CFP "Speaking Across Borders: Language, Mobility and Community" AAA Annual Meetings in SF 2012

[Elizabeth Anne Falconi]

Dear Colleagues,

I wanted to circulate my proposal for a panel entitled "Speaking  
Across Borders: Language, Mobility and Community" that I hope will be  
of interest to some of you.  In any case, please feel free to pass the  
CFP (see below) along to anyone else who might be, and to contact me  
if you have any questions.  The deadline for sending abstract  
submissions to me is March 21st, 2012.

Thanks very much.

All the best,

Elizabeth


Call For Papers:

Speaking Across Borders: Language, Mobility and Community

This panel approaches the 2012 AAA conference theme of Borders and  
Crossings by considering how close attention to the linguistic  
practices of highly mobile populations can help us to understand the  
shape and character of contemporary communities.  Scholars have  
approached the intersection of language and community from a wide  
array of perspectives, often focusing on the frequency and density of  
interactions between speakers with a shared body of cultural and  
linguistic knowledge (see Gumperz 1968, Morgan 2004). However, the  
degree to which such knowledge must be shared, and the methods for  
assessing such knowledge have been the subject of much contention (see  
Irvine 2006).  Other scholars have investigated the connective ties  
that anonymous co-nationals construct with one another through shared  
practices of consumption, and the circulation of discursive forms (see  
Anderson 1991, Spitulnik 1997).  Across various definitions the  
relationship between speaker?s knowledge and patterns of use remain a  
crucial locus for researchers investigating the relationship between  
language and social life.

Recent scholarship on language use within migrant and diasporic  
communities has demonstrated the ways speakers evoke their ties to  
distant places and contexts through talk (see Eisenlohr 2004,  
Baquedano Lopez 2001, Duranti 1997) and use such ties to mark their  
affiliations with and distinctions from other interlocutors, for  
example through the production of ?hemispheric localism?  
(Mendoza-Denton 2008).  Building on such work, this panel seeks papers  
that investigate the relationship between language and conceptions of  
place-based belonging across a range of geographic and social  
contexts.  In addressing this relationship, panelists will be asked to  
consider the following questions:

- How do processes of migration across borders and between places  
impact the ways that people talk to and about one another?
- How do migrants, non-migrants, and disaporic populations talk about  
the places and spaces that they live in, come from and move through?
- What linguistic forms, patterns and genres (e.g. reported speech,  
narrative, verbal art, ritual speech) do speakers draw on to maintain  
social ties across time and space?
- Can linguistic practices, and ideologies travel across social and  
geographic spaces, and how are they made sense of, or translated in  
these new contexts? What kinds of obstacles might interrupt this  
process of transportation?

If you are interested in contributing a paper, please send an abstract  
of 250-300 words, your name, contact information, institutional  
affiliation and a very short author bio to Elizabeth Falconi  
(efalcon1 at swarthmore.edu) by MARCH 21st.

Works Cited:
- Anderson, Benedict. (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the  
Origin and
Spread of Nationalism. Verso Press.
- Baquedano-Lopez, Patricia. (2001) ?Narrating Community in Doctrina Class? in
Narrative Inquiry, Vol. 10 (2).
- Duranti, Alessandro. (1997) ?Indexical Speech Across Samoan Communities? in
American Anthropologist, Vol. 99(2).
- Eisenlohr, Patrick. (2004) ?Temporalities of Community: Ancestral Language,
Pilgrimage, and Diasporic Belonging in Mauritius? in Journal of Linguistic
Anthropology, Vol. 14(1).
- Gumperz, John. (2001 [1968]) ?The Speech Community? in in Linguistic  
Anthropology: A Reader, Wiley Blackwell.
- Irvine, Judith. (2006) ?Speech and Language Community? in  
Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics 2nd edition, (ed.) Keith  
Brown. Oxford: Elsevier.
- Mendoza-Denton. (2008) Homegirls: Language and Cultural Practice  
Among Latina
Youth Gangs, Blackwell Publishing.
- Morgan, Marcyliena. (2004) ?The African American Speech Community:  
Reality and
Sociolinguists? in Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader, Wiley Blackwell.
- Spitulnik, Debra. (1997) ?The Social Circulation of Media Discourse  
and the Mediation of Communities? in Journal of Linguistic  
Anthropology, Volume 6(2).



Elizabeth Falconi
Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Swarthmore College
Phone: (610) 328-8638
Email: efalcon1 at swarthmore.edu