Advisory Committee

Greg Bryant

Professor of Communication

gabryant [at] ucla.edu

Professor Bryant’s research examines vocal communication across cultures from an evolutionary perspective. Work in his lab has investigated vocal signals of indirect language use, infant-directed speech, vocal emotion, and other voice phenomena. He also has research on the evolution of music, music perception, and conversational behavior.

https://gabryant.scholar.ss.ucla.edu/

Steven Clayman

Professor of Sociology

clayman [at] soc.ucla.edu

Professor Clayman’s research addresses human interaction as a topic in its own right, and as a window into social institutions ranging from law and policing to media and politics. His methods are dawn from the conversation analytic tradition, using recordings of naturally occurring interaction as primary data, and integrating context-sensitive case analysis with statistical methods.

https://soc.ucla.edu/faculty/steven-clayman

Norma Mendoza-Denton

Professor of Anthropology

nmd [at] anthro.ucla.edu

Professor Mendoza-Denton’s research concerns language and identity, bringing ethnographic methods and sociolinguistic tools (e.g. sociophonetics) together to study social worlds including politics and gang affiliation.

http://www.anthro.ucla.edu/faculty/norma-mendoza-denton

Giovanni Rossi

Associate Professor of Sociology

rossi [at] soc.ucla.edu

Professor Rossi researches human language and gesture as a system of tools for social interaction. His interest is both in the universal features of this system grounded in a common infrastructure for human interaction and in its variable features driven by the local resources and norms of particular cultural and social settings.

https://soc.ucla.edu/faculty/giovanni-rossi

Tanya Stivers

CLIC Director & Professor of Sociology

stivers [at] soc.ucla.edu

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.

https://soc.ucla.edu/people/tanya-stivers

Hongyin Tao

Professor of Asian Languages and Cultures

tao [at] humnet.ucla.edu

Professor Tao takes a usage-based approach to language, where he describes recurrent patterns of language use in context and attempts to explain linguistic patterns from multiple perspectives, including structural, cognitive, historical, social interactional, and cultural. He works with both large quantities of computerized data as well as specific episodes of conversational interaction, with a keen interest in bridging the gap between linguistic research and language teaching and learning.

http://www.alc.ucla.edu/person/hongyin-tao/

Emeritus Faculty

Alessandro Duranti

Distinguished Professor of Anthropology

aduranti [at] anthro.ucla.edu

Professor Duranti’s research projects have focused on the role of verbal and visual communication in political arenas, everyday life, and during music performance and rehearsals. Theoretically, he has been interested in agency, intentionality and intersubjectivity.

http://www.anthro.ucla.edu/faculty/alessandro-duranti

Marjorie Goodwin

Distinguished Professor of Anthropology

mgoodwin [at] anthro.ucla.edu

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.

http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/faculty/goodwin/

John Heritage

Distinguished Professor of Sociology

heritage [at] soc.ucla.edu

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.

https://soc.ucla.edu/faculty/john-heritage

Elinor Ochs

Distinguished Professor of Anthropology

eochs [at] anthro.ucla.edu

Primary among Professor Ochs’ research interests is the role of language and culture in life span human development and learning across social groups. She has conducted research on language socialization, narrative, post-industrial childhoods, language and panic disorders, and the communicative worlds of children with autism spectrum disorders.

http://www.anthro.ucla.edu/faculty/elinor-ochs

In Memoriam

1937-2024

Emanuel Schegloff

Distinguished Professor of Sociology

schegloff [at] soc.ucla.edu

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.

http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/schegloff/

1943 — 2018

Charles Goodwin

Distinguished Professor of Communication

Professor Goodwin’s research focused 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.

http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/clic/cgoodwin/

https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/in-memoriam/files/charles-goodwin.html

Affiliated Faculty

Daria Bahtina (Linguistics)

Rick Dale (Communication)

Erin Debenport (Anthropology)

Linda Garro (Anthropology)

Michiko Kaneyasu (Asian Languages and Cultures)

Tami Kremer-Sadlik (Anthropology)

Paul Kroskrity (Anthropology)

Jason Throop (Anthropology)