UCLA Anthropology Discourse Lab

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Discourse Lab Faculty

Faculty who regularly attend Discourse Lab include the following:

Alessandro Duranti 

After doing extensive fieldwork on language and culture in (Western) Samoa, Professor Duranti carried out research in California, first to document literacy practices among young children of Samoan descent and then to closely follow a political campaign for the U.S. Congress. More recently, he has been studying the culture of jazz aesthetics and the practice of improvisation.

Marjorie H. Goodwin  

A principal concern of Professor Goodwin's research has been describing the embodied language practices through which children constitute their social world in the midst of moment-to-moment interaction as they play on the street or playground. Of particular concern has been describing dispute processes and forms of social exclusion in the peer group.

Paul Kroskrity 

Professor Kroskrity's research focuses on language and culture, language contact, language and identity, language ideologies, anthropology and verbal art, and the ethnography of communication. His work addresses American Indian Languages (especially the Kiowa-Tanoan and Uto-Aztecan families), the Pueblo Southwest, and Central California.

Elinor Ochs 

Primary among Professor Ochs' research interests is the role of language and culture in life span human development and learning across social groups. Most recently, she has taken on the direction of the UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families, a Sloan Center on Working Families.

Jason Throop 

Professor Throop's research spans psychological and medical anthropology, phenomenology, theories of experience in anthropology, self and subjective experience, empathy, pain/sensation/emotion, morality, temporality, and anthropology of the will. He has conducted fieldwork in Yap (Federated States of Micronesia). 

Suzanne Wertheim  

Dr. Wertheim's work explores the dialectic between language as a cultural practice and language as a grammatical system, with a particular focus on contracting languages undergoing multigenerational shift. Her interests span linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics, language contact and language contraction, post-Soviet studies, Turkic linguistics, language and gender, and discourse/pragmatics. She has conducted fieldwork in post-Soviet Tatarstan.