Monica Heller (OISE)



"Language, social order and social justice"

A key dimension of the work of John Gumperz was his focus on the relationship between the making of social difference and the making of social inequality. His interactionist approach sought to link the detailed workings of communicative agency with the sedimented constraints of the institutional structures in which most of the valuable resources in life are produced and distributed, seeking an answer to the questions of why those resources are never equitably distributed, and what we could do to change that. In this talk, I will review his approach to linking the interaction order to institutional order and to social selection, some critiques of his approach, and some ways in which ethnography grounded in political economy has attempted to build on his work while responding productively to his critics.