Dear Search Committee:
My scholarship is in the fields of sociolinguistics and cultural studies, including the analysis of electronic discourse communities in pedagogical contexts. My extensive experience conducting sociolinguistic fieldwork/ teaching a range of interdisciplinary writing courses as well as my administrative experience building a Technical
Comunications program/ teaching writing intensive cultural studies courses may well suit the _____________ position you have posted on the MLA job list this year.
My dissertation, titled Mill Villagers and Farmers: Economics and Dialect Shift in a Small Southern Town , is a report on my own sociolinguistic study of dialect change in Griffin, Georgia, a textile mill town about 40 miles south of Atlanta. Based on original fieldwork composed of over 36 interviews, the purpose of this study is to record dialectal variation in two dialect communities in Griffin, to observe change through apparent time, and to measure the degree of integration each individual speaker has into a close-knit social network. Chapter 1 introduces the two groups in Griffin—the founder population of farmers and the later community of mill workers—as speech communities whose oppositional linguistic and social identities center around the socioeconomic institutions of the patriarchal textile mills and the pervasive cotton market. As agriculture waned throughout the 20 th century, textile mills dominated the economic landscape of Griffin, and contact between these once-separate communities increased, dramatically restructuring the local linguistic ecology. Chapter 2 provides sociohistorical background on how the linguistic contact equations of different regions of the South varied due to differing origins of speakers, migration routes, settlement patterns and population ratios.
This ethnographic investigation traces how socioeconomic patterns are reflected linguistically in local speech. Chapter 3 presents a quantitative analysis of six phonological features and confirms that older speakers aligned oppositionally by occupational categories while the contact patterns of middle age and younger groups caused a restructuring of the available pool of linguistic features. Chapter 4 presents a quantitative analysis of six grammatical features and discusses influences such as settlement patterns, salience, and indexical significance, as well as phonetic simplicity, semantic bleaching and grammaticalization. Chapter 5 critiques the notion of linguistic
“prestige” and instead examines how the changing structure of social network ties has determined the routes of linguistic negotiation. In addition to adding a valuable data point in the ongoing project of mapping U.S. dialects, my work adds to the field of linguistics by linking various linguistic methodologies such as dialectology, variationist, and social network theories, and also connecting various academic disciplines. Analogizing, for example, from evolution theory, I describe the contact ecology in Griffin as a pool of competing linguistic features available to speakers for a selection process. Also, drawing parallels between cultural studies and social network theory has enabled me to write a

rich narrative that describes the communities in Griffin ethnographically through historical research, personal involvement and painstaking record-keeping.
During my fellowship at Georgia Tech, I have had the opportunity to design several courses in cultural studies that employ electronic pedagogy. For example, my course “Introduction to Cultural Studies: Self and ‘Other’ in Ethnographic
Representations of the American South” combines humanities computing with ethnographic methods to introduce students to cultural studies while improving their writing and research skills. Theoretical goals—recovering culture at its “roots”, decentering literary and academic discourse, revealing the fragmentary nature of authorship, privileging collaboration and non-traditional texts, researching artifacts within historical and cultural contexts, and studying the reflexive nature of language and society—are achieved at the same time that students reach traditional goals, such as valuative research, critical interpretation of information, clear writing and oral presentation skills. Throughout all of my courses, I try to invoke in my students a wider awareness of ‘language’ and ‘text’, but my ultimate goal is to equip them with solid skills of analysis and employable literacy.
My current research project, “‘Talk’ and Writing in Online Communities: An
Investigation of Linguistic Ecologies in Electronic Settings,” stems from this experience in the electronic classroom. Students in my courses produce texts in computer environments that range from asynchronous ‘bulletin board’ applications to interactive web sites to synchronous ‘real-time’ chat rooms. In and out of the classroom, these texts provide building blocks that are useful for collaborative work, research projects, and incremental essay drafting. However, the virtual environments where students work also become speech communities in which individual and group identities are negotiated through linguistic means that are a unique combination of speech and writing. As an observer-participant, I am simultaneously conducting an ethnographic study of these environments while acting in the role of instructor. This work-in-progress will result both in tested cases of online assignments and in a contribution to a book proposal tentatively titled Cultural Studies of Science and Technology (editors Auslander & Colatrella) .
Since August 2002 I have acted as Technical Communications Coordinator in the department’s new business writing program. Working closely with the Associate Chair,
Director of Communications, and Electronic Pedagogy Coordinator, I have managed four newly appointed instructors and designed a curriculum that serves over seven schools across campus. Currently, I am working with the Office of Assessment to develop a focused assessment rubric that will culminate in a report justifying additional funding.
Thank you for considering me for the _________________ opening at
____________. You can reach me most easily by cell phone (404-452-2352) or email
( lisa.mcnair@lcc.gatech.edu
).
Sincerely,
Lisa McNair
Marion L. Brittain Fellow & Technical Communications Coordinator
School of Literature, Communications and Culture
Georgia Institute of Technology

Atlanta, GA 30332
404-894-1023

As linguistic geographies and life modes were renegotiated, oppositional and distinct speech patterns were recombined thus changing the values of the variables in the restructuring equation of contact.
Certain phonological shibboleths are spreading (/ai/-monophthongization) while others are leveling (/r/-pronunciation); speakers from both occupational categories in
Griffin appear to be participating in the front and back vowel movements of the Southern
Shift with a slight decrease in the younger groups (the configuration of the Southern Shift is critiqued); and all speakers in Griffin are participating in the articulatively conducive pin/pen merger, but only younger groups show strong signs of the cot/caught merger
(complications highlighted in other studies are explored).
This contact ecology entails an expanded pool of features, providing more linguistic options to individual speakers, and an interesting example of how socioeconomic trends affect social behavior and thus language change. Results from 36 sociolinguistic interviews indicate that most features in the African American-influenced variety spoken by older farmers are diminishing while younger and middle-age white speakers in both groups are converging toward a southern variety more similar to the speech of older mill villagers. Although some features show influence from standard varieties, these results generally indicate that competition among vernaculars has developed within the local speech communities and that the mill industry has had a substantial cultural impact on the town. Economically, the century ends on an ironic note: rumors of a comeback of cotton cross cultural economic paths with the closing of several mills in Griffin due to cheaper labor overseas.
Three different Southern patterns emerge: the large plantations, where African varieties and European varieties were important factors; the isolated Appalachian mountains, where migrants from the borderlands of North England, Ireland and Scotland brought their dialects through the valleys of Virginia and the Piedmont to a relatively secluded and stable environment; and the interior cotton belt, where a mix of small-scale cotton-growers from the tidewaters and a smaller number of African slaves made up a large part of the social ecology.