Gregory Thompson

Following up on previous research demonstrating the high level of care realized by a paternalistic Mexican physician, the present research further explored the hypothesis that there are cultural differences in preferences for and experiences with physician paternalism vs. patient autonomy in White American culture as compared with Mexican culture. In this research, we interviewed sixty (60) people including twenty (20) Mexican, twenty (20) Mexican American, and twenty (20) White American respondents. We asked these patients about their experiences with and attitudes towards paternalism and patient autonomy in healthcare interactions. With some caveats, our data showed strong support for both hypotheses while also suggesting a high level of care can be realized by paternalistic physicians when “paternalism” is understood in a cultural context. We close with a brief consideration of the implications of these findings.

In this article we critically evaluate the case made by proponents of academic language (AL) that AL is functionally necessary for schooling due to specific functional advantages of AL. We consider three examples of AL introduced by AL proponents in order to show (1) that AL proponents have been too quick to accept the ALH, (2) that functional advantages of AL can be accomplished with non-AL varieties and 3) that AL may, in fact, be dysfunctional within the domain of schooling. We briefly describe the language ideological processes by which AL has been naturalized as appropriate to the domain of education while the functional potential of non-AL forms in schooling is obviated (noted by Halliday 2004). We then consider the work of M. A. K. Halliday, the researcher most commonly cited as providing justification for the ALH (esp. Halliday 2004), elaborating his critique of AL while also showing how this critique has been ignored by AL proponents citing his work. In closing we point to some implications of these findings for creating more equitable educational practices regarding academic language.

We argue that patient autonomy is a cultural value specific to Western culture and that the autonomy focus in U.S. health care may produce negative patient outcomes for patients from other cultures. To this end, we present a case study of a Mexican physician’s interactions with his patients and apply the method of discourse analysis to argue that (a) this physician’s interactions are highly paternalistic, (b) there is an appreciation for this among his Latino patients and in the broader Latino community, and (c) this physician provides high-quality ethical care precisely because his paternalism communicates important ethical values such as familial intimacy, insistence, and care. We further propose that paternalism may produce better outcomes for Latino patients.

This note is intended as a gateway to the research program of The Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition (LCHC). The narrative spans from LCHC's research in the 1960's focused on the role of culture and social context in human development to its recent focus on the design of educational activities in community settings. . The themes indexed in this document's title such as "culture," "development" and "social inequality" signal the nexus of concerns that animated the Lab from its inception.  In many respects, they have become more acute and pressing.
Several additional co-authors are no included because of limitations imposed by Academia.

In this short essay, we introduce a collection of papers that examines the relationship between semiosis, subjectivity and timescale. We argue that a temporal approach to the relationship between semiosis and subjectivity—i.e., one that considers, at least, the interactional, ontogenetic, and historical timescales—can reveal the variety of ways in which semiosis comes to be implicated in subjectivity. This approach can be understood as a reformulation of the traditional linguistic anthropological concern with linguistic relativity.

Our paper offers a new theoretical and methodological approach to the study of moods in academic settings.We begin by introducing the concept of classroom mood as a phenomena distributed across time and across people. Then we propose a method for studying classroom mood using the linguistic anthropological notion of stance. We demonstrate this method through an analysis of a year-long video ethnography of literacy teaching and learning in a first-grade classroom. In this analysis, we document how a collaborative-problem-solving mood, one form of emotional experience, emerges through stance-taking over time as a communicative, collaborative, and relational process. Our analysis describes how a teacher and her students coordinated affective and epistemic stances dialogically and opportunistically to build a collaborative problem-solving mood over time. This mood called forth (solicited) particular actions from students to participate
competently in the learning activity,which included joint attention, effortful listening, and correct tool use (strategies/sound cards). Our analysis demonstrates how contextual moods influence engagement in learning.

In this paper, we analyze the mutual constitution of frames and selves in interactional practice. We consider two examples, one taken from an Israeli radio call-in program and the other an American tutoring session. Both interactions follow a similar pattern with the caller and student encountering what appears to be a negative construal of their self, to which both respond with unusual interactional moves. In the radio call-in, during a discussion of the corruption of the government, the caller turns the conversation to the notion of “buying a wife.” In the tutoring session, during the tutor’s mini-lecture on the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the student takes out her mathematics notebook and starts working on math problems. In the discussion of these peculiar interactional moves, we consider the motivations, justifications, and consequences of these interactional moves. In so doing, we suggest how a theory of discursive and interactional framing could augment theories about the social construction of self, including face-work theory. In addition, we describe how a theory of power and agency in interaction rely on and constitute moral worlds.