Advanced Cognitive Ethnography Lab

The ACE-Lab is a hub for state of the art research where empirical approaches to organisational cognition, action and communication are investigated and developed.

Cognitive ethnography links multiple timescales in investigations of human interaction. Descriptions of local coordination pick out distinct events by identifying their enabling conditions, which include factors such as shared attention, sociocultural norms and expertise. An important assumption of cognitive ethnography is that the stuff that makes up the mind can be equally found located within and outside the skin. Cognitive ethnography thus involves integrating data across observations, interviews and exploration of social and material artifacts. Thus, cognitive ethnography is a methodology developed specifically to explore such cognitive processes as distributed.

The lab is concerned with the intersection of applied linguistics, ecological cognition, semiotics, interaction studies, dialogue studies, phenomenology and ethnography where these scientific approaches share a focus on sense-making and co-operative action in natural human interaction in organizational settings.

The lab aims at qualifying empirical methods to the study of human embodied interaction in order to 1) investigate how organization members develop new ideas, manage technical, practical and communicative challenges, collaborative in teams and make decisions and to 2) design functional and empirically tested organizational work environments. The theoretical background for studying such practices is the cognitive video-ethnography approach to micro-analytic studies of human action, cognition and communication.

In total, the lab's overall ambition can be visualised as having four legs, each with a different but interrelated focus.

1. Interdisciplinary Research: Qualifying empirical methods to human interaction and cognition.
2. Local, National and International Network: Establishing and expanding formal networks with scholars in the fields of cognitive video-ethnography and embodied interaction.
3. Organizational Collaborations: Engaging in research collaborations with organizations that benefit from applying cognitive video-ethnography.
4. Education Initiatives: Education and qualification of practitioners with a focus on teaching methods of how to investigate, analyse and design functional and dialogical work practices by applying video-ethnography.