89

This article explores the microtemporalities that make up interactions, using as its empirical basis a corpus of sound recordings of meetings and telephone exchanges within an intra-hospital palliative care team, collected as part of a sociological and interdisciplinary research project conducted in Portugal. The main theoretical and methodological framework for this exploration is ethnomethodological conversation analysis. Recording and transcribing the work of health and social work professionals enables us to draw up detailed maps of the “swampy lowlands” (Donald Schön) where these professions are practiced, full of irreducible contingencies that practitioners manage in the here-and-now of their professional action, with expertise and skills that tend to escape the radar of work evaluation and organizational management instruments. Along the way, the article develops a discussion that ties in with a metaphor proposed by Bruno Latour, that of the windsurfer, to think about the microtemporal order of situated actions and design the research devices best suited to its study.