CONTRIBUTOR:

Frederick Erickson

AFFILIATION:

TITLE:

Professor Emeritus

DEPARTMENT:

Education & Information Studies

INSTITUTION:

University of California, Los Angeles

BIOGRAPHY:

Frederick Erickson is the Inaugural Kneller Chair of Anthropology of Education, Emeritus, and Professor of Applied Linguistics, Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. He previously taught at the University of Illinois, Chicago, Harvard University, Michigan State University, and the University of Pennsylvania, where he directed its Center for Urban Ethnography. Joining the Council on Anthropology and Education as a graduate student in 1968, he then became chair of its standing committee on cognitive and linguistic studies, its president and subsequently the editor of its journal, Anthropology and Education Quarterly. A pioneer in the use of video analysis in microethnography and interactional sociolinguistics, he studies the ecological organization of face-to-face interaction, with an emphasis on ways in which the listening reactions of listeners influence the speech of speakers. His publications include (with Jeffrey J. Shultz) The Counselor as Gatekeeper: Social Interaction in Interviews (1992) and Talk and Social Theory: Ecologies of Speaking and Listening in Everyday Life (2004), which received the American Educational Research Association’s Outstanding Book Award in 2005. In 1998-99 and 2006-07 Erickson was a residential fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, CA. In 2014 the Council on Anthropology and Education named its annual Outstanding Dissertation Award in his honor. Cinema film and video footage from his research resides in the Human Studies Archive of the Anthropology Department at the Smithsonian Institution.