In this article, we demonstrate how participants make use of others’ gazing actions to monitor and engage events in their surroundings. Specifically, we focus on a tension between one sort of gazing action that participants freely join in, “noticing”, and another, “watching”, that is subject to constraints related to participant identities toward a collective and their corresponding rights of membership that include toward what and with whom they may gaze. Employing the method of conversation analysis, we provide a fine-grained examination of differences between the two gazing actions that include movements of the head, body, eyes, and feet, and highlight how these differences provide a resource for differentially orienting to the environment and joining in visually based activities with others.
