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Corruption in the Trump Era: Mimetic effects of transgressive leadership

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Corruption in the Trump Era: Mimetic effects of transgressive leadership

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Members
Donna Goldstein and Kristen Drybread

Message:
Seeking 4-5 panel members to join us at SLA 2020 in Boulder, CO. Donna Goldstein and Kristen Drybread are the organizers. Please send us a 250-word abstract for consideration. Email us at: donna.goldstein@colorado.edu
kristen.drybread@colorado.edu

Abstract
Whether it involves petty bureaucrats or elite powerbrokers, corruption is commonly understood to be a crime of calculation that results in illicit financial gain.[1] Indeed, contemporary tales of corruption in the United States most often center on how the rich exploit legal tax regimes or powerful politicians abuse their offices to retain power and secure private financial rewards. But corruption does not always—or even necessarily— involve political or financial schemes. Nor does it hew to a particular political ideology. We argue that corruption in the Trump-era might best be understood as an effect of what Richard Sennett terms the ‘corrosion of character’: an emerging sensibility occasioned by the contemporary configuration of global capitalism and strategic neoliberalism that seeks individual short-term gain above collective well-being, and that seems to imagine a future dependent on excessive accumulation—of power, money, resources—in the present. And we assume that this excessive accumulation has been accompanied by a lively paper/visual trail of the language to justify it.

Attending to this trail, we aim to broaden the definition of corruption beyond simple bureaucratic bribes and grand political and financial schemes by addressing the constellation of bad actors and questionable actions that characterize this historical moment. The contemporary corruption we discuss almost never simply involves a singular act or utterance, or an isolated set of players. Corruption has become an attitude—an evolving social practice that is transgressive, acquisitive, self-serving and narcissistic, and that understands both the individual and the community in new and unexpected ways. Animated as it is by the current occupant of the White House, this attitude has arguably become the current zeitgeist.

Some will insist that the Trump-era has not created anything new in the world of corruption: political scandals are as old as politics itself. Nevertheless, our work would argue that during the last three years, U.S. public and political life and global politics have inspired new forms of subjectivity that both advance and intensify prior modes of corruption in synchrony with Trumpian aesthetics. The corruption we speak of is multi-faceted. It includes financial secrecy, nepotism, economically self-centered policy, sexually predatory behavior, political bribes and bullying—and more.

Anthropological research is uniquely positioned to offer critical analytical perspectives on how corruption in the Trump-era is defined, practiced, and understood in the public sphere. This panel will explore the practices by which those with access to power and connections within the Trump regime have stepped over the imaginary moral line separating acceptable from unacceptable behavior.

We seek panelists to join us in taking a scholarly dive into public archives and other visual or textual data that can deepen our understanding of Trump-era corruption, parsing through the language, gestural excesses, rhetorical strategies, expressed desires, unconscious dreams, and mimetic instantiations of corruption practices in the present.

[1] Robert Klitgaard famously expressed corruption as a formula: “C = M + D – A. Corruption equals monopoly plus discretion minus accountability (Klitgaard 1998).

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Members
Scott F. Kiesling
Sean Nonnenmacher
Matthew John Hadodo

Message:
Seeking 3-4 panel members to join us at SLA 2020 in Boulder, CO. Please send us a 250-word abstract for consideration. Email us at:
mjh145@pitt.edu
sen40@pitt.edu

Abstract
As the 2020 spring conference theme for the Society of Linguistic Anthropology is “Future Imperfect: Language in Times of Crisis and Hope,” examining speech practices in different types of communities with uncertain futures is fitting. Since Bakhtin (1981), the concept of chronotopes has been applied not only to literature, but to linguistic anthropological and sociolinguistic studies of speech communities. Scholars have discussed the role of time and place linkages to language in analyzing how speakers come to understand shared experiences tied to real or imagined communities (e.g., Blommaert, 2015; Eisenlohr, 2004; Woolard, 2004). Furthermore, the always situated semiotic processes of language ideologies (e.g., Irvine & Gal, 2000) aid in the propagation of spatio-temporal social meaning.

