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).  

 

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:

 

 

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.

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

 

-      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?

 

 

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. 

 

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. 

 

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: 

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. 

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.

  

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. 

 

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

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?

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.