Adam Kendon (4 April 1934 – 14 September 2022) was one of the world's foremost authorities on the topic of gesture, which he viewed broadly as meaning all the ways in which humans use visible bodily action in creating utterances including not only how this is done in speakers but also in the way it is used in speakers or signers when only visible bodily action is available for expression.
[1] At the University of Oxford, he studied Experimental Psychology, focusing on the temporal organization of utterances in conversation, using Eliot Chapple's chronography.
Important influences on his theoretical understandings included: Erving Goffman, Albert Scheflen, Ray Birdwhistell, and Gregory Bateson.
[3][4] Becoming aware of Scheflen's work in 1965, while still at Oxford, he managed to meet him in Philadelphia, where he shared his earliest work; as a result, he was first invited to join William S. Condon's research team at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic in 1966-67, and then to join Scheflen's research team at Bronx State Hospital in 1967.
He undertook filming everyday interaction in Papua New Guinea but also was able to record a sign language in use in the valley where he worked where there was a considerable number of deaf persons.
[6] His publication of this work, in three articles in 1980,[7][8][9] proved to be a pioneering study; no other accounts on sign language from this part of the world were to appear until the beginning of the twenty-first century.
[22] In 2016, Frederick Erickson interviewed Kendon about his techniques for analyzing both videotapes and live interaction for the conference “Learning how to look and listen: Building capacity for video-based transcription and analysis in social and educational research;” the videos of their conversations have been made publicly available.