Document use constitutes a pervasive feature of institutions (see Gitelman, 2014; Riles, 2006), being treated and mobilized by professionals and clients as central resources for obtaining knowledge on bureaucratic procedures as well on clients' particular situations (see Zimmermann, 1969). Within the complex material ecologies organizing encounters between social workers and citizens seeking institutional support, the ways in which documents are requested, searched for, transferred, inspected and talked about pose important practical challenges to the participants (see Monteiro, 2019, 2021). The present study proposes a detailed analysis of how documents are managed in Social Work encounters, grounded on a corpus of video recordings of Social Work encounters (20 hours approx.) organized in diverse institutions in Portugal, between speakers of European Portuguese, and proceeding within the framework of multimodal Conversation Analysis (see Mondada, 2018), investigating the situated, moment-by-moment production of social interaction by examining the sequential organization of participants' audible and visible conduct. In the analysis, I focus on two main tasks whereby participants treat documents and written texts as interactionally-relevant for obtaining knowledge and providing information on bureaucratic procedures – requesting clients' documents or for documenting their case, or explaining them how to carry out specific courses of prescribed action by highlighting visible features of written texts –, showing how they are organized through the mobilization of linguistic and bodily resources, as well as object use and, moreover, how they are treated by participants as are crucial and consequential for adequately obtaining and information. This study aims to contribute to the study of document use in institutional interaction (see Day & Mortensen, 2020; Day & Wagner, 2019) and, more specifically, its relevance for the exercise of Social Work practice (see Birk, 2017; Scholar, 2016). Moreover, it aims to investigate how documents are treated by participants as complex sources of knowledge, i.e. as bureaucratic artifacts and as textual and material objects, by focussing on the multimodal organization of participants' practices for requesting, retrieving, inspecting and showing documents.
