LASS 854 (SOCI*222) Analyzing Talk

Division of Liberal Arts

3 credits 45.0 hours
200 level undergraduate course

This course asks: What can be learned by listening, recording, and analyzing human communication? Much like the interdisciplinary course Observing Humans, Analyzing Talk will involve student-led field work in a location chosen by the student. This is a course primarily about the study of power and culture; the students will be learning about patterned power dynamics through the frameworks of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and age. Speech, para-linguistics, gesture, and posture are the focus as the course introduces classics in sociolinguistics, semiotics, and video ethnography. Like music, drama, and choreography, and visual art, human talk can be analyzed both aesthetically and structurally. Framed by the media available of its time, Analyzing Talk will cover speech and gesture research and will ask how media extends and limits the questions of a particular age. Classics in documentary film will augment the course.

Prerequisites LACR*102 or LACR*103