Charles Goodwin (semiotician)


Charles Goodwin was a UCLA distinguished research professor of communication and key member of UCLA’s Center for Language, Interaction and Culture. Goodwin contributed ground-breaking theory and research on social interaction and opened new pathways for research on eye gaze, storytelling, turn-taking and action.

Biography

Goodwin worked in the field of social welfare before entering academia. He was a caseworker for the New York City Department of Welfare, and a filmmaker for the Developmental Center for Autistic Children in Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic.
After receiving a BS in English from Holy Cross, and a law degree from New York University School of Law, Charles Goodwin was awarded his doctorate in linguistics in 1977 by the University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. From that point on he made contributions to the field of interactional linguistics,. He and his wife, Marjorie Harness Goodwin, collectively and individually opened up avenues of inquiry in interaction. His UCLA page lists his interests in "Human Action, Video Analysis of Embodied Talk in Interaction, Distributed Cognition, Aphasia in Discourse, Gesture, Ethnography of Science."
After leaving Philadelphia, Goodwin taught anthropology at the University of South Carolina before he and his wife both became instructors at UCLA, he in the Communications Department, and she in the Anthropology Department.
His commitment to colleagues and to scientific inquiry is made manifest in the organizations of which he was a member: the American Anthropological Association, the American Association for Applied Linguistics, the Society for Linguistic Anthropology, the International Pragmatics Association, the Society for Visual Anthropology and the Committee on Computing as a Cultural Process.
With close to 49 years of publications and scores of books, chapters and articles to his name, Goodwin pushed the understanding of communication in many facets. Nick Enfield, a linguistic anthropologist, reviewed Goodwin’s final book, “Co-Operative Action,” and offered a shining characterization of Goodwin as “one of the most creative, insightful, and unfettered scholars of human social action in interaction.”

Overview of major works

This essay is Goodwin's most cited work. According to Goodwin, the ability to discern what is important in any profession is not a natural psychological ability, but one that emerges from the discursive practices of professionals demonstrating their expertise. He claims that the effective use of discursive practices such as coding, highlighting, and graphical representation, allows archaeologists, lawyers, and police officers to see and help others see "objects of knowledge" phenomena of interest to them in their profession.

Publications