(Salle F106)
Büscher, Monika
(Lancaster University, Lancaster)
Embodied conduct in emergency teamwork
Emergency situations demand fast, effective collaboration between
diverse actors. Police, fi re services, and medical personnel need to
secure the scene, create access routes and ensure they are kept free,
categorise, treat and transport victims, handle hazardous materials
or deal with contamination, and coordinate work with emergency
service personnel in emergency vehicles, dispatch centres, and hospitals.
Communication is crucial, but often diffi cult under immense
time pressure, in extremely complex and often very dangerous settings.
On the scene, embodied conduct plays an important role. The
victims embodied action (or inaction) allows response teams to
quickly understand, and to react fl exibly to changes in, the situation,
while the embodied conduct of emergency personnel their
movements, orientations, gestures, facial expressions in relation to
often chaotic and in themselves highly expressive spatial, material
and technological forms of embodied conduct is a crucial resource
for effective collaboration. Based on ethnographic observations with
emergency service professionals during training exercises for major
incidents, I present an analysis of embodied conduct in emergency
teamwork.
