Area of Focus
The UMass Communication Department has a vibrant group of faculty and students working in ethnographic and cultural approaches to social interaction. Topical foci of our research include intercultural communication, personhood, ethnic and racial identity, power in discourse, pragmatism, and moral action. Faculty in this area of our graduate program vary in background and specific research interests, but we are united in addressing questions of social interaction, culture, and meaning:
- What is the meaning of “meaning” in social interaction and how is it constructed through joint action?
- How are these meaning-making processes culturally and contextually embedded and variable?
- What are the roles of power in these processes?
- How do theoretical constructs and perspectives such as identity, performance, aesthetics, morality, and politics help us to understand these processes and relationships?
We emphasize qualitative methods, particularly ethnography and discourse analysis, in our approach to these problems. The overall strengths of our department in qualitative methods, social theory, and issues of representation complement the work of faculty within the area of social interaction.
Courses
Courses with the following titles have been offered in recent years, some regularly, most on a revolving basis:
- Social Uses of Language
- Theories of Social Interaction
- Qualitative Research Methods in Communication
- The Ethnography of Communication
- Cultural Discourse Analysis
- Field Research Methods in Social Interaction
- Moral Discourse
- Intercultural Communication
- Feminist Discourse
- Rhetoric and Performance
- Persons and the Moral Order
- Gender and Communication
- Communication of Identity
- Coordinated Management of Meaning
- Critical Pedagogy
- Discourse Analysis
- Mediation
Faculty with Expertise in Language, Meaning, and Culture
- Benjamin Bailey (PhD, Linguistic Anthropology, UCLA 1999) - Ethnic and racial identity, social interaction
- Donal Carbaugh (PhD, Communication, Washington, 1984) - Ethnography of communication, cultural discourse, pragmatics
- Leda Cooks (PhD, Communication, Ohio, 1993) - Performance, power, and culture
- Vernon Cronen (PhD, Communicaton, Illinois, 1970) - Moral action, pragmatism, and Coordinated Management of Meaning
Faculty with allied interests in communication, culture, and social interaction are in Anthropology (David Samuels, Jacqueline Urla), Education (Teresa Austin, Meg Gephart), History (David Glassberg, Alice Nash), Judaic and Near Eastern Studies (Olga Gershenson), Comparative Literature (Ed Gentzler), and elsewhere.
Graduate Student Achievements
In the past five years, three dissertations written in our program have received Distinguished Dissertation Awards from the National Communication Association and the International Communication Association.
Support for graduate student work has been supplied not only by our department, but also by:
- The American Jewish Archives
- The Finnish Ministry of Education
- The Fulbright Foundation
- The Jacob Javits Foundation
- The National Endowment for the Humanities
Work based upon our graduate student studies has been published in various books and in journals including:
- Research on Language and Social Interaction
- Communication Theory
- International Journal of Intercultural Relations
- International and Intercultural Communication Annual
- Journal of Language and Social Psychology
- Journal of Communication
Graduate Student Placement
Our recent graduates have been placed in various academic settings including the following:
- Baruch College of the City University of New York
- California State University Channel Islands
- University of Colorado Boulder
- Fitchburgh State University
- University of Helsinki, Finland
- New Mexico State University
- Rutgers University
- University of Hartford
- Westfield State University
Titles of Recent Graduate Student Dissertations in Communication, Social Interaction, and Culture:
- Silencing non-traditional identities through communication: Situated enactments of sexuality in Japan
- “Hate speech” in Hungarian Public Discourse
- Finnish cultural discourses about mobile phone communication
- Mass media appropriations: Communication, culture, and everyday social life
- Strategies of the self: negotiating cultural identities in anglophone and allophone Montreal
- Deliberation and democracy: ethnography of rhetoric in a New England town meeting
- Recovering trauma: an ethnographic study of women's storytelling within contemporary support group environments
- Communicating environment: cultural discourses of place in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts
- Women's ways of speaking about menopause and hormone replacement therapy: an American discourse on personhood
- Communicative practices of Yiddish-speaking Jewish elders on South Miami Beach
- Recovery culture: the promotion of depression and consumption of mental health technologies in contemporary social practices
- The Black, Jewish, Other video dialogue: a case study of the social construction of transformative discourse
- Exploring the meaning of work: a CMM analysis of the grammar of working among Acadian-Americans
- A social constructionist perspective on the Chinese lian/mian (face) practices
- Popular belief in gender-based communication differences and relationship success
- Communicating culture: public discourse and ritual action in a Jewish community
- Paradox and promise in the dialogue on race: a case study analysis of the dialogues of the Springfield (MA) World Class City Commission
- Voices of anorexia: a study of voice, communication, and the body
- "Asia" (matter-of-fact) communication: a Finnish cultural term for talk in educational scenes
- "What does it mean to be a Puerto Rican woman?": a study on cultural identity, collective agency and representation
- Conversation and culture in the Puerto Rican cultural center: an ethnographic exploration of communicating personhood
- Coordination and conflict in a multicultural organization: a case study of communication among Koreans, Americans and Korean-Americans
- This land is our land: the social construction of Kaho‘olawe Island
