Language and Social Interaction Division

The Language and Social Interaction Division (LSI) provides a home to those who study how social life is produced and organized through situated conversation, language use, and embodied interaction. Members of LSI investigate the collaborative practices that shape our social worlds in a wide range of interactional settings, including, for example, classrooms, doctors’ offices, public meetings, work, and home, as well as interactions between and across cultural borderlines. The LSI tradition, though well established in the communication field, is interdisciplinary and draws on the related fields of anthropology, applied linguistics, sociology, sociolinguistics, and others. Language and social interaction scholarship is informed by a variety of research methods, including discourse analysis, conversation analysis, ethnography and micro-ethnography, pragmatics, narrative analysis, and other approaches to studying the subtle features of human interaction that constitute everyday life.