Spring 2013 Visiting Scholar: Dr. Maarit Siromaa, University of Oulu, Finland

Maarit Siromaa is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oulu, Finland. She is a visiting scholar in the Department of Sociology at UW-Madison in April-May 2013. Maarit wrote her dissertation on Resonance in Storytelling, examining the recurrent, situated verbal, prosodic and embodied practices of stance taking in conversational stories. Maarit currently works as a researcher in an Academy of Finland funded project Social Action Formats: Linguistic, Prosodic and Embodied Practices in Spoken English and Finnish. Her postdoctoral project deals with the everyday interactional resources and practices of colleague support. She is also interested in the way in which people move in and out of various interactional situations at the workplace. In her research, she mainly draws on the methodology of Conversation Analysis and Ethnography.

Spring 2013 Visiting Scholar: Joseane de Souza, University of Vale do Rio dos Sinos, Brazil

 

Joseane de Souza is a PhD student at University of Vale do Rio dos Sinos, in São Leopoldo, Brazil. During the Spring 2013 semester she is a visiting scholar in the Department of Sociology at UW-Madison. Josie comes from an Applied Linguistics Department in Brazil. She and her research group, directed by professor Dr. Ana Cristina Ostermann, investigate doctor-patient consultations from a talk-in-interaction point of view, with emphasis on Conversation Analysis, Ethnomethodology and also Ethnography. Her ongoing research is about interaction between women with breast cancer and oncologists, and she is particularly interested in the delicacy involved (or not) in the expressions of feelings and concerns by these patients and how the doctors respond to them.

Previous studies by both Josie and the research group she is part of have been published (in Portuguese) in the recent book Humanization. Gender: Power. The Contribution of Talk-In-Interaction Studies to Health, edited by Ostermann and Meneghel  (Mercado de Letras, 2012). 

Here is the link to the article Contributions by Conversation Analysis to healthcare studies: 

reflections based on patients' attributions, in co-authorship with Ana Ostermann:

http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-311X2009000700010

And for interactional demands in calls to a government health helpline and their relations with prescribed work, which looks at how operators of a helpline in Brazil interact with women seeking guidance related to their health:

 http://seer.fclar.unesp.br/alfa/article/view/4171/3769

"The Co-Operative Organization of Human Action", A lecture by Charles Goodwin (UCLA). April 11

2012-13 Lecture Series: Language, Cognition and Sociality

The Co-Operative Organization of Human Action

Charles Goodwin
Applied Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles

Comments from Mitchell Nathan, Department of Educational Psychology

4:00 pm, Thursday, April 11, 2013
254 Van Hise Hall, 1220 Linden Drive

Abstract: Human action is built by actively and simultaneously combining materials with intrinsically different properties into situated contextual configurations where they can mutually elaborate each other to create a whole that is both different from, and greater than, any of its constitutive parts. These resources include many different kinds of lexical and syntactic structures, prosody, gesture, embodied participation frameworks, sequential organization, and different kinds of materials in the environment, including tools created by others that structure local perception. The simultaneous use of different kinds of resources to build single actions has a number of consequences. First, different actors can contribute different kinds of materials that are implicated in the construction of a single action. For example embodied visual displays by hearers operate simultaneously on emerging talk by a speaker so that both the utterance and the turn have intrinsic organization that is both multi-party and multimodal. Someone with aphasia who is unable to produce lexical and syntactic structure can nonetheless contribute crucial prosodic and sequential materials to a local action, while appropriating the lexical contributions of others, and thus become  a powerful speaker in conversation, despite catastrophically impoverished language. One effect of this simultaneous, distributed heterogenity is that frequently the organization of action cannot be easily equated with the activities of single individuals, such as the person speaking at the moment, or with phenomena within a single medium such as talk. Second, subsequent action is frequently built through systematic transformations of the different kinds of materials provided by a prior action. In this process some elements of the prior contextual configuration, such as the encompassing participation framework, may remain unchanged, while others undergo significant modification. A punctual perspective on action, in which separate actions discretely follow one another, thus becomes more complex when action is seen to emerge within an unfolding mosaic of disparate materials and time frames which make possible not only systematic change, but also more enduring frameworks that provide crucial continuity.  Third, the distributed, compositional structure of action provides a framework for developing the skills of newcomers within structured collaborative action. Fourth, human tools differ from the tools of other animals in that, like actions in talk, they are built by combining unlike materials into a whole not found in any of the individual parts (for example using a stone, a piece of wood and leather thongs to make an ax). This same combinatorial heterogenity sits at the heart of human action in interaction, including language use. It creates within the unfolding organization of situated activity itself the distinctive forms of transformative collaborative action in the world, including socially organized perceptual and cognitive structures and the mutual alignment of bodies to each other, which constitutes us as humans.
This lecture is free and open to the public. Sponsored by the Language Institute, with funding from the Anonymous Fund. For more information or accommodations, contact: Dianna Murphy, (608) 262-1473.

