Poster Plenary

Friday, May 30, 5:30–8 pm CDT

Queer Worldmaking: Tabletop Roleplaying Games and Political Imagination

Elliott Wiseman

Can players use tabletop roleplaying games as assistive technology to imagine and mobilize toward alternative worlds? The poster presents preliminary findings from ongoing field research with queer players across multiple sites, highlighting how these players use TTRPGs to explore alternate forms of sociality (e.g., redefining community, security, and the human).

  • Tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) are genre of gameplay in which participants build plots and fantasy worlds collectively and, for the most part, improvisationally through in-character dialogue and narration of character actions. I explore the potential of this form of play to impact the out-of-game world by offering space and tools for players to imagine how the world could be different, particularly within gaming groups that are entirely or majority queer. Specifically, I ask: within the queer subculture which has arisen around tabletop roleplaying games, do or can these games serve as assistive technology to imagine more desirable worlds and mobilize for their creation? To answer this question, I also consider the following sub-questions: What kinds of experimentation, speculation, and queer worldmaking happen in the course of gameplay? What kinds of political thought and action do they allow or foreclose, and how does this contribute to the formation and reformation of players’ political imagination? This poster will present preliminary findings from ongoing field research with queer players across multiple sites, highlighting the ways these players use TTRPGs to explore alternate forms of sociality (for example, redefining community, security, and the human), and how this relates to their experiences and desires in the out-of-game worlds they inhabit.

    Elliott Wiseman (they/them) is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Letterwork: Making Language Beautiful in Times of Decline

Keith Murphy

This presentation provides an overview of my current research project. The project is about writing — the letters, characters, glyphs and other marks that are typically treated as language in visual form — and the work that’s invested to create, maintain, and advance writing as both a visual medium and technological infrastructure.

  • This poster presentation provides an overview of my current research project. The project is about writing, the letters, characters, glyphs and other marks that are typically treated as language in visual form. The title, Letterwork, offers a clue as to what it’s about. Rather than situating writing as an object at the center of my analysis, I’m emphasizing instead the work that’s invested to create, maintain, and advance writing as both a visual medium and technological infrastructure. More specifically, the project is an ethnographic study of the people who ensure that the writing we use in our everyday lives continues to stay up-and-running — that it looks right on the page, can appear clearly on digital screens, can be used to express cultural meanings, that it facilitates communication, and so much more. By “people” I’m referring to those whom historian Steven Shapin would call the “invisible technicians” of writing, the little recognized professionals and dedicated amateurs who live a life among letters. The poster will be divided into “stories” about five different kinds of letterwork: pressing (the contemporary craft of letterpress printing); drawing (designing typefaces, especially in the digital age); drafting (typography and graphic design); coding (managing the Unicode text encoding standard); and keeping (preserving type and design artifacts). One takeaway is that letterwork helps humanity retain backward compatibility — that is, that the new harmonizes in some way with what came before — which in turn allows us to stay connected to the past while continuously moving into the future.

    Keith Murphy is an associate professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine

Indigenizing Whiteness in Contemporary Television Comedies

Barbra Meek and Monika Bednarek

This study analyzes the discursive construction of Whiteness in Indigenous-centered contemporary television comedy series from the United States and Australia, focusing on the shows, Reservation Dogs (Harjo & Waititi, 2021–2023) and Rutherford Falls (Helms & Ornelas, 2021–2022). We show how Indigenous screen creatives indigenize Whiteness through character dialogue.

  • This study analyzes the discursive construction of Whiteness in Indigenous-centered contemporary television comedy series from the United States and Australia. For the US, we analyze two landmark series with First Nations showrunners: Reservation Dogs (Harjo & Waititi, 2021–2023) and Rutherford Falls (Helms & Ornelas, 2021–2022). We include an international comparison with supplementary data from Australia, consisting of a similar corpus of comedy series with First Nations creative involvement. To begin, we use corpus linguistic results of the presence of color terms (e.g. black, white, red, brown, yellow) to show that Whiteness is an important identity category in both corpora, although it is expressed through different word forms. We then present a more detailed analysis of the word forms that occur in both the US and Australian datasets, namely white and whites. We undertake a comparative analysis of how these words occur, distinguishing between use as surname, noun, nominalized adjective, predicative adjective, and attributive adjective. Results indicate considerable overlap between the two corpora, with only a few differences (e.g. the use of premodified body parts in the Australian series). Our second focus is on contextualizing the uses of these words to unpack how the screen creatives indigenize Whiteness by marking it overtly in character dialogue. This act of marking disrupts the status of Whiteness as a category that is typically unmarked, and presupposed, in mainstream discourses. As our analyses show, it also represents multiple opportunities for diverse discursive engagements with Whiteness.

    Meek: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Bednarek: University of Sydney

Racialized Imaginaries: Haitian Personhood and Mock Haitian in Dominican Media

Benjamin Puterbaugh and Kendall Medford

El Moreno Venezolano (the Black Venezuelan), a Black Haitian, emphatically and “comedically” denies their Haitian heritage by posing as Venezuelan. This study analyzes their interactions with Dominican media personalities. We identify the ways both audience and speaker construct imaginaries of Haitian personhood through Mock Haitian and other indexical features.

  • In the Dominican Republic, traditional media formats such as talk shows are still highly consumed through cable, radio, and now, on social media. Talk show discourse — the quotidian themes and topics in discussion — represent important venues for social actors to influence public opinion. Haitians, the largest ethnic minority population in the DR, are conspicuously absent in these spaces. This study examines one Haitian-identifying individual, El Moreno Venezolano (the Black Venezuelan), who has been permitted in this space by critically analyzing their interactions with Dominican media personalities. Important to the social context of this comedic character is that the character emphatically denies his Haitian heritage, claiming instead to be Venezuelan. We seek to address a few questions: what imaginaries of Haitian personhood are permitted in Dominican media? To what extent do Dominican hosts, and Dominicans at large, interact with and construct this personhood? We draw on recent studies on racialized comedic performances (Calhoun & Yoo, 2024; Beaton et al. 2024) to analyze the linguistic features that indexically create this characterological figure (Agha, 2007). With Haitianized Spanish (Ortiz Lopez, 2010) as a reference, we identify a Mock Haitian register that co-occurs with strategic references to cultural and social aspects of Haitian life in the Dominican Republic to “humorously” make el Moreno Venezolano recognizable. Such a comedic act is only possible because of the raciolinguistic (Rosa & Flores, 2017) and raciosemiotic (Smalls, 2020) ideologies that connect race to language and the racialized body to meaning-making sign.

    Benjamin is a PhD candidate in Applied Linguistics at the University of South Florida. Kendall is a PhD candidate in Linguistics at Tulane University.

