Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Children's Performance of Problem-Solving Genres

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Graduate student Heather Loyd, advised by Dr. Elinor Ochs, will undertake research on how children learn and deploy culturally-valued communicative skills. She will investigate how children appropriate and parlay speech and other expressive genres to secure their social networks, gain prestige, handle life predicaments and otherwise participate in the social life of the streets and family. While much anthropological research on genre has focused on the communicative worlds and speech economies of adults, we know very little of how genre competence is socialized and manifest in childhood across different communities and settings. The research will be carried out in 12 months of fieldwork in inner city Naples. She will employ an ethnographic and micro-interactional design to examine how boys and girls use verbal and embodied genre forms such as greetings, animation, innuendo, complaints, and teasing to attain social ends such as strengthen a relationship, gain respect, convince people to do things, and win an argument. Ethnographic methods will include participant-observation in homes and peer groups, video- and audio-recordings of everyday communicative practices in these settings, in-depth, open-ended interviews, and youth-narrated home and neighborhood tours. These data will be used to identify and analyze 1) linguistic, corporeal, affective, and aesthetic genre features and strategies displayed to problem-solve and navigate social, moral and material worlds; 2) family and peer group attitudes towards children's genre performances; and 3) how children are socialized into gendered expressive genres and moral frameworks. The research is important because by exploring genres as social resources, the study will illuminate how problem-solving genres affect how boys and girls in this community think, feel, and act in relation to local moral frameworks and economic contingencies. These findings will help to illuminate the processes by which class and other socioeconomic differences are learned and acted upon by children. Funding this research also supports the education of a graduate student.