This panel seeks contributors who address chronotopes, disruption, and transformation as theoretical or methodological paths toward futurity. Critical explorations of how speakers situate themselves or those in power in space and time might offer productive avenues for overcoming traumas. As chronotopes have been applied to research in a broad way, we similarly welcome paper topics that discuss language and space/time dimensionality broadly. Additionally, crisis can be understood on different scales, with some communities experiencing macro-level disruptions due to war, whereas others are dealing with more intimate, personal traumas. Specific topics may include:

Language contact

Minority languages

Language policy and subsequent responses

Language in constructing life stages (childhood to adulthood to senescence)

Nostalgic constructions of communities’ pasts

Migration and diaspora

Bakhtin, M.M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination. In M. Holquist (Ed.). Austin: University of Texas Press.

Blommaert, J. (2015). Chronotopes, scales, and complexity in the study of language and society. Annual Review of Anthropology 44:105-16.

Eisenlohr P. (2004). Temporalities of community: Ancestral language, pilgrimage and diasporic belonging in Mauritius. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14(1):81-98.

Irvine, J. and Gal, S. (2000). Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In P.V. Kroskrity (Ed.), Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Politics, and Identities: 35-84. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.

Woolard, K. (2004). Is the past a foreign country?: Time, language origins, and the nation in early modern Spain. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14(1):57-80.

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Responsibility and Evidence in Late Capitalist Discourse                 

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Responsibility and Evidence in Late Capitalist Discourse                 

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Members:
Aurora Donzelli
Joseph Sung-Yul Park

Message:
We are looking for potential contributors to our panel. Please email us a 250-word abstract no later than November 25th at
adonzelli@slc.edu
ellpjs@nus.edu.sg

Abstract
Our contemporary moment is often represented as marked by the progressive extension of market logics to every domain of human existence and interaction (Brown 2003, 2006; Cruikshank 1993; Martin 2000; Rose 1990; etc.). Key to this process has been the institution of novel paradigms for determining moral and epistemic standards of conduct. The ideal neoliberal subject is imagined to be engaged in the moral project of maximizing the value of one’s human capital, as well as a constant evidencing of one’s engagement with such responsibility of self-development. Institutional, technological, and political economic configurations constantly monitor and assess individuals in these terms, guiding them towards internalization of such discourse through self-modulation. A growing ethnographic literature has thus shown how the contemporary world is characterized by the proliferation of evidentiary regimes based on ideals of transparency and moral standards pivoting on notions of accountability and individual entrepreneurialism (see for, example, Cavanaugh 2016; Gershon 2011, Matza 2009; Shore and Wright 2003; Strathern 2000; Urciuoli 2008; West and Sanders 2003). But we still lack a fuller account of how these larger discursive formations impact the grain of everyday life, structuring our daily encounters and interactions. Drawing on the seminal volume edited by Hill and Irvine (1993) and extending its insights into contemporary political economic context, this panel explores of how situated language use participates in producing the specific notions of knowledge and agency that characterize the late capitalist present. Our goal is to “turn the tools of linguistic anthropology” to further our understanding of how neoliberal notions of responsibility and evidence are both produced and challenged through actual instances of discursive activity (Hill and Irvine 1993: 3). Specific questions addressed by contributions may include:

-      What kinds of discursive practices and styles come to be valued as transparent, moral, and responsible under neoliberalism, and by what semiotic processes?

-      How do neoliberal models of responsibility and evidence affect contemporary linguistic and semiotic styles of political self-presentation and participation?

-      What do debates on fake news and (un-)accountable political practices reveal about the new moral and epistemic standards of our times?

-      How do the moral and epistemic paradigms of our present shape linguistic practices in the workplace? How do they affect contemporary forms of material production and semiotic circulation of commodities, though certification protocols, (re-)branding strategies, and new technologies of the working self? How are they resisted and subverted through specific patterns of communicative behavior?

