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1CMN 530 FAMILY COMMUNICATION Prof. Sheila McNamee Office: Horton 111A Phone: 862-3040 Office Hours: Tuesdays 3:30-5 [email protected] & by appointment (please note: I am often in my office and you are welcomed to stop by any time without an appointment) Family Communication is the context we will use to study the intricacies of interpersonal communication. Specifically, we will be limiting our focus to the topic of family because, in drawing this limitation, we become less distracted by various sorts of relationships and more attentive to the most important aspect of this course: the recognition and understanding of patterns of communication. We will be particularly concerned not only with pattern recognition but with analyses of how patterns remain stuck and how change may be relationally constructed. The particular theories, concepts, and analytical methods we will use in this class are applicable to any close, personal relationship. Our attention to family relationships is, in some ways, arbitrary, but nonetheless, interesting. A focus on family is useful for our study of communication patterns because some of the most innovative work in the field of interpersonal communication has emerged within the area of family therapy. While our own interests are not limited to therapeutic process or to the sorts of severely dysfunctional patterns that might necessitate therapy, we are interested in understanding how some unwanted patterns of interaction persist and how others so easily change. This focus on persistence and change of interactive patterns is, of course, the focus of therapy. Thus, we will explore several models of communication that have been developed within the family therapy field because they inform us about everyday patterns of interaction and the propensity of these patterns to become stuck and rigid. Our interest, of course, will be on methods for transforming these rigid patterns and creating new possibilities in family interactions. As we study family communication we will come to realize the impossibility of making objective, factual statements about families and their communication patterns. This is a significant difference from the way other disciplines study family. Anthropology, sociology, psychology, history and most other disciplines tend to understand families as “types,” in “stages,” or varying sets of relationships. For us, however, each analysis we provide, each theory we employ, each question we ask and each answer we give is only part of broader cultural narratives. The stories that make our families unique, while apparently local, are by-products of multiple networks of relations and thus, represent the coordination of multiple conversational resources. Our focus in this course on language practices emphasizes the socially constructed nature of our worlds in general and family life in particular. In this course, we will develop a way of talking about communication such that we describe ourselves and others as actively participating in the construction of the worlds in which we live and thus in the creation of our identities and our realities. Consequently, we can not help but adopt a notion of relational responsibility. If this course is successful, you will learn news ways of talking and acting. This is what family interaction, and social life in general, is -- learning to coordinate multiple2conversational resources. Why study family communication? One easy answer to this question is to say that because we are all part of some kind of family, family communication is important to us. But, in addition to being within our realm of day-to-day existence, the topic of family communication is also one that varies vastly from person to person (even among people within the same family). Each person's experience with his or her family is different but shares some semblance of similarity to another's experience. So, not only is this a topic you already should feel comfortable discussing, it is a topic that most often leaves us feeling as if we know nothing or very little. Many of us find that no matter how much we try to change unwanted family patterns and relationships, we fail. Much of our failure is due to our focus on individual family members and their attributes. We will talk throughout the semester about individualism. Typical of individualist discourse is the statement, “It’s your fault!” – a statement heard frequently in families. In this course, we will focus on shifting from an individualist to a relational discourse. This shift engages us in transformative dialogues within our own families as well as informs our analyses of other families’ patterns. On a broader level, studying family communication generates an understanding of the complexity of that small microcosm we call "family." Understanding this small unit provides an analogue for much of human interaction. We could use our study of "family" to help us understand global politics, governmental groups, organizational contexts, communities, roommate relationships, and intimate relationships – actually, any sort of relationship. Also, in our culture, as in most others, family is an important organizing institution. Cultures are developed around several central notions and "family" is most often one of those notions. Certainly, in our own culture, the development of personhood - from infancy to adulthood - is positioned within the context of "family." If the idea of family is of such importance to how we are as a culture, then our in-depth study of the communication processes that construct our ways of talking about family becomes central to any description of human interaction. . . . while people talk of everyday things . . . in talking about these matters they confirm or challenge the social relationship that exists between them. A verbal message is never merely a neutral transmission of information . . . it is always also a communication about the relationship (Danziger, 1967) It is correct (and a great improvement) to begin to think of the two parties to the interaction as two eyes, each giving a monocular view of what goes on and, together giving a binocular view in depth. This double view is the relationship. (Bateson, 1972) . . . our ways of talking are formative of social relations . . . to talk in new ways is to construct new forms . . . and to construct new forms of social relation . . . is to


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UNH CMN 530 - Syllabus

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