WORKSHOP: A Planning Workshop for Training in Anthropological Discourse Analysis

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

Dr. Barbra Meek (University of Michigan) and Dr. Susan Philips (University of Arizona) will convene a planning workshop to develop a training program in anthropological methods of discourse analysis for documenting and analyzing social interactions. Discourse analysis is particularly valued in studies of the way ideas emerge, circulate and are transformed in the interactional process and in studies of the nature and organization of interpretive diversity. Cultural anthropologists are increasingly turning to discourse analysis as a form of data analysis that will give them insight into the nature of culture. Similarly, linguists are increasingly turning to discourse analysis as a method that will help them analyze socially embedded linguistic practices. This two-day workshop, to be held in the Spring of 2012, will bring together linguists and anthropologists skilled in discourse analysis to discuss the best pedagogical practices for teaching how to do discourse analysis and the logistics necessary for carrying out the training program, which will be held initially in conjunction with the Summer 2013 Linguistics Institute at the University of Michigan, which is organized by the Linguistic Society of America. Training in anthropological discourse analysis will ultimately provide cultural and linguistic anthropologists, sociolinguists, and others with useful methodological tools that will strengthen the overall scientific merit of the research they conduct. The project will stimulate linguistic anthropologists to speak and write about method more and to share their analytic approach with those disciplines with which linguistic anthropology engages in methodological discussions. The workshop will also provide an important opportunity for interdisciplinarity and collaboration between scholars in Anthropology and Linguistics.