16:194:670 / 17:194:575 Topics in Social Interaction - Spring 2011

Mondays 3:10 – 5:50 PM, CI 203

Dr. Galina Bolden, Department of Communication


This course examines communication processes in a range of contemporary organizational settings, including a variety of workplaces, police, medical offices, courts of law, and news media, with an emphasis on methods for studying these settings. We describe interpersonal communication processes through which organizational goals, roles, cultures, and relationships are constructed and enacted through talk and other forms of communicative conduct (including embodied action), and discover how the study of interpersonal aspects of social interaction can provide a window into the often unnoticed and, effectively, invisible workings of these institutions.

In addition to acquainting students with current research in this domain, the course is designed to equip you with analytical skills for studying social interaction in organizations and in a variety of other settings. The students will conduct their own pilot study at an institutional setting of their choice and develop skills involved in video-based research of communicative behaviors.