Kristine Fitch

Kristine Fitch is associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa. She received a BS in Speech Communication, BA in Spanish, and an MA in Speech Communication from University of Texas at Austin; her Ph.D from University of Washington. Her work is ethnography of speaking focused on personal relationships and persuasion, with more recent attention to examination of culture at the intersections of public and private life. She has published in Communication Monographs, Communication Theory, Human Communication Research, and Research on Language and Social Interaction, as well as a book entitled Speaking relationally: Culture, communication, and interpersonal connection (Guilford, 1998) concerned primarily with interpersonal communication among urban Colombians as the basis for theorizing about interpersonal ideology in personal relationships.

Key Words:
Ethnography, discourse analysis, culture, persuasion, personal relationships, nationalism, identity, social construction of meaning