-       How do shifting ideologies about ideal displays and enactments of responsibility, agency, and desire lead to new models of ideal personhood?

-      What new evidentiary regimes do conditions of late capitalism, including those of precarity, surveillance, and inequality, represent?

-      How do neoliberal modes of governance construct different populations as (ir)responsible, (im)moral, (un)truthful, or (un)trustworthy?

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Members
Steven P. Black
Betsey Behr Brada

Message:
Seeking 4-5 panel members to join us at SLA 2020 in Boulder, CO. Steven Black and Betsey Brada are the organizers. Please send us a 250-word abstract for consideration. Email us at:

sblack@gsu.edu
betsey.brada@reed.edu

Abstract
This panel will explore the communicative processes through which the field of global health is defined, valued, and materialized, examining how these processes intersect with, reproduce, or transform existing health/communicative inequities. We are particularly interested in topics such as: translation, code-switching, and substitution in global health talk; language, social identity, and the constitution and maintenance of institutions and institutional norms; mediatization and its consequences in global health discourses; the communicative constitution of global health ethico-moral frameworks; and the communicative processes uses to position global health as a distinct spatio-temporal, moral, and professional domain. More broadly, this panel will engage and contribute to an innovative body of research at the intersection of linguistic and medical anthropology. Other related paper topics are also welcome.

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Genres are the Drive Belt of the Economy: Genres and Technologies

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Genres are the Drive Belt of the Economy: Genres and Technologies

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Ilana Gershon

Seeking 3-4 panel members.  Please send me a 250-word abstract for consideration.
Email me at:
igershon@indiana.edu
PLEASE DO NOT email me at my gmail account  -- it is a very unreliable way to get in touch with me.

Abstract
Scholars of capitalism in the humanities have long known that capitalism can only function because language forges the social relations that enable capitalist exchanges. Language enables the standardization of practices and products that capitalism requires to operate within markets and create new ones. To understand how crucial language is for capitalism to function, it is necessary to analyze how language produces such standardization using linguistic anthropological understandings of patterned forms such as genres. Genres play particular roles in organizing knowledge in predictable forms that can be readily used by diverse audiences to undergird the work necessary for economic life to take place. Recognizable genres endorse, legitimize, bind, and otherwise make legible economic action and actors.  Studies of genre – historically focused on discrete textual features or structures of oral speech – have largely given sway to emphases on technology, such as platforms, software, or algorithms as modes of social determination (Manovich 2001, 2013). This raises questions for studies of genre about the line between genre and technology. While technological capacities draw increased scholarly attention, technologies too rely on a complex set of genre cues and orienting frameworks that culturally and contextually make users aware of what a technology is or does. Landing pages, privacy police statements, website architectures, and pop-up alerts are all micro-genres that feature in the basic use of any given technology or larger technological assemblage. In short, there is no technology without culturally-recognizable genres. The diverse array of new technologies such as computer screen layouts, video-conferencing overlays, or computer code readouts, nevertheless, challenge our understanding of how genres exist, how they interact with each other, visually co-occur, and are hierarchically arranged.

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Putting Out Fires: Communicative Crises in the Workplace

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Putting Out Fires: Communicative Crises in the Workplace

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Rosalie Edmonds

Sonya Rao

Seeking 4-5 panel members to join us at SLA 2020 in Boulder, CO.

The panel seeks papers that examine crises of communication in the workplace, and how the crises of capitalism, colonialism, and contemporary ecofascism arise and are confronted in the workplace. Scholars of communication have looked to the workplace as a site to explore social hierarchy, institutional behavior, and patterns of interaction. Workplaces and their hierarchies often act as sites of oppression and compel workers to conform to institutional expectations – discursively (Urciuoli and LaDousa 2013), ideologically (Kroskrity 1998, Mertz 2007) and in interaction (Hall 1995, Heritage and Clayman 2010). On the other hand, workplaces are also sites for political organizing, for workers to improve their own working conditions, as well as to strike and bargain for a variety of other community benefits.

