Who we are

Our society brings together gesture researchers working in diverse academic and creative disciplines including anthropology, linguistics, psychology, history, neuroscience, communication, art history, performance studies, computer science, music, theater, and dance.

Gesture studies is a rich interdisciplinary field, broadly concerned with examining the use of the hands and other parts of the body for communicative purposes. Gesture has been found to be indispensable from many arenas of human life, including thought, collaborative work, science, art, music and dance. Engineers seek to build computers that recognize hand-gestures. Cognitive scientists see in them windows into the human mind. Gesture researchers work in diverse academic and creative disciplines including anthropology, linguistics, psychology, history, neuroscience, communication, art history, performance studies, computer science, music, theater, and dance.

Typical research areas include the roles and organization of gesture in face-to-face conversation, universal and cultural aspects of gesture, gesture’s relationship to thought and language, the role of gesture in human evolution and child development, gesture and its relations to other media (multimodality), gesture in the workplace, the evolution of sign languages from gesture.