With a background in the language and cognitive sciences, I employ a multimodal analytical approach, informed by ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, to investigate social interactions across diverse settings. I am particularly interested in complex ecologies of action that enable the observation of how participants’ make sense of their material environment through embodied interaction, sensoriality, and lived experiences of disabilities. 

I completed my PhD in general psychology in 2021 with a dissertation contrasting EMCA’s situated, interactionally grounded understanding of action and embodiment with the methodological individualism (i.e., the assumption that the individual mind-body is the default locus of action) that still dominates the so-called embodied cognitive sciences, including the language sciences. My doctoral research drew on a novel corpus of videorecorded advanced sport-climbing training sessions involving visually impaired athletes and their sight-guides and analyzed a range of multimodal interactional practices for sensing and navigating the material layout of climbing routes. 

Between 2021 and 2024, I worked at the University of Bologna (Italy) as an adjunct professor and postdoctoral researcher, focusing on interactions in institutional settings such as clinical encounters involving patients with limb amputations in a prosthetics clinic, and guide-dog handover programmes with blind clients (data collected by Dr. Chloé Mondémé, CNRS – ENS de Lyon, France). In 2024, I joined the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano within the EU-funded project Children’s interactional competence at school: conversational social norms, participation forms and language structures (ChICaS), where I explored small-group activities among children in primary school classrooms.

I joined this Institute in October 2025 as a postdoctoral researcher on the SNF-funded project Everybody Speaks About the Weather (https://data.snf.ch/grants/grant/10001010; PI: Prof. Lorenza Mondada).

AREAS OF RESEARCH

social interaction; ethnomethodology; conversation analysis; multimodality; complex ecologies; embodiment; sensoriality; disability; weather

– Selected research outputs –

PUBLICATIONS

Veronesi, D. & Simone, M. (2025). Primary school children and cooperative interaction: Recruitments and offers of assistance in small-group activities. Ricerche di Pedagogia e Didattica 20(2), 53-76. https://doi.org/10.60923/issn.1970-2221/22544

Simone, M., Mondémé, C., & Galatolo, R. (2025). Becoming a co-operating pair: Blind trainees learning to interact with their guide dogs. Journal of interactional research in communication disorders 15(3), 269-289. https://doi.org/10.3138/jircd-2024-0016

Margutti, P., Galatolo, R., Simone, M., & Drew, P. (2024). Proposing surgery at the prosthetic clinic: Managing patient resistance. Patient Education and Counseling 129, 108385. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pec.2024.108385

Simone, M., Galatolo, R., & Fasulo, A. (2025). Haptic resources in pain communication: New amputees redirecting doctors’ professional touch at the prosthetic clinic. Health Communication 40(7), 1326-1340. https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2024.2397614

Simone, M., & Galatolo, R. (2023). Du «faire agir autrui» au «faire ensemble» : les instructions comme moyen de soutien du mouvement corporel lors d’entraînements d’escalade avec des athlètes malvoyant.es. Langage et société 179(2), 141-165. https://doi.org/10.3917/ls.179.0140

Simone, M., & Galatolo, R. (2023). The situated deployment of the Italian presentative (e) hai...,‘(and) you have...’ within routinized multimodal Gestalts in route mapping with visually impaired climbers. Discourse Studies 25(1), 89-113. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614456221126320

Simone, M., & Galatolo, R. (2021). Timing and prosody of lexical repetition: How repeated instructions assist visually impaired athletes’ navigation in sport climbing. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 54(4), 397-419. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2021.1974742

Simone, M. (2021). Language, action, and sensoriality: A multimodal analysis of interactions in inclusive sport climbing with visually impaired athletes [Dissertation thesis]. Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna. Doctoral programme “Philosophy, science, cognition, and semiotics” (PSCS). https://doi.org/10.48676/unibo/amsdottorato/9919

Simone, M., & Galatolo, R. (2020). Climbing as a pair: Instructions and instructed body movements in indoor climbing with visually impaired athletes. Journal of Pragmatics, 155, 286-302. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2019.09.008

TALKS AND CONFERENCES

Galatolo, R., Simone, M. & De Stefani, E. (2025). “How did it happen?” The narrative construction of workplace accidents in between institutional purposes and patients’ lifeworld. Paper presented at the conference of the International Association for Dialogue Analysis (IADA), Bologna, 16-19 July 2025.

Veronesi, D. & Simone, M. (2025). Mitigation vs. directness: The modulation of deontic rights in children’s peer-interaction in the classroom. Paper presented at the conference of the International Association for Dialogue Analysis (IADA), Bologna, 16-19 July 2025.

Simone, M. (2024). A conversation analytic perspective on patient-centered healthcare: Two studies on Italian data. Public lecture held at Romanisches Seminar, Heidelberg University, 31 October 2024.

Simone, M. (2023). Models of disability and their effects on how we understand and study paraclimbing. Keynote presented at the 6th conference of the International Rock-Climbing Research Association (IRCRA), Bern, 7-10 August 2023.

Simone, M., Mondémé, C., Galatolo, R. (2023). Repetition and instruction in blind pedestrians training with guide-dogs. Paper presented at the conference of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA), Bruxelles, 9-14 July 2023 

Simone, M. (2023). Investigating the interplay between grammar, the body, and sensoriality in interactions between visually impaired athletes and their sight guides in paraclimbing. Paper presented at the 23rd conference of the Associazione Italiana di Linguistica Applicata (AItLA), Arezzo, 24-26 May 2023.

Simone, M. & Galatolo, R. (2019). Supporting the co-participant's mobility with linguistic resources: the case of guided climbing sessions. Poster presented at the 8th Joint Action Meeting (JAM), Genova, 10-13 July 2019. 

Simone, M. & Galatolo, R. (2019). Dealing with sensory diversity while instructing movement: the case of indoor climbing with blind and partially sighted athletes. Paper presented at the 19th conference of the International Institute for Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (IIEMCA), Mannheim, 2-5 July 2019.

Simone, M. & Galatolo, R. (2018). Climbing as a pair: How sighted coaches and visually impaired athletes coordinate their perception and action in indoor guided climbing training. Poster presented at 7th International Conference on Spatial Cognition (ICSC), Rome, 10-14 September 2018.

Simone, M. & Galatolo, R. (2018). Instruction practices in indoor climbing with blind and partially sighted athletes. Paper presented at the conference of the Association Suisse de Linguistique Appliquée (VALS-ASLA), Basel, 6-8 June 2018.