This panel asks: how can linguistic anthropologists use the tools of conversation analysis, ethnography of communication, and sociolinguistic interpretation to carry on the traditions of observing communication in the workplace, while responding to the political crises of 21st century working contexts? How can we use these methods to understand and document the liberatory potential of workplace communication?

Discourses of transformation might not reflect workplace dynamics – where gendered, sexual, racial and caste orders inherited from former regimes still dominate. These discourses manifest in workplace interactions, where workers reinforce and/or contest language ideologies, epistemic legacies, and political oppression. In this panel, we hope to define and expand the role of linguistic anthropologists in understanding and describing contemporary workplace communication.

Please send us a 250-word abstract for consideration by Wednesday December 11th at 6pm. Email us at:

sonyarao@ucla.edu

redmonds@ucla.edu

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Gender and sexuality in the imagined community: Anti-LGBTQ discourses and nationalism

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Gender and sexuality in the imagined community: Anti-LGBTQ discourses and nationalism

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Members:
Dominika Baran
Catherine Tebaldi

Please email 250 word abstract to:
dominika.baran@duke.edu
cat.tebaldi@gmail.com
by December 10.

Abstract:
Anti-LGBTQ discourse has become a central resource in the construction of national identity and patriotism in right-wing populist rhetoric wherever such rhetoric has gained significant mainstream currency. It seems that in many parts of the world, from Eastern Europe to Brazil, the imagined community of the nation (Anderson [1983] 1991) is being envisioned as homogenous not just in terms of race, ethnicity, and religion, but in also terms of cis-heteronormative identities and family models. From YouTuber Wife with a Purpose’s “white baby challenge” to Marion Marechal Le Pen’s activism against marriage for all, anti-LGBTQ discourses are core aspects of the new populist “alt-maternalism” (Mattheis 2018), whereby conservative politics seek to regiment gender and sexuality through religious belief in gender complementarity (i.e. Klatch 1987), or mobilize gender essentialism in service of racist agendas (Minna-stern 2019) by cementing conceptions of the woman as the reproducer of the nation (Farris 2017).

Most recent literature on populist discourses and nationalist ideologies examines anti-refugee discourse, racism, and white supremacy (e.g. Wodak & Boukala 2015; Bolonyai & Campolong 2017; Wodak & Krzyżanowski 2017; Alduy 2015; Blee et al. 2017), but only a few studies focus on anti-LGBTQ discourse (e.g. Binnie 2014; Chojnicka 2015; Paternotte & Kuhar 2018; Darakchi 2019; Russell 2019). While it may seem like a predictable aspect of an ideology that glorifies homogeneity and social conservatism, the intense focus on gender identities and sexual orientations on part of right-wing populists demands rigorous scholarly scrutiny.

Consequently, this panel seeks to examine, from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives, the processes of the discursive construction of the nation, and of the patriotic subject of the nation, as inherently cisgender and heterosexual – and, conversely, the construction of any identification or empathy with the LGBTQ community as unpatriotic, and the otherization of LGBTQ-identifying citizens as “outside” the national body. One avenue of this inquiry may be a reference to George Lakoff’s (2014) argument that conservative ideologies of the nation tend to envision it as modeled after the patriarchal and hierarchically governed family. Another might focus on the discursive intersections between the nation and religion, or ethnogenesis and reproductive obligations as envisioned by social conservative nationalists. This panel invites papers that will explore the ways in which people’s sexual orientation and gender identities are constructed as a threat to the idea of “the nation.”

Please submit 250-word abstracts to Dominika Baran (dominika.baran@duke.edu) or Cat Tebaldi (cat.tebaldi@gmail.com) by December 10.

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Language in Media: Endorsements, Subversions, and Anxieties

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Language in Media: Endorsements, Subversions, and Anxieties

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Members:
Deina Rabie
Gwendolyn Kirk

Seeking 3-4 participants to join our panel at SLA 2020 in Boulder, CO. Please send us a 250-word abstract for consideration.

