Elinor Ochs

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Elinor Ochs is an American linguistic anthropologist, and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at University of California, Los Angeles. Ochs has conducted fieldwork in Madagascar, Italy, Samoa and the United States of America on communication and interaction. Together with Bambi Schieffelin, Professor Ochs developed language socialization, a field of inquiry which examines the ways in which individuals become competent members of communities of practice to and through the use of language. Professor Ochs is also known for her contributions to applied linguistics and the theorization of narrative and family discourse.

In the USA, Professor Ochs has conducted research on a wide range of topics including the social construction of knowledge in a physics laboratory, sociality and autism, and the socialization of morality in family discourse. The last was conducted during her decade long tenure as the director for the Center on Everyday Lives of Families, supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Workplace, Workforce, and Working Families Program on Dual-Career Working Middle Class Families. In 1998, Professor Ochs was named a MacArthur Fellow for her contributions to the study of language.