Jenny
Mandelbaum

Jenny Mandelbaum uses Conversation Analysis to examine how a variety of aspects of the organization of interaction pertain to social relationships and identities. Her work focuses on the everyday lives of families. Her published work includes studies of storytelling, repair organization, the management of social knowledge (epistemics), and the implementation and consequences of such actions as recruiting assistance from others, requesting, offering, assessing, and complaining.

Jenny Mandelbaum's research uses the methods of Conversation Analysis to examine everyday talk-in-interaction. She is particularly interested in how a variety of aspects of the organization of interaction pertain to social relationships and identities. Her work includes studies of storytelling, repair organization, the management of social knowledge (epistemics), and the implementation and consequences of such actions as recruiting assistance from others, requesting, offering, assessing, and complaining. She is currently working with a large database of field video-recordings of families engaged in routine activities (eating meals, preparing and cleaning up from them, “hanging out” in front of the TV, doing homework, etc.). Currently, she is exploring how parents (and other family members) respond to children’s (including grown children’s) social infractions.

She was a faculty member at Rutgers for nearly 35 years and served as department chair from 2003-2006. She taught the department's Introduction to Communication (Comm 101), in addition to teaching Family Communication; Relationships and Identities in Interaction; Language, Behavior and Communication; Qualitative Methods; and Interpersonal Communication. She taught Honors Seminars for the SAS Honors Program in Storytelling in Everyday Conversation, and Communication and Construction of Family. She also taught two Byrne Seminars: How to do things with storytelling; and (with Galina Bolden) "It's Not Fair!": Complaining in Everyday Conversation.