Email: drabie@utexas.edu

Now more than ever, media has emerged as a vital site of engagement in political and cultural life and the circulation of information, entertainment, and technologies. In this panel, we address language use in media through two intersecting themes. The first examines the strategic role of media personalities and questions the ways in which language is deployed to tow political or corporate agendas, and the ways it is subverted to create opportunities for social and political contestation. We ask how the multimodal and rapidly diffusing structures of particular media platforms or spaces serves state and corporate interests while creating potential opportunities for appropriation by non-dominant parties and voices. We also question whether there are particular languages or registers better suited for the semiotic processes of knowledge circulation and how they come to bear on questions of origin or authority.

Our second theme explores media as key sites in which linguistic anxieties emerge and are codified. These especially come to the fore in neoliberal, globalized spaces such as social media and corporate television, which are also maximally intertextual and rapidly circulating. Media are utilized for regulating and policing language and linguistic identity, and are routinely credited with playing a role in language shift and loss. At the same time, they create loci of possibility for emergent reconfigurations and unexpected solidarities. This panel foregrounds the role the affordances of media play in this process, drawing closer attention to its metadiscursive and metalinguistic capacities. It also emphasizes the multimodality of media communication, considering semiotic relationships between visual, sonic, and linguistic dimensions.

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Talking Materials: Exploring the Conversation Between Language and the Material World

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Talking Materials: Exploring the Conversation Between Language and the Material World

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Members:
Patricia Markert and Mackenzie Manns

Message:

We are looking for 4-5 contributors to join our panel. If interested, please send us a 250-word abstract for consideration by Dec. 10. You can contact us at:

pmarkert@binghamton.edu

mackenzieraemanns@gmail.com

Abstract:
Materiality and language exist in a dialogic relationship. The goal of this panel is to start a discussion about the ways linguistic anthropology, as the study of human interaction and language in the world, and archaeology, as the study of the material past and present, can inform each other to enrich our anthropological understanding of the complex relationships between people, places, things, and narratives. We see the collaboration between these two subfields of anthropology as providing an effective foundation for critical investigations into place, space, and identity. This panel has its origins in two projects that tackle the intersection of linguistic anthropology and archaeology from both sides: Markert is an archaeologist who uses oral history, narrative analysis, and the Bakhtinian chronotope alongside archaeological data to investigate how narration shapes and is shaped by the material world; Manns is a linguistic anthropologist using archaeological theory and semiotics to investigate and critique the ways archaeological narratives shape and inform historic sites and their audiences. Both projects integrate talk, things, and landscapes to look more deeply into the ways in which identity is challenged, produced, shaped, or erased through language and materiality. We argue that the way the past is evoked, constructed and presented, through both materials and speech, has important implications in the present. In short, the way we talk about the physical world informs the ways that it is made and understood, even as the physical world shapes, constrains, and inspires the ways we talk. This matters, because people are at the heart of this dialogue between material and language.

Broadly, we are interested in papers that look at the intersection between the material and linguistic, with attention to the ways these intersections inform and shape the social world. As the purpose of this panel is to start a dialogue, we encourage diverse approaches to and ideas about the ways things, landscapes, and language intersect, the methods and theories used to address these intersections, and how this matters within the context of challenges faced by anthropology and the wider world today. We especially welcome papers that imagine new ways that archaeology and linguistic anthropology might work together in the study of material and narrative worlds.

