Ethnographic Essay

Ethnographic Essay

  • Submitted By: ekamdeep
  • Date Submitted: 12/10/2013 6:26 PM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 1913
  • Page: 8
  • Views: 126

ethnographic essay


Purdue Nanotechnology Club(PNC) aka ‘The Dream-killers’
Knowledge also is at the base of a discourse community that functions on the basis of sharing the same through the means of communication. Language is of essence in the case as it not only formulates the reality for that discourse group but shapes and or enhances the perception of others towards the group. In short, the way a community uses language affects how others in different communities look at the world. In the case of the Purdue Nanotechnology Club, which is an honors Nano-tech club , only for the students and researchers working on an ‘electromagnetism’ experiment at the Purdue University, it definitely constitutes a discourse community that spreads and enhances the knowledge of said community . More pertinently, the community uses discourse to create a personal and knowledge based relationship among its members; a relationship, which in turn, creates a discourse community as it facilitates and defines the goals broadly agreed upon by its members- that become shared with a high degree of commonality of vision and goals. It is achieved through the means of intercommunication with one another and is strengthened and fortified through feedback to its members and their intelligent and critical inputs . The PNC qualifies as a discourse community with more than one genre used to further the communicative goals and that employs its own specific lexis that defines the community and may set prove enigmatic for non members.

The Purdue Nanotechnology Club, as part of its specific lexis, stresses four strategic core- values often referred to as the organizations “pillars”; these pillars function as the organization’s primary means to fulfill its mission statement "to enable highly effective specialists” through “innovation, globalization and collaboration” . The language used in our society functions not only as a means to give the society a structure, but also...

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