Voicing Institutions; Figur(at)ing Selves
The Semiotics: Culture in Context Workshop is now accepting submissions for the 2024-25 academic year. As usual, this workshop serves as a forum for scholars attuned to the emergent production of cultural and linguistic phenomena via diverse semiotic processes. Our theme for this year is “Voicing Institutions; Figur(at)ing Selves.” We invite papers, from any discipline, that consider how language, communication, and semiosis are mediated by institutions, and in turn mediate the process of institutionalization. We are particularly interested in papers that attend to how notions of the self emerge within, and in interaction with, institutions and institutionalized discourse.
Linguistic anthropologists have studied how both large-scale and local institutions result in the regimentation of semiotic activity (Gal and Irvine 2019; Rosa 2016; Agha 2005) and how institutions perform such regimentation through practices and processes of voicing (Bauman and Briggs 2003; Kunreuther 2014; Nakassis and Weidman 2018; Weidman 2021). A semiotic approach to institutional sites, broadly construed, has lent itself also to an interactional view of the formation of selves and subjects which foregrounds subjects as always already placed at the crossroad of institutional and individual selves (Faudree 2013; Chávez 2017; Rahaim 2012). In this vein, we invite papers that pay close attention to processes of voicing institutions, and the interactional events within, or mediated by, institutions which produce notions of the self and identity. For instance, the discourse of and communication rituals at military institutions may shape the identity of personnel and give meaning to their actions (McIntosh 2021); or similarly, the semiotic forms of human rights institutions may allow legal actors to experience agency and see their work as efficacious (Greenberg 2020). We are also interested in papers that, more broadly, examine talk in institutional sites, the semiotic processes by which institutionalization takes place, and how institutions shape semiotic value and activity.
The deadline for submissions is two weeks before the beginning of each quarter. If you would like to workshop a paper with us sometime next year, please send an email to Krithika Ashok (kashok@uchicago.edu) and Shubham Shivang (shubhams@uchicago.edu) with the following information
- Paper title
- Type of paper (e.g., dissertation chapter, MA paper, a potential manuscript submission for a journal)
- An abstract of no more than 250 words
- The quarter(s) in which you are able to present (if more than one, please list your preferences in ranked order): Fall 2024, Winter 2025, or Spring 2025.
Please note that your paper must be an unpublished work in progress at the time of presentation.
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References:
Agha, Asif. 2005. “Voice, Footing, Enregisterment.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15 (1): 38–59.
Bauman, Richard and Charles Briggs. 2003. Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chávez, Alex E. 2017. Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Faudree, Paja. 2013. Singing for the Dead: The Politics of Indigenous Revival in Mexico. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Gal, Susan, and Judith T. Irvine. 2019. Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Greenberg, Jessica. 2020. “Law, Politics, and Efficacy at the European Court of Human Rights.” American Ethnologist 47 (4): 417–31.
Kunreuther, Laura. 2014. Voicing Subjects: Public Intimacy and Mediation in Kathmandu. Berkeley: University of California Press.
McIntosh, Janet. 2021. “‘Because It’s Easier to Kill That Way’: Dehumanizing Epithets, Militarized Subjectivity, and American Necropolitics.” Language in Society 50 (4): 583–603.
Nakassis, Constantine V., and Amanda Weidman. 2018. “Vision, Voice, and Cinematic Presence.” Differences 29 (3): 107–36.
Rahaim, Matthew. 2021. Ways of Voice: Vocal Striving and Moral Contestation in North India and Beyond. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Rosa, Jonathan. 2016. “Standardization, Racialization, Languagelessness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies across Communicative Contexts.” Linguistic Anthropology 26 (2): 162–183.
Weidman, Amanda J. 2021. Brought to Life by the Voice: Playback Singing and Cultural Politics in South India. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.