 

Christina Higgins to visit UW, February 20th

Christina Higgins (Associate Professor, Second Language Studies, University of Hawaii)

An alum of English Language and Linguistics will be offering a lecture on

“Multilingual Swahili: Language play, double voices, and re-entextualization practices”

Wednesday, February 20, 2013 

4:00-5:30 

Room (206 Ingraham Hall)

Dr. Higgins is a highly productive, interdisciplinary scholar. Her work spans theoretical and methodological innovation as well as engaged and applied linguistic action. Here is how she describes herself on her website:
 I am a sociolinguist who is interested in multilingual practices, globalization, and identity. In my research projects, I have drawn on discourse analytic, ethnographic, and qualitative approaches to study various facets of the global spread of English, Swahili variation, and multilingual identities. Geographically, I have focused much of my research on East Africa, where I have studied language in the workplace, the intersection of popular culture and multilingualism, and HIV/AIDS education sponsored by non-governmental organizations. Much of this work is synthesized in my recent book, English as a Local Language: Post-colonial Identities and Multilingual Practices (Multilingual Matters, 2009).

On December 1, 2009, Language and HIV/AIDS (co-edited with Bonny Norton, Multilingual Matters) became available. This edited volume focuses on the social and discursive construction of local and global knowledge in educational efforts meant to prevent the spread of HIV.

My research in Tanzania also includes a recent study on the development of intercultural identities among expatriate transnational Swahili speakers. The study is featured in my most recent book, Identity Formation in Globalizing Contexts (Mouton de Gruyter, 2011). This edited volume addresses identity construction among multilinguals in the context of new millennium globalization and includes studies from Tanzania, France, Hong Kong, England, Canada, and the United States.

I have also been exploring the sociolinguistics of multilingualism and language awareness in Hawai'i through various collaborative projects, including a videoethnographic project with high school students on the Leeward Coast of O'ahu (Higgins et al, forthcoming). Be sure to check out the documentary on youtube Ha Kam Wi Tawk Pidgin Yet? that the students produced when asked to explain why Pidgin is still spoken in Hawai'i, despite all the negative attitudes towards the language. This project includes a website with a Teacher's Guide and language awareness materials on Hawai'i Creole for high school language arts and social studies classrooms. Also see Da Pidgin Toolkit, a short claymation film that teaches newcomers to Hawai'i essential Pidgin vocabulary (e.g., da kine, ono, choke) in a creative way. To explain more about the history and development of Pidgin, I produced Pidgin: How was . . . how stay at the Hawai'i Plantation Village Museum in Waipahu, on the island of O'ahu. This is a permanent exhibit that explains how Pidgin came about on plantations and that documents the importance of the language to Hawaii's past and present.

I teach graduate level courses in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, English and globalization, intercultural communication, and qualitative research methodology.He