In 1980–81, the core group, which met regularly throughout the year, included Elinor Ochs, John B. Haviland, Penelope Brown, Steven Levinson, and Robert Van Valin, Jr.
In 1983–84, Duranti was a postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition (LCHC) at the University of California, San Diego, directed by Michael Cole.
In 1995–96, using a combination of participant-observation and videography, Duranti documented the political campaign for the U.S. Congress of Walter Capps, then Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
His earlier critique of speech act theory is here expanded to a broader discussion of intentionality and intersubjectivity inspired by Edmund Husserl's writings and supported by examples drawn from three of his research projects: his ethnographic study of Samoan ways of speaking, the audio-visual documentation of the 1995–96 political campaign of Walter Capps for the U.S. Congress, and a study of the culture of jazz aesthetics and improvisation.
"[8] Duranti introduces into anthropological theory the novel concept of the intentional continuum to describe "a range of graded ways of being disposed or mentally (and sensorially) connected with some entity in the world.
Combining his interest in intentionality, intersubjectivity, and improvisation, Duranti has been more recently writing about cooperation and the conditions that trigger what he calls “interactional glitches,” involuntary missteps that interfere with the smooth completion of a joint task.