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Current Research Projects
Center on the Everyday Lives of Families: A Sloan Center on Working Families
Housed in the UCLA Department of Anthropology, the Center
on Everyday Lives of Families integrates scholars across the four sub-fields of anthropology – cultural
anthropology, linguistic anthropology, archaeology, and biological anthropology – along
with scholars from the fields of applied linguistics, education, and psychology
in pursuit of four goals: 1) detailed, ethnographic research on how members
of middle class working families create a home life through culturally and
situationally organized social interactions; 2) creation of a digital video
archive of family and household activities of working families; 3) apprenticeship
of postgraduate, graduate, and undergraduate scholars in fine-grained documentation
and analysis of social interactions that impact the well-being of working families;
4) public dialogue on how working families accomplish routine family and household
activities and the centrality of these activities for building family and community
relationships and world views.
The Ethnography of Autism
The project provides an ethnographic
account of the everyday lives of high-functioning children with autistic
spectrum disorders (Autistic Disorder and Asperger Syndrome). Analytic
foci include autistic children’s narrative interactions with family members and peers, inclusion in public school classrooms as a social practice, autistic children in multi-lingual families, and autism and the social world. Our current project examines socialization of children with autism spectrum disorders into the social rules of school and family, focusing on social rule violations. The study documents autistic children’s
sense of rule awareness, which is foundational to belonging to a
social group. UCLA's Ethnography of Autism Project is supported by
the Spencer
Foundation for Educational and Related Research. The Principal Investigator
is Professor
Elinor Ochs.
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