CLIC Faculty

Core Faculty

Steven E. Clayman (Sociology)

Professor Clayman's research concerns the intersection of talk and mass communication, with a primary focus on broadcast news interviews, presidential news converences, and other interactions between journalists and public figures.

Alessandro Duranti (Anthropology) 

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.

Charles Goodwin (Applied Linguistics & TESL)

Professor Goodwin's research focuses on many aspects of language and interaction, including the co-construction of meaning, the ethnography of science, aphasia as a social process, and the social organization of perception through language use.

Marjorie H. Goodwin (Anthropology)

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.

Jennifer Jackson (Anthropology)

Professor Jackson's scholarly interests since 1994 have been focused in Madagascar and the U.S. Her work spans studies in semiotics, language ideologies and aesthetics, verbal and visual artistic performance in political practice as they relate to the production of democracy, civil society and the state in Madagascar as well as the US. In the US, she has recently focused on ideologies and aesthetics of language informing how notions of truth and violence are conveyed in oratorical address.

John Heritage (Sociology)

Specializing in conversation analysis, Professor Heritage's recent research deals with communication between attending and reviewing physicians in a hospital as well as the analysis of broadcast news interviews between journalists and public figures.

Elinor Ochs (Anthropology) - CLIC Director

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.

Tanya Stivers (Sociology)

           Professor Stivers' research attempts to uncover the underlying structures of conversation using
           recordings of spontaneous naturally occurring social interaction. Studying how and when people
           use particular interaction practices, and to what effect, helps us understand where the boundaries
           are in terms of culture and language.

Emeritus Faculty

Emanuel A. Schegloff (Sociology)

For Professor Schegloff, direct interaction between persons is the primordial site of sociality. Given this research perspective, he has focused on the detailed analysis of (audio and/or video) recorded episodes of naturally occurring communicative interaction.

Associated Faculty