Welcome to Discourse and Social Interaction

Division of National Communication Association

The Discourse and Social Interaction Division (formerly: Language and Social Interaction) provides a home to those who study how social life is produced and organized through situated conversation, language use, and embodied interaction. Division members 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 broader tradition of Language & Social Interaction scholarship, though well established in the communication field, is interdisciplinary and draws on the related fields of anthropology, applied linguistics, sociology, sociolinguistics, and others. This tradition 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.