Majorie Harness Goodwin is a linguistic anthropologist whose primary interest is the investigation of how talk is used to build social organization within face-to-face interaction. Her early work making use of videotaped interaction at family dinners investigated processes of mutual monitoring between speakers and hearers, examining how in the midst of storytelling speakers might modify the talk of the moment in response to affective displays of co-participants. Research with a team of six anthropologists on the Workplace Project at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center examined moment-to-moment negotiation of meaning across multiple modalities among workers at a large metropolitan airport. Recently, much of her work has focused on how children across different age, gender, class, and ethnic groups (including Latinas, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Caucasians) organize their social groups and develop dispute strategies, including forms of logical proof, in the midst of spontaneous play. In attempting to provide global differentiations between gender groups, social scientists have often dichotomized differences between girls' and boys' interactions. While boys are said to organize themselves exclusively in hierarchical groups, Goodwin finds that boys have available a repertoire of alternative organizational and dispute styles. Girls' games are reputed to be less complex than boys' and girls reportedly have little experience with conflict; this is argued to affect girls' ability to develop important negotiational and social skills. By examining the specific linguistic practices used to build turns at talk as well as the intonational contours and body positioning which accompany them, she shows how during play, girls learn to construct themselves as agents who are responsible for monitoring the social order they create.