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Listening to the winds change: Emergent scholars in interdisciplinary language research

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Listening to the winds change: Emergent scholars in interdisciplinary language research

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Members:
Abigail Michelini
Meg Niiler
Jack Peterson

Message
We are looking for 1 - 2 contributors to our panel on interdisciplinarity and emergent scholarship. Please send a 250 word abstract by Dec. 10 to the following email addresses:

jstv@iup.edu
gtpv@iup.edu
Mrniiler@wcupa.edu

Abstract:
The complex, uncertain world of today presents unique challenges to emerging scholars. Finding footing in one’s discipline can lead to feelings of isolation and entrenchment for many scholars, seducing some to the thinking of the past. Embracing interdisciplinarity can provide the scholar with a greater understanding of the complexity of today’s social problems, but can leave the scholar feeling unmoored. Finding a middle ground between isolating disciplinary entrenchment and interdisciplinary engagement for social change, the scholars on this panel share how their research seeks to value the disciplinary knowledge of the past while acknowledging its limitations to transdisciplinary problems that affect us and those we teach.

The following topics will be addressed:

Beliefs about Teaching Spanish Writing - (changing disciplinary winds) the troubles of disciplinary rigidity

English language teaching - (changing philosophical winds) the English language classroom as site of posthumanist, translingual poetics

Rhetorical Listening/Poetic Inquiry - (changing political winds) rhetorical listening as a tool for communicating across political differences and divides.

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Teaching Linguistic Anthropology in a Time of Rapidly Emerging Technologies and Shifting Communicative Strategies [* A ROUNDTABLE]

Members:
• Kathe Managan, University of Louisiana, Lafayette
• Jacqueline Messing, University of Maryland-College Park

Message:
(Looking for 2-3 more presenters for a roundtable on methods for teaching linguistic anthropology. Send me an email at ·      kathe.managan1@louisiana.edu with your idea if you think this is something for you!)

Abstract:
The Marist Mindlist for the class of 2023 notes of this year’s incoming freshmen that “[t]heir smart pens may write and record faster than they can think” and “YouTube has become the video version of Wikipedia.” Today’s students communicate with gifs and memes as readily as they do with a computer keyboard and perhaps more readily than they do with a pen and paper. Smart phones and social media shape their social interactions and the way they acquire and share knowledge. In this context, linguistic anthropology has useful lessons to teach students about communication and the social life of words. But how do we most effectively teach these lessons to today’s students? How do we incorporate new technologies and learning modalities into our pedagogy? The emergence of digital communication technologies has also enabled the growth of online and hybrid teaching. While all of these changes present challenges for educators they also offer new opportunities to engage a wider range of students and to include a greater diversity of voices in our educational materials. With the goal of fostering a discussion on best practices, this roundtable brings together faculty members teaching students using online, hybrid and face-to-face formats at a variety of different types of higher education institutions.

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Quentin Williams, University of the Western Cape

Jaspal Naveel Singh, The University of Hong Kong

Hip Hop futurism refers to evocations of science-fiction and cyborg aesthetics in the sonic, lyrical and embodied practices of Hip Hop cultural production (De Paor-Evans 2018). It can also refer to Hip Hop lyricism that thematizes Afrofuturistic philosophies (Rollefson 2008; Womack 2013). In this panel we seek to expand the notion of Hip Hop futurism by turning our attention to the ways in which global Hip Hop practitioners construct time – and in particular new, undiscoverable, not-yet realized sociolinguistic, discursive and narrative futures – to envision emancipation. These chronotopic constructions, rather than being emancipatory in and by themselves, open up imperfect potentials for global Hip Hop heads to reimagine their futures and critically refashion the self and one’s community. Hip Hop provides the genre, practice and rhetorical means to decode the linguistic and non-linguistic signs from the future and to prepare multilingual speakers to develop critical understandings of a world to come.

We invite papers that engage with contemporary linguistic anthropological frameworks to demonstrate how Hip Hop provides alternative roots and routes for the creative performance of a multilingual future, the representation of new identities and selves, and the reinvention of language. We are interested in contributions that employ a critical historical approach to the future of language and multilingualism, with Hip Hop as the starting and end point. We are also interested in contributions that demonstrate how Hip Hop allows us to rethink language and other cultural practices as goals and mediums for sociocultural transformations of multilingual speakers across the globe.