“‘Cis” Is a Slur”: Twitter Takes on Performative Language Ideology

Bel Cairns

Starting from a tweet by Elon Musk, I analyze the language ideologies underpinning online discourse about trans identity. Acknowledging the context-dependent meaning of “cis”, I examine how and why different discourse communities online misunderstand each other. Throughout, I consider the larger question: Who gets to determine what language is harmful?

  • In June, 2023, Elon Musk tweeted that “‘cis” is a slur.” In this paper, I contextualize this tweet in terms of linguistic constructions of gender identity, and the discourse surrounding slurs. In analyzing the tweet, and various reactions to it, I draw on theories of indexicality, performative language ideology, double-voicing and referentialism. I propose that the tweet can be understood in terms of its indexical meaning in the overarching conversations about slurs and gender, as a double-voiced critique of performative language ideology, and as a threat towards trans people and allies. I explore how double-voicing and referentialism were used to critique the statement, and discuss the usefulness and logical consistency of those critiques, and how they fit into the broader conversations about slurs and identity.

    Bel Cairns is an undergraduate student majoring in Classics at the University of Waterloo.

Negotiating Authenticity Through Colonial Entanglements

Judith Pine

Drawing on analysis of complex bundles of indexical signs deployed in recorded musical performances as well as interviews and fieldwork with Lahu performers in Thailand and China, this poster will explore the ways in which 21st century Lahu performers negotiate multiscalar geopolitical contexts to lay claim to variously legible indigeneity.

  • The notion of indigeneity is complicated in the Greater Mekong subregion, particularly the uplands of SE Asia and southwest China (Baird et al 2016, Leepreecha & Meixi 2019, Morton and Baird 2019). Claims to indigeneity must negotiate a complex ontological terrain within which competing “civilizing projects” (Harrell 1995) have worked for over a century to shape upland peoples via discursively constructed notions of authenticity and modernity. Lahu performers engage in this negotiation via complex bundles of signs.

    Drawing on an analysis of musical performances, as well as interviews and fieldwork with Lahu performers, this poster will explore Lahu performers negotiation of multiscalar geopolitical contexts. Taking stance as “a crucial point of entry in analyses that focus on the complex ways in which speakers manage multiple identities” (Jaffe 2009) this poster explores the semiotic production, or taking, of variously recognizable or legible stance by Lahu performers as a performative claim to indigeneity, or indigeneities.

    The embrication of distinct civilizing projects both complicates and calls attention to the racio-ontologics” (Shankar 2019) which inform performances of Lahu-ness. Attending to elements of “stance objects” (Jaffe 2009) in the work of two specific groups of Lahu performers located in Yunnan, PRC illuminates this complexity. The poster will consist of still images and brief descriptions of the presuppositions and entailments of multimodal stance-taking. Links to videos of the performances will be included on the poster and visitors will be invited to leave short notes on their own experience of the signs occurring in each case.

    Professor, Dept of Anthropology, Western Washington University.

Person-indexing Registers

Constantine V. Nakassis

This poster explores person-indexing registers, cases where one of the register’s indexical targets is an individuated, singular entity in its putatively historical particularity. While prototypically this is a person, the range of cases of such enregisterment is broad: brands, kula shells, chatbots, among other individuables, may all be so enregistered.

  • Most of the sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology literature has focused on register phenomena that involve social typifications of elements of the speech event, in particular, on social personae (a social type of personhood). In contrast to these persona-indexing registers, we can discern what we might call person-indexing registers. Person-indexing registers differ from persona-indexing registers in that one of the virtual targets of the register’s model of semiosis is an individuated, singular entity in their putatively historical particularity (a social token, as it were). While this is prototypically a person, the range of cases of such enregisterment are broad: celebrities, brands, kula shells, heirloom objects, AI chatbots, among other individuables, may all be so enregistered. While similar in many regards in their semiotics to persona-indexing register, person-indexing registers interestingly differ in that signs enregistered to the entity they index (e.g., a star, a brand, a biographical individual, etc.) are often construed not only as proper-to that entity but, in certain cases, “their” property. This shifting of indexicality to propriety to property makes person-indexing enregisterment central to certain political economies of semiosis. Ultimately, however, persona- and person-indexing registers should not be thought of as two kinds of register but rather two dimensions of enregisterment that are in a constant dialectic traffic, built up out of and constantly transforming into each other.

    Constantine V. Nakassis is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.

Deaf Society and Deaf-hearing Kinship: Past, Present, and Future Imaginaries

E. Mara Green

This poster explores Nepali Sign Language (NSL) signers’ approaches to language learning by both other deaf people and deaf people’s hearing children. What understandings of community, kinship, and futurity animate signers’ commitments and practices? How might these in turn inform scholarly accounts of language socialization and intra- and intergenerational communication?

  • This poster focuses on how deaf Nepali Sign Language (NSL) signers talk about and negotiate language learning by other deaf people, on the one hand, and deaf people’s hearing children, on the other. NSL is a young signed language that has emerged and conventionalized since the 1966 founding of Nepal’s first permanent deaf school. It is the language of what NSL signers call deaf society: robust networks of deaf people involved in deaf schools and organizations and the communities that both scaffold and extend beyond these institutions. As deaf society grows, so do the number of deaf couples with hearing children. Grounded in long-term ethnographic research, I show that NSL signers consider themselves responsible for facilitating other deaf people’s entrance into deaf society and shared spaces of accessible language. Drawing on more recent research, I explore how this normative value compares with the more variable ways that deaf people approach how hearing children with deaf parents (should) learn language(s), including NSL, Nepali (spoken and written), and English (spoken and written). Some deaf parents, for example, emphasize communicating with their hearing children in sign from infancy; others express that their children should focus first on formal education and learn to sign later on. What kinds of imaginings of, and ethical commitments to, deaf sociality, parental responsibility, and futurity shape deaf parents’ practices and beliefs? And how might these practices and beliefs in turn inform linguistic anthropological accounts and imaginings of language socialization, multimodality and multilingualism, and intra- and inter-generational communication?

    E. Mara Green is an assistant professor at Barnard College, Columbia University.

The Spanish Civil War Never Ended: Examining How Spanish Memory Activists are Reimagining Fascist Objects

Alanna Lawhon

This research explores how the ideological battles from the Spanish Civil War persist, by examining how neo-fascist historical narratives are co-produced through language and sites of memorialization, and how they may be reimagined and disrupted. It also highlights ongoing memory struggles, including repurposing fascist objects and counter-memorialization efforts.

