Karen Tracy
Karen Tracy is Professor of Communication at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She, has interests in discourse analysis, face and identity-work, and language and social interaction problems in institutional, small-group settings. Her research seeks to identify the dilemmas within a communicative practice, the conversational moves that reflect and manage identified tensions, and the normative beliefs participants have about how they ought to act. She has studied academic colloquia, citizen calls to 911 and the police, and is currently beginning to write about deliberative difficulties in school board meetings. She is in the beginning stage of collecting data about jury deliberation. She is the author of Colloquium: Dilemmas of academic discourse, and has edited multiple books and special journal issues. She has contributed articles to Communication Monographs, Human Communication Research, Discourse Studies, Journal of Language and Social Psychology. Her B.A. (1972, Pennsylvania State University) and M.A. (1974, Bowling Green State University) were in Speech and Language Pathology; her Ph.D. (1981, University of Wisconsin) was in Communication Arts. She taught at Temple University prior to joining the faculty at CU and is currently editor of the journal, Research on Language and Social Interaction.
