Expanding Ethnography of Communication Research: Toward Ethnographies of Encoding

The Ethnography of Communication research agenda, as it has been incorporated into the field of Communication over the past 3 decades, has made considerable contributions to our understanding of the cultural and social coding of language-in-use. This article argues that further development of this research agenda requires ethnographies that attend to processes of encoding, including their precoded phases, and pay greater attention to the temporality, performativity, and materiality of communication. This is illustrated with reference to the rapidly shifting contemporary techno-social environments communicators face today.