The fieldwork for this project took place between 1980 and 1982. It
involved two years of ethnographic work in one high school in the Detroit
suburbs that I call "Belten High", and one to two months in each of four
other Detroit suburban schools.
In all of these schools, there was a hegemonic opposition between two
social categories, referred to as
jocks and
burnouts. The
jocks are a school-oriented community of practice, embodying middle class
culture. The burnouts are a locally-oriented community of practice,
embodying working class culture. This
kind of split occurs in many schools across the country, sometimes
corresponding to ethnic boundaries as well.
The project focuses on the Northern Cities Shift, shown at the
bottom of
this
page. Variation in the vowels involved in this shift correlate
not only with category affiliation, but with practices associated with
the categories.
Publications from this research:
Books:
ECKERT, PENELOPE. 1989. Jocks and burnouts: Social categories and
identity in the high school. New York: Teachers College Press.
ECKERT, PENELOPE. 2000. Linguistic variation as social
practice. Oxford: Blackwell.
Articles:
ECKERT, PENELOPE. 1980. Clothing and geography in a suburban high
school. Researching American culture, ed. by Conrad Phillip Kottak,
45-48. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press139-45.
ECKERT, PENELOPE. 1983. Beyond the statistics of adolescent
smoking. American journal of public health, 73.439-41.
ECKERT, PENELOPE. 1987. Relative values of opposing
variables. NWAVE 15 at Stanford, ed. by Keith M. Denning, Sharon
Inkelas, Faye C. McNair-Knox and John R. Rickford, 101-10. Stanford:
Depsrtment of Linguistics, Stanford University.
ECKERT, PENELOPE. 1988. Sound change and adolescent social
structure. Language in Society, 17.183
ECKERT, PENELOPE. 1990. The whole woman: Sex and gender
differences in variation. Language Variation and Change, 1.245-67.
ECKERT, PENELOPE. 1990. Cooperative competition in adolescent girl
talk. Discourse Processes, 13.92-122.
ECKERT, PENELOPE. 1990. Adolescent social categories, information
and science learning. Toward a scientific practice of science
education, ed. by Marjorie Gardner, James Greeno, Frederick Reif and
Alan Schoenfeld, 203-17. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum.
ECKERT, PENELOPE and WENGER, ETIENNE. 1994. From school to work:
An apprenticeship in institutional identity. Working papers on
learning and identity: Institute for Research on Learning.
ECKERT, PENELOPE. 1995. Adolescent trajectory and forms of
institutional participation. Pathways Through Adolescence: Individual
Development in Relation to Social Contexts., ed. by Lisa Crockett and
Ann Crouter, 175-96. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
ECKERT, PENELOPE. 1996. Vowels and nailpolish: The emergence of
linguistic style in the preadolescent heterosexual marketplace. Gender
and belief systems, ed. by Jocelyn Ahlers et al. Berkeley: Berkeley
women and language group.