  • Though the Spanish Civil War (SCW) is commonly thought to have ended in 1939, my research tracks the ways in which the ideological battles of the SCW are still being fought in contemporary Spain. By engaging with anthropological theories about history and power (Trouillot 1995), nationalism, and language materiality, I argue that historical narratives are co-produced by the language and monuments that the memory cultures use and identify with. Neo-fascist and leftists’ respective rhetorical strategies and sites of memorialization serve as “echoes” that tie the here-and-now to then-and-there of Spain’s fascist past (Love 2023). This research demonstrates how historical narratives are produced, not just what they are, as well as the ways in which they may be reimagined and disrupted. Through ethnographic research in Spain, I found that fascist objects are being reimagined through the practice of asynchronous, dialogic graffiti at fascist grave sites, justice and inclusion projects at archival institutions, and the creation of counter monuments. Spain's memory battles are tied to a larger, transnational memory movement, situating this research within a global reckoning about authoritarianism and history.

    Alanna Lawhon is a graduate student at New York University. She is currently working towards her masters in Interdisciplinary Studies.

Imaginaries of Displacement in Militarized Global Apartheid

Hilary Parsons Dick

This poster visualizes human displacement within militarized global apartheid (MGA), a network of immigration deterrence regimes that criminalize Global South displacement. It engages the production of both the white supremacist imaginaries that enable MGA and the anticolonial imaginaries that refuse it. The presentation includes interactive digital content with accessibility features.

  • This poster will visualize human displacement within militarized global apartheid (MGA). MGA is a worldwide amalgam of immigration deterrence regimes initiated in the 1970s by Global North policy makers in response to increases in the transnational movements of Black, Indigenous, and other minoritized people from the Global South. Today, MGA policies—instantiated in border walls, mass detention, cybersecurity—spread far into the interiors of Global North nation-states; the Global South nation-states that assist the southward expansion of MGA; and the sovereign Indigenous lands these nation-states dissect. Champions of MGA have justified its expansion by strategically (re)producing white supremacist imaginaries that racialize Black, Indigenous, and other minoritized people from the Global South as inherently dangerous, criminal beings. Displaced people from the Global South reckon with MGA through the (re)articulation of anticolonial imaginaries, which assert of the absolute value and fundamental humanity of Black, Indigenous, and Brown life. In crafting these imaginaries, displaced people not only variously subvert, repurpose, and/or ignore the predicates of MGA. They dynamically engage the rich archive of anticolonial discourse produced by throughout the long night of white extraction.

    The poster will depict these imaginative engagements with interactive textual, visual, and linked digital content (videos, images, question and answer exchanges) made available through QR codes. To improve the accessibility, I will work with one of my research assistants, who is a sign language interpreter, to develop ASL content for the videos. We will also investigate using braille and ASL specific fonts on the physical poster.

    Hilary Parsons Dick is an Associate Professor of International Studies in the Department of Historical and Political Studies at Arcadia Univeristy.

“That Is Not Our Version of Feminism”: Examining Modern Discourses of Feminism in Quebec

Robin Turner

This talk delineates contemporary conceptualizations of feminism in the Quebec imaginary that engage with race, class, and immigration. By examining the Quebec government’s rejection of intersectional feminism, I argue that political and social discourses of feminism in Quebec are inseparable from the historical tension between Quebec nationhood and Canadian federalism.

  • This talk delineates contemporary conceptualizations of feminism in the Quebec imaginary that engage with race, class, and immigration. By examining the Quebec government’s rejection of intersectional feminism, I argue that political and social discourses of feminism in Quebec are inseparable from the historical tension between Quebec nationhood and Canadian federalism.

    In February 2023, Representative Ruba Ghazal of Québec Solidaire (QS) called for support of intersectional gender analysis to “defend the rights of all women in Québec”. Ghazal’s motion ignited a debate among lawmakers regarding the conceptualization of feminism as a government policy. The proposal was ultimately shot down by the majority Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) before ascending to debate on the floor of the salon Bleu. Minister for the Condition of Women, Representative Martine Biron explained: “Ce n’est pas notre vision du féminisme” – That is not our vision of feminism.

    Biron’s comment generated extensive coverage and debate in major news outlets for weeks following the meeting. Quebec media was overtaken by conflicting understandings of what intersectionality is and what it has to do with feminism. Some compared the rejection of intersectional analysis to Gender-based Analysis Plus, or GBA Plus, an analytical process adopted and implemented by the Canadian Government since 2005, leading some to question: Is intersectionality a Canadian principle but not a Quebecois principle? Using analytical methodology proposed by Wortham and Reyes (2015), I explore dialogic and competing discourses of feminism through a sociopolitical lens informed by sociological tradition unique to modern Quebec.

    Robin Turner (she/her) is a PhD candidate in French Linguistics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Reclaiming and Resisting “Indian-ness”: Peer Socialization and the Coloniality of Digital Gaming in Southern Peru

Benjamin Smith

The poster offers an account of how young men in Southern Peru contend with the coloniality of the gaming world through practices of peer socialization in internet-mediated play. In doing so, they both resist and partially reclaim stereotypes of “Indian-ness.”

  • The poster offers an account of how young men in Southern Peru contend with the coloniality of the digital gaming world through practices of peer socialization in internet-mediated play. The practice that reveals this work of socialization is their usage of epithets that tie gaming incompetency to a hierarchized and racialized rendering of skillfulness, a distinctly colonial vision of “Indian-ness.” Drawing on an analysis of these usages in recorded game play, the analysis reveals these processes of language socialization to be a very specific kind of ideological project: in these moments, the process of learning and growth in gaming takes shape as a set of strategies for avoiding negatively evaluated, immature and less fully competent states, states racialized as Indian. In doing so, these young men resist the language of racism: they re-deploy it as a form of playful, solidarity-generating humiliation and use it to re-imagine the potency of incompetent game play.

    Associate Professor of Human Development, Sonoma State University

Aura is Practice: How “Sustainable” Thatched Roofs in Japan Are Made

Zi Yang Lim

How do thatched roofs in Japan exude an aura of sustainability? Aura here is understood as a phenomenological aesthetic ideology. This study aims to move beyond an emphasis on state apparatus constructing aesthetic ideology or presupposed essence, to consider the ever-emergent processes and excesses that generate auratic power and influence.

  • Thatched roofs are a locus to understand development processes. Thatched roofs in Japan are considered timeless sustainable symbols while many thatched roofs in Southeast Asia, for example, are representative of moral and economic depravity. I aim to understand how thatched roofs in Japan exude an aura of sustainability. Aura here is understood as a phenomenological aesthetic constituted of both rhetorical and mechanical elements. (Bauman 2016) This study aims to move beyond an emphasis on state apparatus constructing aesthetic ideology to consider the ever-emergent processes and excesses that generate auratic power and influence. Aura is not an essence that thatched roofs in Japan are presupposed to have. I argue that aura is practice – of reiterative activities that produce and reproduce aura. Some examples of these activities include fencing rice paddy fields, loading trucks, and thatching and repairing roofs notwithstanding. This study will examine “modes of objectification” (Keane 2003:423) to understand how these activities resonate and aggregate to exude aura.

