Friday, April 12, 2013

Social psychology membership

See the message below from the Social Psychology section.  Note that we are still quite low on members and will be sending a similar message out to the Social Psychology section to recruit from them.  Please do join their section if you can to return the favor.  Erik & Dirk.


Greetings,

The ASA’s Social Psychology section’s membership committee would like to invite you to join our vibrant section. We are a section interested in social processes, broadly conceived, whose work is applicable to many members of the Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis section.

Among the many benefits of joining is the opportunity to network with like-minded faculty and graduate students about existing research and the possibility of sparking collaborative research efforts. Our quarterly newsletter highlights important research of interest to our members and serves as a central location to find exciting and relevant information on social psychology.

There are additional benefits for graduate students who join the section. The first is our Graduate Student Investigator Award. Each year, one student member of the section will receive $1,000 towards completing a research project (and there are efforts underway to increase the award to $2000 in coming years). We also have an active graduate student network, including a writing group on Facebook where students exchange and receive feedback about works in progress.

We hope that you’ll consider joining and encourage others to as well. To add a membership, you'll need to log in to the ASA homepage and click the "Join a Section" link (https://www.e-noah.net/ASA/Sales/Sections.asp?S=2). Student memberships are only $5.

Sincerely,
Members of the ASA Social Psychology Membership Committee
Jessica Collett (Chair), University of Notre Dame, jlcollett@nd.edu
Stephen Benard, Indiana University, sbenard@indiana.edu
Philip Brenner, University of Massachusetts Boston, philip.brenner@umb.edu
Mike Harrod, Central Washington University, harrodm@cwu.edu

Friday, April 5, 2013

John Gumperz

John Gumperz died last Friday, March 29th 2013.


Here is an Obituary from Professor Amy Kyratzis, UCSB, where he worked for many years.

Dear Colleagues,

It is with great sadness that I write to inform you that Professor Emeritus John Gumperz passed away last Friday.

Professor Gumperz received his doctoral degree in Germanic Linguistics from the University of Michigan.  He held a postdoctoral appointment at Cornell in Linguistics, where he began his life-long interest in the languages and linguistics of  the new nation of India.  He has an honorary doctorate (Honoris Causa) from the University of Konstanz, Germany.  He has had a long–term relationship with the Institute for German Language (IDS- Institut fur Deutsche Sprache) in Mannheim.

Before coming to Santa Barbara and becoming an active member of the U.C.S.B. LISO faculty, for most of his career, from 1956 until his retirement in 1991, he was a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Professor Gumperz co-founded the subfield of sociolinguistics, the Ethnography of Communication, with Professor Dell Hymes, and later founded interactional sociolinguistics.  He left behind a tremendous legacy of work, contributing to the understanding of code-switching, linguistic variation, intercultural communication, languages and sociolinguistics of India, conversational inferencing and contextualization in face-to-face interaction, educational sociolinguistics, and many other areas.  His work advanced our understanding of the linguistic and interactional construction of social inequality.

Professor Gumperz trained a large number of current scholars, and was widely known for his openness and support of junior scholars.  He wrote or edited numerous articles and books, including “Directions in Sociolinguistics: the Ethnography of Communication” (ed. w/Dell Hymes), “Discourse Strategies” (Cambridge U. Press), “Language and Social Identity” (Cambridge U. Press) , and “Rethinking Linguistic Relativity” (ed. w/Stephen C. Levinson, Cambridge U. Press).  Professor Gumperz was Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Distinguished Fellow of the American Anthropological Association, Life Fellow of the Linguistics Society of America, and a Guggenheim Fellow. He was former President of the International Pragmatics Association, a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton, an Overseas Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge University, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University.   Professor Gumperz was honored recently at a session organized at the American Anthropological Association meetings in his honor.  He will be greatly missed. 


Amy Kyratzis
Professor
Department of Education
University of California
Santa Barbara, CA  93106