Charles Goodwin (semiotician)

Goodwin worked in the field of social welfare before entering academia. He was a caseworker for the New York City Department of Welfare, and a filmmaker for the Developmental Center for Autistic Children in Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic.^[3]

After receiving a BS in English from Holy Cross, and a law degree from New York University School of Law, Charles Goodwin was awarded his doctorate in linguistics in 1977 by the University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.^[4] From that point on he made contributions to the field of interactional linguistics, (sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology). He and his wife, Marjorie Harness Goodwin, collectively and individually opened up avenues of inquiry in interaction.^[5] His UCLA page lists his interests in "Human Action, Video Analysis of Embodied Talk in Interaction, Distributed Cognition, Aphasia in Discourse, Gesture, Ethnography of Science."^[6]

After leaving Philadelphia, Goodwin taught anthropology at the University of South Carolina before he and his wife both became instructors at UCLA,^[7] he in the Communications Department,^[8] and she in the Anthropology Department.^[9]

His commitment to colleagues and to scientific inquiry is made manifest in the organizations of which he was a member: the American Anthropological Association, the American Association for Applied Linguistics, the Society for Linguistic Anthropology, the International Pragmatics Association, the Society for Visual Anthropology and the Committee on Computing as a Cultural Process.^[10]

Nick Enfield, a linguistic anthropologist, reviewed Goodwin's final book, “Co-Operative Action,” and offered a shining characterization of Goodwin as “one of the most creative, insightful, and unfettered scholars of human social action in interaction.”^[11]

• "Professional Vision" (1994)

In this influential essay, Goodwin argues that people can learn to 'see' complex phenomena based on the discursive practices of professionals, which he aligns with socially situated accounts of human action, in contrast to approaches which focus exclusively on psychological abilities. He compares, on the one hand, the techniques of an expert archaeologist for teaching a novice, and on the other hand, the strategies that lawyers in the Rodney King trial used to convince the jury that King was a danger to the officers who beat him. In the case of the King trial, the result of these processes is that "the massive beating is...transformed into ten separate events" (p. 617), allowing the lawyers to systematically guide the attention and meaning making of the jury:

One of the defense attorneys in the first trial had photographs made from individual tape frames. The photos were cropped, enlarged, and pasted in sequence to form a display over a meter long that was placed in front of the jury on an easel. The salience of King in these images was amplified through use of highlighting. As the defense attorney unveiled his display, he placed clear overlays with large white lines outlining King's body on top of the photos (see Figure 8). Earlier we saw an archaeologist weave a post mold into existence by drawing a line through subtle patches of color differences in a bit of dirt. Here the defense attorney uses similar procedures for enhancing objects in the domain of scrutiny to call forth from the murky pixels on the video screen the discursive object that is the point of his argument, a large, violent, charging African-American man who was so dangerous that hitting him 47 times with metal clubs was reasonable and justified.

Across these two examples, Goodwin identifies several discursive practices they share in common—coding, highlighting, and graphical representation—that allow professionals to turn a complex and confusing 'field' into "objects of knowledge" (p. 628) for non-professional actors. Crucially, Goodwin argues that these practices depend on common forms of human cognition, but that communities of practice have access to certain categories and techniques, which can be a source of authority.