    Zi Yang is a Master's student in Anthropology at the University of Chicago, advised by Professor E. Summerson Carr.

"Ы" is for "Ынтымак" (Solidarity): Monumentalizing Kyrgyz Identity and Script Politics in Bishkek

Ashley McDermott and Asel Nurdinova

How did "Ы," a character that also occurs in Russian script and is common in most forms of Cyrillic, become such a salient marker of Kyrgyzness that it was chosen to become a monument? The present paper explores "Ы" and its role in contemporary Bishkek language and identity politics.

  • In 2024 Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan unveiled a new monument in honor of the city's 146th birthday–a sculpture of the letter "Ы". "Ы" is featured in the park "Ынтымак" (solidarity) and is accompanied by a QR code that links to information about the country. How did "Ы," a character that also occurs in Russian script and is common in most forms of Cyrillic, become such a salient marker of Kyrgyzness that it was chosen to become a monument? The present paper explores "Ы" and its role in contemporary Bishkek language and identity politics– its changing usages and understandings as an indirect index of Kyrgyz nationalism and patriotism, a shibboleth for Kyrgyzness in a multinational post-colonial state (Ochs 1990, Hill 2005), yet also a marker of shared post-Soviet identity due to histories of Soviet language policies (Akiner 1990; Grenoble 2003; Landau and Kellner-Heinkele 2001).

    Real and imagined linguistic differences are often used to police and construct social boundaries–like between combatants in war, victims and perpetrators of genocide (Turits 2002), socioeconomic classes (DeGraff 2020) citizens and non-citizens (McNamara 2005). "Ы" is also only interpretable as a shibboleth by those who can rely on the local context of Russian and Kyrgyz codemixing and language ideologies. Recent changes in state language policy perceived to be more "pro-Kyrgyz" have been met with rebukes from the Russian Federation. Thus "Ы" is the safest choice for a Kyrgyz monument, as it does not directly index Kyrgyzness for those outside of Kyrgyzstan.

    Ashley McDermott is a Doctoral Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Michigan.

    Asel Nurdinova is an independent researcher from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan interested in the intersection of family language policy, discourses of language endangerment, and institutional language maintenance projects in Central Asia. She holds a BA from the American University of Central Asia and an MS from the Diplomatic Academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Kyrgyz Republic.

“You Are Already Dead”: On Signing Rockets and Semiotic Perpetration

Janet McIntosh

This poster explores the contemporary dynamic of writing messages on missiles and rockets, sometimes authored by Americans and destined for Gaza or Russia. I analyze the semiotic perpetration involved in these long-distance speech acts that rely on violence to make their utterance complete.

  • People have written taunts on deadly munitions since the ancient Greeks. In recent years, this tradition has gained visibility in conflicts supported by U.S.-supplied arms. Across Israel, soldiers and civilians have used sharpies to scrawl names, jokes, and more on missiles bound for Gaza. Politicians—including Americans—have shared images on social media of themselves inscribing messages on Israeli and Ukrainian missiles. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs have raised funds for the Ukrainian resistance by inviting foreign supporters, especially Americans, to pay for messages written on rockets aimed at Russia. In this poster, I analyze several examples of these long-distance speech acts, which have inspired widespread civilian participation (cf. Li 2024) in what might be described as a form of “semiotic perpetration.”

    The stances (Jaffe 2009) and participation frameworks (Goffman 1981) reflected in the writings on these rockets vary, with an array of implications. Some are inscribed with “dedications” to those who died at the hands of the enemy, while others are sardonically sent as a “present” to the same enemy. Many messages interpellate the enemy as a monolithic and inherently guilty figure, rendering them ungrievable (cf. Butler 2010). The spectral addressee, doomed never to read the words, is invoked solely to be condemned by the inscription. Other inscriptions rely on violence to serve as the punchline of a joke. If language and violence are so ontologically entwined in these speech acts, how do the authors of such messages understand their own relationship to geopolitical violence?

    Janet McIntosh is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University.

Grafting: How Public Messages Gain and Lose Authority

Susan Gal

Political messaging depends on mottos and slogans. “Grafting” names the semiotic process by which new uses ride on established political slogans, strengthening the new use with the authority of the earlier one, which is thereby corrupted. Not appropriation, nor parody, graftings critically and powerfully transform our world of public argumentation.

  • “My body, my choice” was a motto that declared support for abortion rights in the 1970s. But during COVID-19, it justified refusals of masking. The surprising new use equated two disparate discourses and grafted one argument onto another: reproduction was equated with epidemiology; individual bodily autonomy was equated with danger to whole communities. "Responsibility to protect" (R2P), the international human rights slogan, was used to justify Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Humanitarianism was equated with military discourse; protection equated with attack. The Vatican's claim that the term gender is a form of "colonization to destroy our culture" is yet another, if more complex, example. These new and contrasting meanings are "grafted" onto -- they ride on -- expressions and mottos that are already firmly authorized and persuasive for a population. The new usage undermines the earlier values, e.g. bodily autonomy, state sovereignty, gender as an ethics of equality. As in botany, a grafted shoot draws sustenance (here: authority) from the stem on which it is implanted, but it serves its own growth, not that of the stem. Discourse registers or genres that are used in grafting undergo a particular kind of recontextualization: they oppose the values that the stem discourse evokes, while riding on the stem's established authority. This is not Bakhtinian tradition, not mere appropriation, nor American stiob [parody.] "Grafting" is a semiotic process of authorization, ubiquitous in political messaging, and often deceptive. What are other examples? How does it work in interaction? What are the effects?

    Departments of Anthropology and Linguistics, University of Chicago.

Talking with Dogs: Therapeutic Encounters with Canine Laborers

Summerson Carr and Katherine Gibson

It is increasingly common to find dogs working as caregivers in U.S. human service settings, where their co-workers and clients experience them as therapeutic precisely because they don’t use language as humans do. This growing practice reveals how people imagine language’s limits, non-linguistic communication, and interspecies exchange.

  • It is increasingly common to find dogs contracted as part- and full-time caregivers in U.S. human service settings, such as hospitals, schools, residential treatment centers and courtrooms. These canine workers are widely regarded as exemplary caregivers, with human co-workers and clients alike explicitly associating dogs’ extraordinary therapeutic efficacy with their communicative capacities. More particularly, these working dogs are imagined and experienced as especially therapeutic communicators/caregivers precisely because they don’t use language as humans do. Indeed, this growing practice of using dogs in human service environments reveals how people imagine the limits of language, the non-linguistic elements of communication, and the possibilities of interspecies exchange.