If you would like to contribute to this panel, please send a 250-word abstract, including references, to Jaspal: singhjn@hku.hk by 10 December 2019.

References

De Paor-Evans, Adam (2018) The futurism of hip hop: space, electro and science fiction in rap. Open Cultural Studies 2: 122-135. https://www.degruyter.com/downloadpdf/j/culture.2018.2.issue-1/culture-2018-0012/culture-2018-0012.pdf

Womack, Ytasha L. (2013) Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-fi and Fantasy Culture. Lawrence Hill Books.

Rollefson, J. Griffith (2008) The ‘Robot Voodoo Power’ Thesis: Afrofuturism and Anti-anti-essentialism from Sun Ra to Kool Keith. Black Music Research Journal 28(1): 83-109. https://europeanhiphoporg.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/Rollefson-RobotVoodooPowerBlackMusicResearchJournalV28.pdf

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Becoming Political: Linguistic & Semiotic Processes of Subject Formation & Collectivity

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Becoming Political: Linguistic & Semiotic Processes of Subject Formation & Collectivity

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Members:
Diego Arispe Bazan, Mariam Durrani, Briana Nichols

We are looking for 1-2 additional contributors. Please email 250 word abstract to Diego diego.arispe.b@gmail.com and Briana brinichols@gmail.com by December 10th.

Across places like Lahore, New York City, Lima, and Guatemala City, the minoritization of queer and racialized groups reproduces (post)colonial forms of disenfrachisement. Yet it also ignites efforts to assert collective agency in these populations. This panel explores the linguistic and semiotic contours of political subject formation across multiple sites around the world, illuminating our collective understanding of how individuals come to understand themselves as vulnerable subjects of politics first. By studying the ways in which people apprehend the uncertainty of the present, we examine how precarious horizons (Petryna, 2015) provide contours for political action. In other words, how do folks come to know and act based on membership within a minoritized political community?

Anthropologists often consider biopolitical communities--racialized, of minoritized sexualities and gender expressions--but not how exactly these identities come to be known to the subjects themselves and then communicated to their chosen publics. Since socially constituted narratives about individuals become definitive of their standing within a community (Wortham, 2004) and even incorporated into their sense of self (Haviland, 2005) through multiple entextualizations, this panel explores relational encounters that highlights how difference shapes individuals’ identification with political communities, broadly defined. Further drawing on contemporary work in linguistic anthropology on queer (Barrett, 2017; Gaudio, 2009) and racialized (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015; Mendoza-Denton, 2008; Urciouli, 2016) communities, this panel interrogates the semiotic, interactional, and linguistic processes around which subjects recognize and organize themselves as political communities.The panel explores wide-spread discourses around lived experiences of precarity, asking what linguistic and semiotic analysis can illuminate about political subject-making as a relational process at the intersection of sociopolitical disruption and transformation. What possibilities emerge for new linguistic and discursive strategies of political collectivity, and what challenges? Can we share the future across communities while still recognizing difference? Can precarious presents forge possibilities for the future in which differences coexist as commensurable, fortifying collectivities?

Works Cited

Bonilla, Y., & Rosa, J. (2015). # Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States. American Ethnologist, 42(1), 4-17.

Gaudio, R. P. (2009). Introducing ‘Yan Daudu. Allah Made Us: Sexual Outlaws in an Islamic African City, 1-28.

Haviland, J. B. (2005). Whorish old man" and" one (animal) gentleman. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 15(1), 81-94.

Mendoza-Denton, N. (2008). Homegirls: Symbolic practices in the making of Latina youth styles. Maiden, MA: Blackwell.

Petryna, A. (2015). What Is a Horizon? Navigating Thresholds in Climate Change Uncertainty. Modes of Uncertainty: Anthropological Cases, 147-64.

Urciuoli, B. (2016). Neoliberalizing markedness: The interpellation of “diverse” college students. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6(3), 201-221.

Wortham, S. (2004). From good student to outcast: The emergence of a classroom identity. ethos, 32(2), 164-187.