Dr. Dickinson's dissertation,
entitled "Life on the Edge: Understanding Social Change through Everyday
Conversation in a Ukrainian Border Community," combined these broad interests,
exploring the ways in which everyday conversational interactions among members
of a dialect-speaking border community contributed to these villagers' emerging
understandings of social and economic change in post-Soviet Ukraine.
Her dissertation also contributes to
studies of contemporary rural Ukraine, and to linguistic study of the Slavic
varieties spoken in the Zakarpattja (Transcarpathian) region of Ukraine.
One of the main foci of her dissertation, and of her continuing work in linguistic
and cultural anthropology, is the nature of conversational storytelling,
from the level of grammatical structure to the nature of topic shift and the
role of storytelling in creating social cohesion and social meaning.
Dr. Dickinson has recently
begun a new project that reflects her interests in linguistic anthropology,
anthropology of post-socialism, and the anthropology of work. In the
summer of 2000, she returned to the Lviv and Zakarpattja regions of Western
Ukraine to interview people who sell goods in various city, village, and
regional markets. The ethnographic and linguistic materials she collected
promise to yield rich data on the transformation of work-based identities
and developing notions A market
seller in rural Ukraine
of a "new" market profession. In December of 2001, she participated
in a larger project on post-Soviet censuses by observing and reporting on
the conduct of the first Ukrainian national census in the Zakarpattja region.
Her latest research project, continuing in summer 2003, concerns images
of Ukraine and its transition to the market economy in contemporary advertising.
Among the courses Prof.
Dickinson teaches at UVM are: Human Cultures; Introduction to Linguistic
Anthropology; Sociolinguistics; the Anthropology of Work; Anthropology of
Eastern Europe; Business Anthropology; Storytelling in Cross-Cultural Perspective;
Language and Gender; and Language in Media and Advertising.
A village in the Zakarpattja
(Transcarpathia) Region of Ukraine