Engaging and Transforming Global Communication through Cultural Discourse Analysis

One cannot open Engaging and Transforming Global Communication through Cultural Discourse Analysis without feeling the joy, excitement, and love that produced this edited collection. It breaks new ground not by presenting readers with superb summaries and extensions of Donal Carbaugh’s and his colleagues’ work, but by illustrating its significance today through detailed cases and analyses. Each of the contributors—from the preface by Gerry Philipsen through the epilogue by none other than the honoree himself—explicates central concepts, assumptions, procedures, findings, and boundaries between, with linkages to, Cultural Discourse Analysis (CuDA) and related approaches in such thoughtful and insightful ways that the ordinary becomes extraordinary, the normative becomes visible. As readers, we participate in the unraveling of rich, meaningful everyday talk that constitutes health, cultural aspects of funeral rites, ambiguities in emerging romantic relationships, refugees and broadcast programming, and so much more. This collection is indeed A Tribute to Donal Carbaugh. Through it we have the honor and privilege of tracing CuDA’s lineage to future applications hinted at between and within chapters. With this tribute, we celebrate Donal the scholar but also the humble force behind this remarkable body of work. -- Patrice M. Buzzanell, Chair and Professor, University of South Florida
Engaging and Transforming Global Communication through Cultural Discourse Analysis: A Tribute to Donal Carbaugh honors a leading second-generation scholar in the Ethnography of Communication and demonstrates the fruitfulness of Cultural Discourse Analysis (CuDA), an innovative approach to cultural analysis that Carbaugh has developed through much of his career. In the best tradition of the Festschrift, the many excellent studies collected in this volume not only celebrate a key scholar’s work, but carry it forward and point the way to future advances.  Recommended reading for anyone interested in communication and culture. -- Robert T. Craig, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, University of Colorado Boulder
Cultural Discourse Analysis is Donal Carbaugh’s expansion of Dell Hymes’ Ethnography of Speaking, integrating concepts from Interactional Sociolinguistics and several later approaches, with the goal of improving analysts’ understanding of how people jointly construct cultural meanings through talk. In Engaging and Transforming Global Communication through Cultural Discourse Analysis, his colleagues and students demonstrate the value of this theory across a wide range of cultural contexts. Uncommon focus is placed on cross-cultural comparisons, with multiple authors contributing their own data to a joint comparative analysis. Authors demonstrate the use of specific tools this theory provides (especially discursive hubs and radiants) for analyzing interaction and understanding communicative practices across cultural groups. Carbaugh’s Epilogue summarizes several key concepts and will be especially valuable to newcomers to the theory. -- Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz, Professor Emerita at University of Wisconsin-Parkside, and Director, Center for Intercultural Dialogue
Rich in description and grounded in theory. This collection not only honors the work and person of Donal Carbaugh, it also demonstrates how Cultural Discourse Analysis can be applied to explicate a range of communicative phenomena. Each chapter works with data from a novel context to demonstrate culturally situated ways of being, acting, relating, feeling, and dwelling. An essential work for anyone interested in the Ethnography of Communication. -- Todd L. Sandel, Associate Professor at University of Macau, and Editor of Journal of International & Intercultural Communication