Researching Culture with Interactional Sociolinguistics. Combining the Micro and the Macro

Guest Lecture with Dr. Stephanie Schnurr (University of Warwick)

This lecture aims to showcase some of the many benefits of researching culture – and other relatively abstract and often blurry concepts – taking an interactional sociolinguistic approach. I will discuss several examples of authentic workplace interactions from my own research in different organisational and socio-cultural contexts to illustrate how interactional sociolinguistics can help navigate some of the methodological, conceptual and theoretical challenges that researchers often face in research of real-life contexts. Drawing on audio- and sometimes video-recordings of naturally occurring interactions, which may be supplemented by interviews and/or observations, interactional sociolinguistics enables researchers to consider both the micro and the macro. That is, insights gained through micro-level discourse analysis can be fruitfully combined with the macro-level context in which encounters take place, thereby capturing relatively abstract concepts such as culture in situ and making them more tangible.

Stephanie Schnurr is Associate Professor at the Centre for Applied Linguistics, University of Warwick (UK) and a leading expert in the field of intercultural communication, particularly workplace discourse. Her main research interests are in professional and medical communication. She has researched and published widely on topics such as leadership, gender, humour, (im)politeness, identity construction, and many other aspects of workplace discourse in a range of different socio-cultural professional and medical contexts. She will give a public lecture on her interactional sociolinguistic research on culture.

Veranstaltung übernehmen als iCal