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OCHS WINS MACARTHUR ‘GENIUS’ GRANT

   transformative contributions to linguistics, science studies, sociocultural anthropology and psychology, and she has developed a highly visible cross-disciplinary center (the UCLA Center for Language, Interaction, and Culture) that focuses on the relations among culture, language structure and discourse,” the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation said about Ochs. “She has now turned her attention to reshaping the field of applied linguistics.”

   Receiving the MacArthur prize was Ochs’ second national honor since April, when she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

   “I’m in complete shock; I can’t believe it,” Ochs said. “I was so thrilled when I was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. I love my work, and that was a real honor, but this is life-altering.” She will receive $320,000 over five years.

   Ochs studies how people communicate in natural settings. She and colleague Thomas Weiner have found, for example, that dinner-time conversation is a valuable forum for collaborative problem-solving and planning for the future. Families, she found, do not relate stories to amuse one another, but to make sense of events in their lives. Typically, the stories are unfinished. Fathers are the exception. They tend not to tell stories about themselves, and when they do, the perspective on events is usually already decided. More often, mothers and children tell stories, and fathers sit in judgment and often criticize the actions of family members.

   In “Constructing Panic” (Harvard, 1995), written with UC Berkeley Assistant Professor Lisa Capps, Ochs describes how mental health can be affected by family narratives: Children are socialized through family narratives as parents perpetuate their unhappiness through stories that portray themselves as victims of a world out of control. Children often get “socialized into anxiety through the narrative process,” Ochs said. “Children, for example, often offer solutions, are told that the ideas would not work, and eventually believe that their circumstances are hopeless.”

   In current research, Ochs and Capps are studying how autistic children communicate in school and at home, and the extent to which they participate in storytelling. In future research, she is interested in hearing from children growing up in Los Angeles concerning their efforts to communicate and be understood in their homes, neighborhoods, schools and other community settings.

   Ochs has found that learning a language  -- whether a foreign language or that of doctors, lawyers or scientists  -- is part of a larger cultural process, and studies the relation between language and culture.

   Previous UCLA MacArthur Fellows include Susan McClary (1995), professor of musicology; Rogers Brubaker (1994), professor of sociology; and Richard Turco (1986), professor of atmospheric sciences and director of the Institute of the Environment.

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