LISO Alumni

LISO Language, Interaction, and Social Organization

Sarah Jones (Ph.D. Sociology, 2004)
Research Analyst
American Institutes for Research (AIR)
SJones@air.org
Dissertation
Studying "success" at an "effective" school : How a nationally recognized public school overcomes racial, ethnic and social boundaries and creates a culture of success.
Research Interests
My current research is on the culture of effective schools. I am also interested in the relationship between self-concept, ethnic and racial identity development, and effective schools.

Joseph Sung-Yul Park (Ph.D. Linguistics, 2004)
Assistant Professor
Department of English Language and Literature
National University of Singapore
ellpjs@nus.edu.sg
Dissertation
Globalization, language, and social order: Ideologies of English in South Korea.
Research Interests
Interaction and language ideology
Prosody in conversation
English and globalization

Mardi Kidwell (Ph.D. Sociology, 2003)
Assistant Professor
Department of Communication
University of New Hampshire
mkidwell@unh.edu
Dissertation
“Looking to see if someone is looking at you”: Gaze and the organization of observability in very young children's harassing acts toward a peer.
Research Interests
Child-adult interactions
Police-citizen interactions
Gaze and embodied action in interaction

Deborah Perry Romero (Ph.D Education, 2003)
Professor
Modern Languages-English
Universidad Autonoma de Queretaro, Mexico
dromero@uaq.mx
Dissertation
The social accomplishment of literacy. Latino families appropriation of technology in an after-school setting.
Research Interests
Her research focuses on interdisciplinary areas of language, literacy and bilingualism. Specifically, she draws on sociocultural and constructivist perspectives to study communication and interaction in joint mediated activity, through discourse and conversation analyses. She has studied the development of writing and literacy in bilingual contexts both in Mexico and with Latino immigrants in US. Her current research explores the interaction between gesture and language in technology settings.

Agnes Kang (Ph.D. Linguistics, 2000)
Assistant Professor
Department of English
University of Hong Kong
makang@hkucc.hku.hk
Dissertation
Talk, interaction and cultural persistence Constituting Korean American discourse in a meeting contex.
Research Interests
My research interests center around the discursive construction of Asian diasporic and Asian American identities. My current research examines language and society in the context of the Korean community in Hong Kong.

Elise Kärkkäinen (Ph.D. Linguistics, 1998)
Academy Research Fellow
Department of English
University of Oulu, Finland
Elise.Karkkainen@oulu.fi
Dissertation
The marking and interactional functions of epistemic stance in American English conversational discourse.
Research Interests
My current research still evolves around stance and more specifically stance taking as a dialogic, interactive, and intersubjective activity. The above research project is carried out in collaboration with John Du Bois, whose idea of stance as enacted in the public space of dialogic interaction has greatly inspired our work. We aim to add to the range of linguistic and interactional resources that can be used by participants in talk-in-interaction for taking stances. Our data consist of the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English, recordings of everyday British English speech, a collection of American and British news interviews, and Finnish everyday conversations.

Peggy Szymanski (Ph.D. Spanish & Portugese, 1996)
Palo Alto Research Center, Computing Science Laboratory,
Workscape Organization Area, Member of the Research Staff II
Peggy.Szymanski@parc.com
Dissertation
Organizing Talk in Activity: Spanish/English Bilingual Speakers in Classroom Work Groups.
Research Interests
Learning activity
The organization of multi-party talk-in-interaction and remote continuing states of incipient talk
Culture change across organizations