allows for an engagement of the environment that goes beyond action and meaning. I reflect on that environment by considering the involvement of scientists' bodies in life with flies, while not forgetting my inhabitation of the laboratory space. Rather than relying on a cross-mapping of attributes known from the human sphere (intentional states or features of the human body) while managing a measurable space observed from the outside, this is an environment lived from within and with others. I conclude the article by proposing its noticing as an orientation toward ecological preoccupations.

  PublisherDOI

• Parler à un grille-pain

  Signata · 2021-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  L’intensification des discussions sur la relation problématique entre l’intelligence artificielle (IA) et la société est récente. Néanmoins, ces discussions restent partielles tant qu’elles ne tiennent pas compte de la façon dont nous vivons les technologies propres à l’IA, notamment dans des situations banales qui concernent nos activités quotidiennes. En considérant l’importance d’une telle prise de conscience, cet article se concentre sur l’Internet des objets, ainsi que sur les assistants personnels intelligents (DVA pour digital voice assistant) qui lui sont associés. Dans une perspective commerciale, ces robots sociaux sont conçus comme des dispositifs qui se basent sur la conversation, et qui manifestent une incomplétude à travers le besoin d’autres voix pour compléter cette conversation. En considérant une dimension relationnelle et incarnée de la conversation, une analyse peut faire apparaître notre implication dans des situations de production interactionnelle, tout en manifestant le caractère réciproque de la conversation. Il ne s’agit pas seulement de remettre en question la conviction des concepteurs de DVA, selon laquelle ces gadgets génèrent des effets de présence qui sont en relation avec un esprit intentionnel, mais il s’agit aussi, en parallèle, de résister à un retour à l’individu, qu’on remarque plus souvent dans les débats sur la relation problématique entre l’IA et la société. Nous pratiquons cette résistance en évoquant les efforts qui concernent la cognition distribuée (distributed cognition) et l’hypothèse de l’esprit étendu (extended mind), mais nous dépassons également la portée du raisonnement instrumentaliste, qui comprend principalement le monde par le truchement d’outils pouvant étendre nos capacités cognitives. Ainsi, nous contestons la rationalisation de notre usage de ces technologies en termes d’efficience et de commodité, et proposons une observation plus proche de l’engagement situé avec les dispositifs vocaux d’IA, considéré en tant que mode d’intervention.

  PublisherDOI

• Beyond intersubjectivity in olfactory psychophysics II: Troubles with the Object

  Social Studies of Science · 2020 · 8 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Psychology
  • Aesthetics

  This article takes advantage of the sense of smell's peculiar spatiality to reflect on how we may render our engagement with the world other than through manipulating well-defined objects. The lived spatiality associated with olfaction is not reducible to the known parameters of 'distant observation' and 'reaching toward', familiar from the visual and tactile modalities. Instead, olfactory spatiality is one of immersion: Odors ask us to give up our dominance while we continue to be involved. The article attends to this immersive quality of the sense of smell by tracing multimodal, embodied qualities of mundane events in a laboratory of olfactory psychophysics, also considering the spatial organization of laboratory chambers, and how researchers fashion their bodies while they recognize the frailty of their enterprise. To engage these complexities, the article illustrates an exercise in experimenting with re-production, re-enactment and re-experiencing. While the exercise functions as a reflection on how to orient a laboratory study to non-ocular dimensions of science, the article, in parallel, enquires into semiotic articulations of smell experiences. By pointing out how smell language, rather than being 'mute', speaks the spatial quality of our olfactory experiences, it concludes the argument against the olfactory ineffability, initiated in the sister essay on 'troubles with the Subject'.

  PublisherDOI

• Beyond intersubjectivity in olfactory psychophysics I: Troubles with the Subject

  Social Studies of Science · 2020 · 9 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Computer Science
  • Psychology

  This article provides an experience-oriented relational account that goes beyond a human control of the world. Rather than working with the notion of intersubjectivity (commonly evoked in sensory STS, and still conserving the subject/object opposition), the article reports on how the sense of smell affords a rethinking of our relationship with the world. It does so by challenging the assumption of olfactory ineffability as it turns to a place whose inhabitants speak about smell as a part of their everyday affairs: a laboratory of olfactory psychophysics. There, we attend to a multimodal, embodied language that participates in preparing, running and analyzing scientific experiments. While Western languages are short on specialized vocabulary for expressing olfactory qualities and it feels difficult to talk about smell, laboratory events manifest smell language in its enmeshing with the sensory realm and the world. Noticing these ties destabilizes the idea of agential subject, highlighting instead our pre-intentional sensibility, in its connection with the world. A sister article on ‘troubles with the Object’ (Alač, 2020) continues to argue that the notion of intersubjectivity is overly narrow, highlighting our immersion in the world (rather than assuming our dominance of it).

