Plenary Speakers 2018
Donal carbaugh – University of Massachusetts Amherst
Donal Carbaugh is Professor of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Among his many accomplishments, he is recipient of the University’s highest awards for Outstanding Accomplishments in Research and Creative Activity in addition to the Samuel F. Conti Faculty Research Fellowship; he is also the recipient of teaching awards as a Graduate Mentor and as a finalist for the university’s campus-wide Outstanding Teaching Award. In June of 2017, a conference on New Directions in the Ethnography of Communication was held in his honor at Mount Saint Vincent College, New York City, and in 2016, he was named a Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association (NCA) for a lifetime of achievement. In 2007-2008, he was appointed Fulbright’s Distinguished Professor and Bicentennial Chair of North American Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland. His general interests focus upon cultural philosophies of dialogic communication, the environment, and the ways culturally distinctive practices get woven into international and intercultural interactions. His studies focus upon Native American, popular American, Russian, and Finnish communication practices, with special attention to the relationship between language use, culture, spirit, and nature. He currently serves on about twenty editorial boards of national and international journals. His published research has appeared in many major academic journals, in several countries including China, Finland, Germany, Italy, and Russia, in several languages.
His books include Talking American: Cultural Discourses on DONAHUE, Cultures in Conversation, Reporting Cultures on 60 Minutes (with Michael Berry), and The Handbook of Communication in Cross-cultural Perspective (edited), Distinctive Qualities in Communication Research (with Patrice Buzzanell), Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography, Self and Culture (edited with Jens Brockmeier), and Situating Selves: The Communication of Social Identity in American Scenes. Recipient of a Hewlett Fellowship for Teaching, Fulbright Fellowships, an Advanced Institute of the Humanities Fellowship, several grants, and a consultant for the United States Congress, he has enjoyed lecturing at the United Nations, at various embassies and universities around the globe.
John Heritage – University of California, Los Angeles
John Heritage is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at UCLA, USA. His research focuses on social interaction and its interface with social institutions, with particular reference to medicine and mass communication. His publications include Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology (Polity Press, 1984), Structures of Social Action (co-edited with Max Atkinson, Cambridge University Press, 1984), Talk at Work (co-edited with Paul Drew, Cambridge University Press,1992), The News Interview: Journalists and Public Figures on the Air (with Steven Clayman, Cambridge University Press, 2002), Communication in Medical Care (co-edited with Douglas Maynard, Cambridge University Press, 2006), Talk in Action: Interactions, Identities, and Institutions (with Steven Clayman, Wiley Blackwell, 2010), Enabling human conduct: Studies of talk-in-interaction in honor of Emanuel A. Schegloff (co-edited with Gene Lerner and Geoffrey Raymond, John Benjamins, 2017, At the intersection of turn and sequence: Turn-initial particles across languages (co-edited with Marja-Leena Sorjonen, John Benjamins, 2018), and Harold Garfinkel: Praxis, Social Order and the Ethnomethodology Movement (co-edited with Douglas Maynard, Oxford University Press, 2018).
Susan Philips – University of Arizona
Susan U. Philips is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. She is a linguistic anthropologist. Philips is the author of The Invisible Culture: Communication in Classroom and Community on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation (1984/1993), the co-editor of Language, Gender and Sex in Comparative Perspective (1987), and the author of Ideology in the Language of Judges: How Judges Practice Law, Politics and Courtroom Control (1998).
She has been primarily interested in the way cultural realities are constituted through language use in the process of face to face interaction. Her major research projects on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation, in the Superior Court of Tucson, Arizona, and in the Kingdom of Tonga each entailed a focus on discourse in institutional settings, coupled with comparison of speakers’ use of language in and out of those settings. In her research she relies on the ethnographic method of participant observation and on the recording, transcription, and translation of socially occurring speech. Substantively she has contributed to scholarly research on language ideologies, honorific languages, language and law, gender and language, and language and social inequality. Her current research interests focus on aging and elderly women in retirement communities.
