Pursuing understanding or engaging the patient? “Making the body speak” as a dilemma-overcoming practice in triadic primary care visits with unaccompanied foreign minors

This chapter reports findings from a single-case study on primary care visits involving a general practitioner (GP), three unaccompanied foreign minors (UFMs) with low competence in the language of the visit, and two professional educators in charge of them. Adopting a conversation analysis-informed approach, we illustrate a communicative practice deployed by the GP: “making the body speak”. Through this practice, the physician makes his own or the UFMs’ body multimodally relevant as an ostensibly available and intersubjectively sharable counterpart of words. The analysis shows that this practice is deployed to scaffold UFM patients in reporting their medical history. We advance that, through this recipient-designed practice, the GP overcomes the dilemma of gathering information vs. acknowledging UFMs’ identity as competent patients despite the linguistic gap