  PublisherDOI

• Ethnomethodology, video analysis, and STS

  ArODES (HES-SO (https://www.hes-so.ch/)) · 2017-01-01 · 12 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDF

• We like to talk about smell: A worldly take on language, sensory experience, and the Internet

  Semiotica · 2017-01-01 · 9 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Western languages have been marked by their lack of specialized vocabulary to express odor qualities, and thus it is stated that it is difficult – if not impossible – to talk about smell. To engage the issue of olfactory ineffability, this paper turns to actual instances of textual renderings of smell by paying attention to how the olfactory language of scent enthusiasts is rendered on the Internet. The methods that enthusiasts’ texts inscribe do not rely on specialized vocabulary but constitute a language that is

  PublisherDOI

• Zeigt auf den Roboter und schüttelt dessen Hand. Intimität als situativ gebundene interaktionale Unterstützung von Humantechnologien

  MEDIAREP · 2016-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Der Beitrag behandelt die Rolle von Intimität in Zusammenhang mit digitalen Medien anhand einer ethnografischen Studie im Bereich sozialer Robotik. Intimität betrifft in den Laboren der sozialen Robotik die situierte Unterstützung von Technologien mit ‹sozialen› Aufgaben. Es wird gezeigt, wie Roboter als soziale Objekte eingeführt werden und wie sie über diesen Prozess eine eigene agency erhalten – indem sie multimodal und multisensorisch mit menschlichen Akteuren interagieren. Grundlage der Studie sind Videoaufnahmen dieser Roboter im alltäglichen Einsatz. So wird gezeigt, auf welchen sensorischen Ebenen diese Interaktion stattfindet, insbesondere in der Koordination von Gesten, Rede, Körperorientierung, taktiler Interaktion, räumlicher Organisation und der Anordnung von Dingen und menschlichen Körpern in diesen spezifischen Laborsituationen. Diese Vorstellung von Intimität wird kontrastiert mit Mensch-Roboter-Anordnungen, in denen die Interaktion über den Blick, also distanziert, organisiert ist, was häufig in Gewalt oder Spektakularisierung resultiert. Der Beitrag zeigt, wie soziale Roboter in konkreten Begegnungen mit Menschen eingebunden sind und wie sich das auf Konzepte wie Selbst und agency auswirkt.

  PublisherDOI

• Social robots: Things or agents?

  AI & Society · 2015-11-07 · 95 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Grounding a Sociable Robot’s Movements in Multimodal, Situational Engagements

  Lecture notes in computer science · 2014-01-01 · 4 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Digital Scientific Visuals as Fields for Interaction

  The MIT Press eBooks · 2014-01-24 · 12 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter analyzes the digital materiality of scientific visuals by examining how brain images displayed on screens are manipulated and coordinated with talk and embodied gesture in neuroscience research. Drawing upon detailed fieldwork and video analysis in an fMRI laboratory, the chapter shows how brain images function as diagrammatic signs that laboratory researchers deploy in situated, multimodal interactions. By recasting brain images as integral parts of the semiotic and interactional production of research, the chapter shows how such visuals provide an interface between digital screens and lived bodies in the everyday work of science.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• A Laboratory Study of the Problematic Relations between Olfactory Experiences and Language

  NSF · $206k · 2016–2020

Frequent coauthors

• Javier R. Movellan

  University of California, San Diego

  5 shared

• Fumihide Tanaka

  University of Tsukuba

  3 shared

• Ayşe Pınar Saygın

  Hacettepe University

  3 shared

• Karen Emmorey

  San Diego State University

  2 shared

• Edwin Hutchins

  University of California, San Diego

  2 shared

• Lisa Cartwright

  University of California, San Diego

  2 shared

• Stephen McCullough

  San Diego State University

  2 shared

• Mohsen Malmir

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• 2013 Book Award, Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis…