Prof. Graham M Jones

Professor studies how people use language and media to not only share knowledge, but also to imbue it with meaning and value - whether by colluding in shared secrets or staking out contrastive positions in an argument. Through ethnographic engagements with a wide range of communities of speech and practice, he analyzes ways in which signifying practices shape moral and epistemological convictions. From the way sleight-of-hand magicians verbally regulate the circulation of technical secrets to the ways computer hackers communicatively coordinate software design projects and anthropologists construct arguments with analogies, his work spans diverse forms of expertise. It also attends to multiple scales, from the shared intimacies of a conversation between friends to debates in a sprawling and anonymous online discussion forum. Jones uses the tools of linguistic anthropology to demonstrate how verbal strategies of encoding knowledge and producing evidence connect with complex social dynamics of identity and difference. Professor Jones's ethnographic and ethnohistorical research has focused primarily on metropolitan and colonial France, but he has also conduced research in the United States, China, Singapore and Québec.