    Drawing on over three years of field research, which follows working dogs from their early training through to their retirement, this poster will show—through text, photographs and linked video—how dogs are trained and deployed as caregivers in US human service settings. The poster will show the significant labor involved in facilitating the kinds of canine communication that can be recognized as an innately therapeutic encounter, which paradoxically involves selectively erasing signs of that labor. Finally, the poster will outline our larger argument about how communicative rituals are crafted and institutionalized by way of—rather than in spite of—the (perceived) opacity of others’ minds, theorized here as a critical cartography of imagination.

    Summerson Carr is Faculty, University of Chicago, Anthropology and Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy and Practice. Katherine Gibson is a Post-Doc, University of Chicago, Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy and Practice.

Analyzing and Teaching the Language of Racism

Christina Leza

This presentation reviews research and pedagogical strategies employed in three college courses designed to teach students how to conduct and communicate about linguistic anthropological analyses of racist discourses. It explores the challenges to and best practices for communicating about systemic racism in and out of the classroom.

  • In The Everyday Language of White Racism, Jane H. Hill states, “The task of cultural analysis is to penetrate the contradictions and inconsistencies that underlie the seeming coherence and validity of our worlds. When these worlds turn out to be damaged and damaging, as is the case in a cultural world centered on White racism, cultural analysis can help us understand how to change them.” This presentation reviews research and pedagogical strategies employed in three college courses designed to teach students how to conduct and communicate about cultural analyses that penetrate the contradictions and inconsistencies of white supremacist discourses. The presentation explores the challenges to and best practices for communicating about the relationship between racism, language, and society in these courses which address the role of language in the production and reproduction of racism. Drawing from both research studies focused on racial discourses and pedagogical techniques developed through teaching about the language of racism, Christina Leza provides an overview of key concepts and theories that shape academic understandings of racism and language. In addressing the challenges to teaching in this area, Leza offers new theoretical concepts for effectively communicating about the social reproduction of racism. As students in these classes learn about the role of language in sustaining systemic racism, they also learn theoretical language that is useful to engaging in antiracist discourse. Examples of community-engaged dialogic activities and student research projects are highlighted as critical activities for students to develop skills in antiracist communication outside of the classroom.

    Christina Leza is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Colorado College and an editor for the second edition of Jane H. Hill’s The Everyday Language of White Racism.

“Jobs in the Blobs Sector”: Genre Excess, Linguistic Landscape, and Joey Harrison’s Ludic Louisville

Karl Swinehart

A former copyeditor turned taxi driver brings the genre conventions of the headline to satirical ends in texts painted in the city’s liminal and marginal spaces. Considering wordplay, genre, and the lifecourse, this presentation situates these texts with respect to other traditions of ludic address within urban linguistic landscapes.

  • The poetic interventions of Joey Harrison have become recognizable for many throughout the city of Louisville, Kentucky. Painted on plywood covering windows of abandoned buildings or along barriers of construction sites, these texts can be found throughout marginal and liminal corners of the city. Harrison’s texts are graffiti-like for their medium and position within the city’s linguistic landscape, yet unlike graffiti for their hyper legibility and explicitly poetic form. Arranged in irregular font with creative kerning, these ludic texts satirize registers of commercial address and self-help uplift. Their composition betrays their author’s background as a former copyeditor, a biography which also illuminates trajectories of print cultures in the early 21st century: a former copyeditor turned warehouse worker and taxi driver brings the genre conventions of the headline to satirical ends on the blank pages found in urban expanse. Considering wordplay, genre, and the lifecourse, this presentation situates these texts with respect to other traditions of ludic address within urban linguistic landscapes.

    Karl Swinehart is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Comparative Humanities at the University of Louisville.

“So…How Does This Work, Exactly ?”: The Counterintuitive and Cooperative Subject Formations of Learning through Role-Play

Ed'd Luna Bhagwandeen

How are shared political imaginaries co-constructed in real-time? Using lamination and co-operative action (Goodwin, 2013; 2017) as conceptual antecedents, I analyze how contradictions in speech and nonverbal communication between near-peers contribute to their collaborative achievement of an otherwise reality in video of a role-play activity at a student union organizer training.

  • This poster presentation features the exploration of role-play as a site for distributed imagination and worldmaking in the context of a student union organizer training. Drawing on Goodwin’s notions of lamination (2013) and co-operative action (2017), the analysis demonstrates how participants collaboratively construct and sustain an “otherwise reality” through verbal and nonverbal communication. The poster focuses on the micro-level interactions between an experienced organizer (Victoria) facilitating the training and a novice organizer (Kunal).

    The presentation will address the following questions:

    How do seemingly mundane actions, like nodding, gaze, and adjustments in physical proximity, support the notion of a socially distributed imagination, collaboratively shaping the emergent reality and talk of the role-play interaction?

    How do participants co-operatively navigate between different frames of reality (lamination) during role-play, and how do these shifts contribute to learning and subject formation?

    How does shared interiority, achieved and recalled through a repertoire of co-operative nonverbal communication, facilitate the development of a confident organizer subjectivity in a novice?

    This presentation draws on video data to analyze the complex interplay of real-world identities and assumed roles in role-play interaction. By attending to subtle nonverbal cues that contradict in-role speech, the analysis reveals how participants collectively imagine and bring into being a new social reality through shared fantasy. This study contributes to a broader understanding of imagination as a collaborative process embedded in social interactions, and it demonstrates how role-play can be a transformative modality for learning and the development of political consciousness.

    Ed'd Luna Bhagwandeen is a doctoral candidate at the Stanford Graduate School of Education.

Let Kids Test Their Way Out of the Mountains: Chronotopes of Equity and Educational Competition in Internet Education across Southwest China

Zhenzhou “Andy” Tan

Based on long-term fieldwork in an Internet education network across Southwest China, this paper draws on the concept of "cultural chronotopes" to explore the motivations for spatiotemporally marginalized communities in China to further commit to educational competition, and the consequences thereof, despite the 2021 state policy to relieve educational burden.

  • This paper explores the motivations for spatiotemporally marginalized communities in China to further commit to educational competition, and the consequences thereof, despite the 2021 state policy to relieve educational burden. Through 12 months of fieldwork between 2023-24 at a participating public middle school in a county seat in Guangxi, I focus on an Internet education network aimed at making quality education at a famous metropolitan school more accessible across the mountainous Southwest China. Since joining the network in 2015, the once obscure county-level school has achieved remarkable success in high-stakes entrance exams and region-wide fame. This paper concerns a two-level dilemma at the school against the backdrop of success. Firstly, I detail how increasingly higher aspirations are instilled while students and teachers cope with the daily felt experience of anxiety and fatigue. Secondly, I observe how school officials debate psychological well-being measures as they make sense of exam performance fluctuations in recent years. This paper argues that this dilemma can be productively understood through the linguistic anthropological concept of “cultural chronotopes” as affective and moral orienting devices. I trace the circulation of discourses about “letting kids test their way out of the mountains” within the network, especially their uptakes in daily interactions by local participants. I thereby analyze the semiotic formation of the “mountains vs. various outsides” chronotope, the legitimation of educational equity as primarily out-and-upward mobility within that spacetime, and how this ideology of bridging urban-rural gaps incentivizes further institutional and individual commitment to educational competition for equity.

    I am a linguistic anthropology PhD candidate at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY).

‘Science’ Anxiety and the Anthrozoological Imaginary

Stasha Arifin Wong

This paper explores how anthrozoology imagines ‘science,’ by examining the technical language and performative work of key anthrozoologists. In my reading of a chapter in the Handbook on Animal-Assisted Therapy, I analyze the semiotic transformations through which a particular imagination of science is stabilized and anxiously guarded, to the exclusion of otherwise approaches.

  • ‘People who take a critical studies point of view tend to have more of a political agenda than people who are in anthrozoology. . . they use longer words and they cite Foucault, French European intellectuals whose names I can’t pronounce very well, and I don’t understand much of what they write to be honest with you.’ This paper contends with the boundaries that scholar, Hal Herzog (2021), raises between the ‘scientific’ disciplines of anthrozoology and cognates such as Animal-Assisted Interactions (AAI) on the one hand, and what he denotes as ‘critical studies’ on the other. Herzog is not the first to draw such a purifying distinction. Nevertheless, I am interested in his scholarly incuriosity. It comes partly as a consequence of institutionalized practices but also, I suggest, from an anxiety that permeates Herzog’s particular imagining of ‘science’. I read Herzog’s comment alongside a chapter in the Handbook on Animal-Assisted Therapy, a key publication in AAI research and practice, examining its exhortation for researchers to ‘reimagine the world with fresh perspective’––this renewed imagination necessitated by the field’s ‘dire need’ for ‘clarity’, ‘direction’, and empirical grounding in ‘substantial evidence-based research’. I consider the performative work (Butler 1993) that the authors and Herzog engage in, through which the ‘science’ of anthrozoology is anxiously imagined to be at a critical, decisive moment. Extending Janet Roitman’s analysis of crisis, I frame this paper’s question as such: How does anthrozoology as a project (Tsing 2001, Appel 2019) imagine ‘science’? What happens to alternate approaches to studying human-animal interactions, when an anthrozoological imagination of ‘science’ yolks itself to a particular historical trajectory and telos?

    PhD Student at University of Chicago department of Anthropology.

Townspeople vs. Mountainpeople: Anchoring Fractal Recursivity and Language Ideologies in Gangu, China

Irene Yi

This poster uses semiotic analysis to explore an ethnographically relevant axis of differentiation, Mountain vs. Town, within rural Gangu county (Gansu province, China). This geographical contrast attracts other distinctions (in modernity, morality, etc.), and is reflected in ideologies about the different ways Mountainpeople and Townspeople speak.

  • Ganguhua, a dialect mutually unintelligible with Standard Mandarin, is spoken in Gangu county, Gansu province, in Northwestern China. Through conducting sociolinguistic and ethnographic fieldwork (63 Ganguhua sociolinguistic interviews; participant observation; field notes), I found that ideologies people held toward Ganguhua—and the different ways people speak—are semiotically mediated by locally-relevant geographical distinctions.

    Following Irvine and Gal’s (2019) framework of axes of differentiation, master tropes, and fractal recursivity, I argue that the geographical distinction between Gangu’s flat, town areas and mountainous peripheries anchor an ethnographically relevant axis of differentiation: Town vs. Mountain. The contrast between modernity vs. traditionalness becomes the master trope, encompassing specific qualitative distinctions along this axis (educated/uneducated, fashionable/unfashionable, etc.). These fractally recurse along each side of the axis: “new town” vs. “old town”, “front mountain” vs. “back mountain”.

    Linguistically, this axis attracts characteristic contrasts like morality, and how it connects to speech. Mountainpeople, because they live in harsher climates, are described by Townspeople in metalinguistic commentary as “hardy and resilient”, but to a degree where hardiness has made them “sneaky [against Townspeople]”. By using descriptions of speech like “[speaking] intonation turning around and around, like in circles” and “slippery [talk], tricking townspeople”, Mountainpeople are assigned a moral attribute, and their speech undergoes rhematization, iconically linking speech patterns (variable intonation) with geographical origin (windy roads, uneven terrain).

    Through semiotic analysis, I ask: How does Ganguhua connect to each level of contrast? And, how do modern discourses of geographic mobility in the region shift this axis and its contrasts?

    Irene Yi is a third-year PhD Candidate in the Linguistics Department at Stanford University.

The Feeling of the Sound: Qualitative Differentiation Among House Dancers in Singapore

Yin Lin Tan

How do dancers construct differences between qualities? Using data from ethnographic fieldwork conducted with house dancers in Singapore, I examine the most relevant qualities for dancers and argue that semiotic resources referring to qualisigns of dance are more consistent and legible when explicitly contrasted along axes of differentiation.

  • How do dancers construct differences between qualities? Drawing together work from sociolinguistic variation (Zhang 2008), qualia (Harkness 2013), and semiotics (Irvine and Gal 2019), I argue that semiotic resources referring to qualisigns of dance are more consistent and legible when explicitly contrasted along axes of differentiation. That is, the specific embodied and linguistic practices used to do qualities, like fastness and slowness, are more iconic of their relevant qualities when expressed within contrastive discourse structures (e.g., “It’s A, not B”) than outside of them. The data come from ethnographic fieldwork conducted with house dancers in Singapore, who improvise their dance by matching the “feeling of the sound” and describe music and movement using sensuous words like fast and slow. These descriptions highlight that dancers actively engage in qualitative differentiation, in which qualities are picked out as socially significant and framed as distinct from one another. In this poster, I analyze video interviews where the dancers freestyle dance to a song and discuss their choice of movements. I use contrastive discourse structures as a starting point to examine the most relevant qualities for these dancers and explore how semiotic resources across multiple modalities are used to differentiate these qualities. By focusing specifically on the fast-slow distinction, I analyze prosodic patterns, like speech rate, and embodied practices, like gestures and physical demonstrations, to show how semiotic resources used to refer to fastness and slowness differ depending on whether an explicit contrast is present in the discourse.

    Yin Lin Tan is a third-year PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University; she is also affiliated with the Department of English, Linguistics, and Theatre Studies at the National University of Singapore.

Talking to Migrants Like Children: Linguistic Indexing of Childhood at a Migrant-Focused Adult English Literacy Program in North Carolina

Ezekiel Kempster

This presentation is a linguistic analysis of the use of motherese (baby talk) and other typically child-directed speech registers with non-native English speaking adults at a migrant-focused adult English literacy program in western North Carolina. I analyze language used to and about the students as well as physical signs in the classroom which directly and indirectly index the adult students as children or having the same capabilities and intelligence as children. This is an important critique on a cultural phenomenon of treating non-native English speaking adults as being something other than adults.

  • This presentation is an analysis of the use of features of motherese and other baby talk speech registers with non-native English speaking adults at a migrant-focused adult English literacy program in North Carolina. The ethnographic and linguistic data was gathered through attending 3 hour classes once a week over a 9 week period, across the offered 4 levels of literacy education at the Rural County Literacy Council. The data suggests that through the use of language and physical signs, the instructors, staff, and program director at the Rural County Literacy Council both directly and indirectly linguistically indexed their adult students as children. The findings are significant because across the existing adult SLA literature, the use of motherese and baby talk registers is not being suggested as best practice for adult language instruction, implying that the use of this register is not out of necessity for instruction, but rather a result of something else. This data possibly speaks to a larger cultural phenomenon of viewing non-native English speaking adults as less capable or intelligent than native English speaking adults, hence the choice to speak to them as if they are young children.

    Ezekiel Kempster is a recent MA graduate from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (December 2024 graduation).

Grillz in the Digital Sphere: Imagining Identity Beyond Materiality

Asia Bertoli

Grillz, rooted in hip-hop culture, exemplify imagination’s role in reshaping identities and cultural artifacts. This study investigates their transformation into global symbols, challenging postcolonial legacies, gender norms, and digital commodification. By bridging materiality and discourse, grillz reveal the imaginative processes shaping collective futures and alternative social imaginaries.

  • Grillz, oral adornments originating in African-American and Latino hip-hop subcultures, have evolved into potent symbols of identity, resistance, and transformation. This paper explores the dual imaginaries encoded in grillz, tracing their trajectory from markers of hyper-masculinity and defiance to tools of gender subversion, innovation, and global fashion. Drawing on semiotic analysis, digital discourse, and ethnographic interviews, this study examines grillz as dynamic cultural artifacts that mediate between materiality, identity, and imagination.

    Grillz embody the negotiation of postcolonial legacies and contemporary aesthetics, challenging traditional binaries of nature and culture, masculinity and femininity. Through their adoption by women and non-binary individuals, grillz subvert hegemonic gender norms, offering a platform for performative self-expression. Concurrently, the digital sphere amplifies the visibility of grillz, where Instagram aesthetics and social media discourses frame them as both symbols of individual creativity and commodified objects in the global marketplace.

    By investigating the interplay of grillz as physical and digital signs, this work illuminates their role in constructing alternative social imaginaries that resist and reconfigure dominant narratives. What does it mean to imagine empowerment through grillz? How do they navigate the tensions between heritage and modernity, subversion and commodification? These questions underscore the transformative potential of grillz as vehicles for imagining new identities and collective futures. This research contributes to broader discussions on imagination as a discursive and non-discursive process that shapes cultural artifacts and social realities.

    Asia Bertoli is a PhD Student jointly affiliated with the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of Zurich (CH) and the Department of Philosophy and Educational Sciences at the University of Turin (IT), under a co-tutelle agreement.

The Demystifying Language Project

Ayala Fader

The Demystifying Language Project (DLP) is a social justice and research initiative that is imagining new ways to create a public linguistic anthropology. The initiative makes scholarship on the politics of language available in public high school. The poster presents research findings on a writing workshop, the open-access website, and future plans.

  • The Demystifying Language Project (DLP) is a social justice and research initiative that is imagining new ways to create a public linguistic anthropology. The initiative aims to make scholarship on the politics of language available in public high schools, which typically teach only standard or “proper” language. The DLP believes that teachers and students should have access to what anthropologists of language know from our research: that standard language is not necessarily better; it just reflects the language of powerful institutions and people. But to make this happen, anthropologists who study language have to learn from high school students, teachers, and undergraduates how to write in a way that speaks to teen lives.

    This poster presents the ongoing efforts of the DLP. We focus on a 2023 writing workshop, the open educational resource that emerged, our research findings, and future plans. The workshop paired scholars of language with students from two New York City public high schools and undergraduate interns. Using a framework of accompaniment (Arnold 2019), each term worked to transpose (Mena 2022) an existing publication into a short reading.

    The DLP reimagines ways of writing and researching in linguistic anthropology that all too often work as gatekeeping mechanisms. The DLP shows that linguistic anthropologists can learn from high school students, teachers, and undergraduates just as much as they can learn from scholars. Working together, we can form meaningful relationships and create scholarship that makes a difference in the world.

    Ayala Fader is Professor of Anthropology at Fordham University. She is the founding director of the Demystifying Language Project and author of Mitzvah Girls and Hidden Heretics.

Imagining Ethnographic Research as a Community-building Space: Reflections on Polish Refugee Women’s Shared Storytelling

Dominika Baran

Based on a longitudinal study in a network of Polish refugee woman, this poster asks how we can (re)imagine ethnographic research to see researchers and participants as engaged in the shared creation of communities that shape the research project and its goals, and grow and extend beyond the project’s boundaries.

  • Conducting research within one’s own social network, where researcher-participant roles become enmeshed with other aspects of their mutual engagement, is both exciting and challenging – theoretically, methodologically, and ethically (Perrino & Pritzker 2022, Lumsden 2019, Riessman 1993). This poster explores moments of tension, surprise, and disruption in researcher-participant interactions in a longitudinal project on collaborative remembering and narratives of migration within a network of six Polish women living in Anglophone countries. The women, including myself, met as teenage refugees in Italy in 1987 and reconnected on Facebook in 2008. The project combines Facebook messenger group chat conversations spanning 13 years, and recordings from several in-person reunions between 2013 and 2024.

    In the group chat and during reunions, the other women regularly shift the researcher-researched dynamic to that among friends and peers, reposition me variously as the target of teasing or as an interloper in their conversation, or articulate their own interpretations of the project. Through a discourse analysis of several such moments using multimodal tools, this poster explores ways of centering participants’ subjectivities as whole and complex persons coming to the project with their own needs, expectations, and goals, while simultaneously disrupting neoliberal frameworks of claiming ownership or stake-holding in the research process (Heyam 2022, Holborow 2016). Responding to the conference theme, this poster asks how we can (re)imagine ethnographic research to see researchers and participants as engaged in the shared creation of communities that both shape the research project and its goals, and grow and extend beyond the project’s boundaries.

    Dominika Baran is Associate Professor in the English Department and in the Linguistics Program at Duke University.