Jürgen Streeck – University of Texas at austin
Jürgen Streeck (Ph.D. in linguistics, Freie Universität Berlin) is a professor of communication studies, anthropology, and Germanic studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He has previously taught at FU Berlin and the Universities of Vienna, Utrecht and Oldenburg. A leading researcher of gesture and embodied interaction, his books include Gesturecraft – The Manu-facture of Meaning (Amsterdam 2009), Embodied Interaction: Language and Body in the Material World (edited with C. Goodwin and C.D. LeBaron, Cambridge 2011), Self-Making Man. A Day of Action, Life, and Language (Cambridge & New York, 2017), and Intercorporeality. Emerging Socialities in Interaction (edited with C. Meyer and J.S. Jordan, Oxford 2017). Jürgen’s conception of the communicating body has evolved step by step in response to questions raised in his data. For example, his view of hand gestures and the bodies making them developed from the observation that speakers look at some of their gestures, but not others; that hand gestures often arise from practical actions and can become intermittent symbolic conventions in a local practice community; that they can anticipate and foreshadow subsequent acts; and that some varieties of gestures, though not others, are produced so rapidly that they cannot constitute deliberately expressive acts. Meaning-making by gesture does not begin with a thought, but with a grasp, with an active, spontanenous, manual take on the situation at hand. Gesture is the communicative medium of a species defined by its distinctive hands and their capacities for making, structuring, and experiencing the material world.
Deborah Tannen – Georgetown University
Deborah Tannen has been a member of the linguistics department faculty at Georgetown since 1979; she is one of six in the College of Arts and Sciences who hold the distinguished rank of University Professor. Her 25 books (12 authored, 13 edited or co-edited) have addressed such topics as interactional sociolinguistics, conversational interaction, cross-cultural communication, frames theory, conversational vs. literary discourse, gender and language, and social media discourse. She has been McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University and has twice been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. She has received 5 honorary doctorates. Her books include Conversational Style: Analyzing Talk Among Friends (Oxford), Gender and Discourse (Oxford), and Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue and Imagery in Conversational Discourse (Cambridge)
Outside of the Academy, she is best known as the author of You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, which was on the New York Times best seller list for nearly four years, including eight months as No. 1, and has been translated into 31 languages. Among her other books, You Were Always Mom’s Favorite!: Sisters in Conversation Throughout Their Lives and You’re Wearing THAT?: Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation were also New York Times best sellers; Talking from 9 to 5: Women and Men at Work was a New York Times Business best seller. Her most recent book, You’re the Only One I Can Tell: Inside the Language of Women’s Friendships, was published in May.
Ruth Wodak – Lancaster University
Ruth Wodak is Emerita Distinguished Professor of Discourse Studies at Lancaster University, UK, and affiliated to the University of Vienna. Besides various other prizes, she was awarded the Wittgenstein Prize for Elite Researchers in 1996 and an Honorary Doctorate from University of Örebro in Sweden in 2010. She is past‐President of the Societas Linguistica Europaea. In 2011, she was awarded the Grand Decoration of Honour in Silver for Services to the Republic of Austria. She is member of the British Academy of Social Sciences and member of the Academia Europaea. In 2008, she was awarded the Kerstin Hesselgren Chair of the Swedish Parliament (at University Örebrö). She is member of the editorial board of a range of linguistic journals and co‐editor of the journals Discourse and Society, Critical Discourse Studies, and Language and Politics. She has held visiting professorships in University of Uppsala, Stanford University, University Minnesota, University of East Anglia, and Georgetown University. In the spring 2014, Ruth held the Davis Chair for Interdisciplinary Studies at Georgetown University, Washington DC. In the spring of 2016, Ruth was Distinguished Schuman Fellow at the Schuman Centre, EUI, Florence. 2017, she holds the Willi Brandt Chair at the University of Malmö, Sweden. Her research interests focus on discourse studies; gender studies; language and/in politics; prejudice and discrimination; and on ethnographic methods of linguistic field work.
Ruth has published 10 monographs, 27 co‐authored monographs, over 60 edited volumes and ca 400 peer reviewed journal papers and book chapters. Recent book publications include The Politics of Fear. What Right‐wing Populist Discourses Mean (Sage, 2015; translation into the German, Politik mit der Angst. Zur Wirkung rechtspopulistischer Diskurse. Konturen, 2016); The discourse of politics in action: ‘Politics as Usual’ (Palgrave), revised edition (2011); Migration, Identity and Belonging (with G. Delanty, P. Jones, 2011); The Discursive Construction of History. Remembering the German Wehrmacht’s War of Annihilation (with H. Heer, W. Manoschek, A. Pollak, 2008); The Politics of Exclusion. Debating Migration in Austria (with M. Krzyżanowski, 2009); The SAGE Handbook of Sociolinguistics (with Barbara Johnstone and Paul Kerswill, 2010); Analyzing Fascist Discourse. Fascism in Talk and Text (with John Richardson, 2013), and (with Majid KhosraviNik and Brigitte Mral, 2013). Click this link for more information on on‐going research projects and recent publications.