Course description:
This course explores the discipline of sociolinguistics, the study of language variation and use, and its application within education settings. Not designed as an advanced sociology or linguistics course. Areas of study include language variation, speech communities, the ethnolography of communication, speech and social identities, and sociolinguistic research related to teaching and learning.
COMM 6470: Meetings, Their Practices and Problems
Professor: Karen Tracy
Time: Monday 3:30-6:00
Place: TBA
Course description:
Meetings are a, if not the, most routinely used communicative form that institutional groups use to accomplish their multiple purposes. Public deliberative groups, teams in workplaces, grassroots social action groups, official political organizations, support-giving institutions: All do work in meetings. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that meeting is what groups are all about. Through meetings groups solve (and create) problems, give information and misinformation, develop and rework policies, make (and remake) decisions, affirm (and dissolve) groupness, and, sometimes, change the world. Meetings are where groups celebrate (and challenge) institutionally important values; they are also routine sites in which individuals display their own power and resist the demands of others. The “having of meetings” is linked to some of society’s most valued ideals—giving voice, fairness, democracy. At the same time meetings are everyone’s favorite thing to hate, occasions to be escaped, complained about, and derogated.
The purpose of this seminar is twofold. A first goal is to develop your familiarity with a disciplinarily diverse and interesting literature about meetings, including influential case studies, a picture of how they came into existence historically, theorizing about their functions and effects, routine communicative practices that occur in them, common interactional troubles, cross-cultural differences, and some of the different expectations about “ideal” meeting conduct. A second goal is for you to carry out a field research project on some specific set of meetings, the scope of which will depend on whether you are an MA or PhD student. In the seminar we will move back and forth between discussion of readings and occasional mini-lectures, and the analysis of tapes and written documents (e.g., minutes, policy documents, virtual discussions) from the meetings that are the foci of people’s different projects. Seminar Prerequisite: Students are expected to have some familiarity with qualitative research methods.
COMM 6740: Power and Control in Organizations
Professor: Stan Deetz
Time: Monday 6:30-9:00
Place: TBA
Course description:
This course is a Ph.D.-level course offered in a seminar format. No specific background is required though both basic organization and communication theory would be helpful. The course focuses on understanding the relations among power, language, social/cultural practices, and the treatment and/or suppression of important conflicts as they relate to the production of individual identities, social knowledge, and decision-making in corporate and community organizations. Most of the attention will be at the micro-level looking at how discourse and concrete practices produce and reproduce relations of power, though larger institutional forces, ideology and society-level discursive formations will be related to these. The readings will include studies investigating the positive forces of member production and the need for control and compliance especially within knowledge-intensive and other organizations with work practices fostering new forms of normative and concertive control. Other readings will discuss the negative side of these new processes and identify systems and practices of inappropriate control and distorted decision-making including detailing the costs of these for people, organizations and host societies.
LING 7900: Language and the Body
Professor: Barbara Fox
Time: TBA
Place: TBA
Course description:
Please contact Prof. Barabara Fox for more information.
