David Boromisza-Habashi

The Ethnographer of Communication at the Table: Building Cultural Competence, Designing Strategic Action

Ethnographers of communication are increasingly working within interdisciplinary teams to address social problems in communities, corporations, and governments. This special forum brings together ethnographers of communication to reflect on the opportunities, tensions, and challenges involved in using the ethnography of communication to seek workable solutions to social problems with fellow scholars, practitioners, and community members. Through empirical case studies, contributors demonstrate how the ethnography of communication is used to build cultural competence and design strategic action.

Meetings: A cultural perspective

Abstract We draw on Helen Schwartzmans seminal work on meetings to make the case for studying meetings and studying them from a cultural perspective. In a global context marked by the increasing interdependence of social groups of all sizes, scholars need ways to study and interpret local phenomena; a cultural approach to meetings provides a means for discovering local practices and theories of communication, and for enabling cross-cultural comparison to generate empirically grounded multi-cultural perspectives. After reviewing how scholars have used Schwartzmans work, we revisit her scheme for studying meetings and demonstrate how it orients researchers to local cultural practices and processes. To illustrate the kind of theoretical innovation that can follow from the application of her scheme, we reformulate her work on the relationship between meetings and social order to argue that egalitarianism and hierarchy should be theorized as strategic communicative accomplishments that serve the locally relevant social ends of some or all meeting participants.

Public speaking as cultural ideal: Internationalizing the public speaking curriculum

ABSTRACT Institutes of higher education around the world respond to the challenge of globalization by internationalizing their curricula. We argue that adding an element of cultural reflection to curriculum design is an important step toward internationalization. We use ethnographic analysis to highlight the cultural gap between Anglo-American and non-Anglo interpretations of public speaking. We begin by reconstructing the Anglo cultural ideal of public speaking from a historical overview of the evolution of the public speaking textbook (Sproule, J.M. [2012]. Inventing public speaking: Rhetoric and the speech book, 1730–1930. Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 15, 563–608.). Then, we review alternative cultural models of public speaking. Finally, we identify directions for future research and curriculum design.

The Communal Function of Social Interaction on an Online Academic Newsgroup

Social relations in academic settings can be intensely problematic. Our case study joins the ongoing conversation among scholars interested in communication issues in academia by shifting analytic attention from individuals negotiating the boundaries of academic communities from the outside to how an academic community negotiates its own boundaries. Using analytic strategies from the ethnography of communication and ethnomethodology, we analyzed observable interaction on an online academic newsgroup (the Ethno hotline hosted by the Communication Institute for Online Scholarship, CIOS) to investigate how fellow academics criticized one anothers communicative conduct in order to accomplish membering, the negotiation and affirmation of communal membership, and their communitys identity. We approached such criticism as natural criticism, that is, criticism members of a self-identified community apply to the discursive conduct of those they see as communal members. We found that natural criticism functioned as a communication practice and as a symbolic resource for membering in the context of this scholarly community. We also found that, as a practice, natural criticism was accountable in multiple ways, and communal members responded to it negatively when it was seen to violate the moral and practical order of the community. For example, when the practice of natural criticism took on a pattern we refer to adversarial mirroring, this pattern became subject to negative evaluation by other members of the community. Our study contributes to language and social interaction scholarship on membering and natural criticism, and to communication scholarship investigating the management of social relations in academic settings.

Dismantling the antiracist “hate speech” agenda in Hungary: an ethno-rhetorical analysis

Abstract In the context of Hungarian political discourse, critics of contemporary antiracist advocacy argue that the antiracist “hate speech” agenda is motivated by carefully concealed political interests that pose a danger to the integrity of Hungarian society. The aim of the present article is twofold: to capture the themes and rhetorical strategies emerging from discursive challenges to the “hate speech” agenda, and to identify the cultural foundations of that rhetoric. The article identifies four themes in critical responses to the “hate speech” agenda: (i) the “hate speech” agenda is founded on the deliberate corruption of the Hungarian language; (ii) the “hate speech” agenda reveals that antiracists are pursuing an alien political utopia; (iii) the “hate speech” agenda is fraught with ideological inconsistency; and (iv) antiracist proponents of the “hate speech” agenda are themselves filled with hatred. Discursive manifestations of the four themes are analyzed for a shared cultural model of sociation and argumentative strategies. The article ends with a discussion of how findings may inform antiracist activism.

The cultural foundations of denials of hate speech in Hungarian broadcast talk

In Hungarian public talk, ‘hate speech’ (gyűlöletbeszéd) is a term commonly used to morally sanction the talk of others. The article describes two dominant interpretive strategies Hungarian speakers use to identify instances of ‘hate speech’. Motivated by an interest in the observable use of the term, the author draws on speech codes theory to investigate how public speakers use the two competing meanings of ‘hate speech’ to achieve moral challenges and counter-challenges in broadcast talk. The author finds that Hungarian speakers accused of ‘hate speech’ can effectively accomplish denials in response to actual or anticipated normative challenges by opting for an alternative meaning of ‘hate speech’. The article concludes with a discussion of implications for speech codes theory, the discourse analysis of denials, and antiracist action.

Speech genres and cultural value in the Anglo-American public speaking course as a site of language socialization

ABSTRACT Speech genres have a significant role in socializing children and adults not only to speak in culturally appropriate ways but also to present desirable identities. We analyze narratives of self-transformation collected in an undergraduate public speaking course in the United States to learn how the acquisition of public speaking as a speech genre contributes to U.S. students’ language socialization. Our study contributes to two traditions of intercultural communication research, one interested in the context-bound, culturally situated character of Anglo-American speech, and another that seeks to explain how local communication resources, including speech genres, travel across cultural boundaries.

The emergence of a local strategies approach to human security

ABSTRACT We consider the contributions that the study of discourse and security can make to international efforts to improve conditions of human security through the study of discourses of security in local socio-cultural contexts. We begin by discussing an applied program of work conducted at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) between 2007 and 2014. This program of work began by developing a cooperative approach to community Security Needs Assessments, and subsequently created a process of Evidence-Based Design to support UN staff in the explicit integration of local knowledge as a key resource in the design of security-related policies and programs. We describe how this work drew from the ethnography of communication, the practical challenges its developers encountered in rendering such knowledge program-relevant, and how this led them to conceptualize a focus on local strategies for the task of UN program design. We reflect on the potential of local strategies research (LSR) for addressing applied challenges in human security, what a LSR agenda on security could look like, and how this might be expanded in dialogue with the vernacular security approach to discourse and security.