Peasant Thems Can't Get Dykes: Multilingual Practices in Queer Eastern Romania

Anna-Marie Sprenger

This ethnography explores English usage among queer residents of Iași, Romania, examining its relationship to identity and social networks. Speakers engage with English differently based on their ties to local queer communities, aspirations to migrate, and connections to global queer discourses, highlighting English’s role in navigating identity and belonging.

  • When do queer speakers outside of the anglosphere use English, and how does their usage relate to their identities and social lives? I investigate language ideologies around, and usage of, English among queer residents of Iași, Romania. This ethnography focuses on LGBT adults assigned female at birth residing in Iași, Romania. These speakers exhibit diverse levels of engagement with the “queer community,” and use resources like makeup and tattoos to index different queer identities. The data suggests English usage can be understood through the analytic categories of personae (King 2021) and social networks (Gal 1978). Here, personae represent accumulations of locally relevant practices (Rauniomaa 2003), such as “flexers” who intend to move out of Romania and “flex” their connections to the West through using English, “ambivalents” who are well-known across Romania as organizers but are ambivalent about moving from Iași and use English to engage in global queer discourses, or “gossips” who are as involved as “ambivalents” in local queer life but are adamant on staying in Iași, and are not only proud to avoid English but use stigmatized regional forms in Romanian. Similarly, queer individuals in Iași exhibit variation in their social networks. Preliminary analysis suggests that the size and diversity of networks determine English usage. Those with more local ties to queer individuals pattern differently from those who don’t; individuals less connected to the local queer community often aspire to leave Romania and use English to accomplish this.

    Anna-Marie Sprenger, University of Chicago, PhD Candidate in Linguistics.

“The Science of Things That Aren’t So”: Pathological Science and the Limits of Detection

Eman Elshaikh

This poster explores “pathological science,” a term coined by Langmuir (1953) to describe scientific pursuits lacking objectivity and reproducibility. Through a linguistic anthropology lens, it examines credibility, reproducibility, and the sociopolitical dynamics shaping marginalized scientific fields, using cold fusion as a case study.

  • In 1953, Irving Langmuir introduced the concept of “pathological science,” describing scientific pursuits led by trained professionals marked by lack of objectivity, reliance on anecdotal evidence, and resistance to falsifiability. Such research often involves phenomena at the limits of detection and non-repeatable results. Cold fusion, a long-controversial field, exemplifies the dynamics of “pathological science,” where credibility battles, sociopolitical pressures, and reproducibility challenges intersect. Rather than using “pathological science” to normatively characterize cold fusion, the poster presents a conceptual analysis of the idea of pathological science by using cold fusion as an example. Using a semiotic framework, the poster will highlight how discourses around pathological science shape perceptions of credibility and marginalization in scientific fields. It also makes some suggestions about the the semiotics of detection, replication, and theory in order to unpack the interplay between belief, evidence, and sociopolitical dynamics in science. By addressing how marginalized sciences navigate reproducibility crises and credibility traps, this poster contributes to broader conversations about the ontology and epistemology of science, shedding light on how “pathological” labels impact knowledge production and circulation within and beyond scientific communities.

    PhD Candidate University of Chicago.

Languaging to Trans*form: A Mobile Archive of the Trans*languaging Art Show

Montreal Benesch

This poster is a miniature art show about the relationship fifteen multilingual trans artists have with their languages. It uses multimodal discourse analysis to aesthetically explore the role of (trans)languaging in imagining and creating trans futures with language practices that better connect us to ourselves and to each other.

  • trans*languaging is an artistic collaboration between fifteen multilingual trans artists focused on our relationships with language. This poster is a miniature art show (audio, visual, physical) featuring discursive reflections on (trans)languaging from the artists and zines for conference-goers to take home.

    Linguistics-by-art-show blurs the border between the “inside” and “outside” of academia, bringing aesthetics and emotion to the academy and linguistic concepts to the public, sharing the critical perspective of boundaries taken by frameworks such as trans linguistics (of gender; Zimman, 2020) and translanguaging (of languages; Vogel & García, 2017).

    Multimodal discourse analysis spotlights three themes found throughout the art and reflections. First, (trans)languaging as self-actualization: After growing up speaking Spanish, Avii found English to be “a new tool to grow, fight, and create … [lending] new strength, direction, and ability to cultivate [her] self-actualization.” Second, lack of access to a language and the accompanying linguaculture; third, lack of language to describe the self: Vivian’s “early writing are filled with graphic sense of wrongness … in the absence of language to describe [her] situation.”

    By centering aesthetic data and juxtaposing the part language plays in licensing self- and allo-recognition with the pain of isolation that arises from the lack of language to aid in recognizing and being recognized, this analysis speaks to the impact of language (and its absence) on the lived experiences of trans individuals and its role in imagining and creating trans futures with language practices that better connect us to ourselves and to each other.

    Montreal Benesch is a first year graduate student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Aren’t We All Jane 57821?: Imagining a Future Through Janelle Monae’s Dirty Computer

Alexus Brown

Since 2007, Janelle Monáe has championed Black queer femme perspectives, integrating Afrofuturism in their work. Dirty Computer explores themes of advanced technology, queerness, and state policing of identity, advocating for Black queer futurity and freedom. This paper analyzes Monáe's storytelling through lyrics, examining identity, resistance, and liberation.

  • From the year 2007 when Monáe truly made their mark on the mainstream music world, they have been bringing forth several ideas championing the intersectionality of the struggle of black femmes in the LGBTQ+ community while fashioning within the many themes associated with Afrofuturism. Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer [Emotion Picture] depicts several themes such as advanced technology, mad science, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic, and speculative fiction while showcasing Jane 57821 and how they are a dirty computer because of their queerness, Blackness, and femininity as intersectional conceptions. Drawing from Kelley (2002), Monáe interrogates “what is ‘normal’ and shows us how the state and official culture polices our behavior [regarding] sexuality, gender roles, and social relationships and encourages us to construct a politics rooted in desire” (6). These Afrofuturistic themes presented lend to Monáe’s involvement in envisioning queer Black futurity by being what Kelley (2002) refers to as the poets who imagine the color of the sky (11). Those who disagree with the ideas set forth by the government in Monáe’s imagination are made to be silenced in one way or another. Is one way to avoid this reality to accept the differences between others and coexist with these people? Janelle Monáe would argue that it would be a start to a very long-waged war against the freedom of expression. This paper will be an ethnography of art and discourse analysis of lyrics as we walk through and interrogate the imagery and storytelling in Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer [Emotion Picture].

    I am affiliated with the University of Pittsburgh as an adjunct professor (only FA24) in the Linguistics department and the Social Work department as a Social Scientist (starting SP25).