[Linganth] AAA panel on typeface and other graphic forms

[Keith Murphy]

Hello!

We are currently organizing a panel for the AAA meetings in Minneapolis 
on voice, stereotyping, and graphic artifacts like typeface, logos, etc. 
The draft abstract is below. If you're interested in participating, 
please send a short description of what you'd like to present by March 
30, 2016 to Keith Murphy (kmmurphy at uci.edu) and Anna Weichselbraun 
(weichselbraun at uchicago.edu).

Thanks!

keith
----------------------
Keith M. Murphy
Associate Professor | Anthropology and Linguistics
University of California, Irvine
Irvine, CA 92697-5100
(949) 824 9234

===

Stereo-types: voicing persons, nations, and evidence through visual 
artifacts

Anna Weichselbraun (Chicago) & Keith M. Murphy (UC Irvine), Co-Chairs

This panel's theme turns on the multiple valences of the stereotype as a 
means of exploring how graphic artifacts---text, letterforms, logos, and 
related visual forms---come to be understood as typical or 
characteristic of particular persons, entities, or concepts. In contrast 
to the cognitivist frameworks that dominate most existing research on 
such graphic signification, these papers draw from and extend the 
Bakhtinian notion of voice (Bakhtin 1983) as it has been taken up in 
linguistic anthropology (Hill 1995, Bauman & Briggs 2003, Agha 2005) to 
investigate precisely how visual artifacts accrue and project 
stereotypical voicing effects in linguistic and language-adjacent 
domains, including internet memes, bureaucratic documents, product 
catalogs, and other graphic media. This approach incorporates attention 
to the qualia (Munn 1986, Chumley & Harkness 2013) that are bundled in 
material object-signs (Keane 2003) which also enables insight into 
moments when previously ignored components of a sign are suddenly 
rendered "visible" in a process of materialization (Nakassis 2013). This 
panel thus draws on recent interest in the material aspects of 
signification in order to ask a number of questions: what are the 
felicity conditions for graphic artifacts that allow these object-signs 
to be apprehended as naturalized icons of entities or concepts? What are 
the metapragmatic limits of awareness for viewers of graphic artifacts? 
How and where do they identify incongruities among graphic artifacts or 
infelicitous effects of such object-signs? When do incongruities call 
into question the authenticity of an object-sign? What can an 
exploration of the materiality of graphic artifacts contribute to an 
understanding of how we communicate across multiple modalities of 
representation? How do graphic ideologies mediate relations between 
texts and the personas they purport to animate? In addition to 
addressing these specific concerns, this panel also seeks to contribute 
to broader anthropological understandings of semiotic processes in the 
realm of the object-sign.

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