[Linganth] Call for abstracts for a panel on the Semiotics of the Carceral state

[Magnus Pharao Hansen]

*Dear Colleagues,*


Lori Labotka and myself are seeking additional participants for a panel we
are organizing for the 2017 AAAs about Language, Agency, Carceraltiy and
Confinement - preferably from a semiotic perspective. We need abstracts
from any interested scholars before march 20th sent to both:


Lori Labotka:  labotka AT email.arizona.edu

& Magnus Pharao Hansen: magnuspharao AT gmail.com


The topic is described below:



*Language and Agency in Confinement: The Semiotics of the Carceral State*



*Incarceration, considered a hallmark of the modern state (Foucault 1975),
is only one of the multiple forms of confinement employed by the state to
discipline its diverse populations and to enforce its different social
structures and norms. Confinement, understood as the limitation of movement
and personal liberty, is used in the criminal justice system from the
prison’s physical confinement of norm breakers, to community corrections
imposed on those deemed deviant or released from prison, to countless
collateral consequences that extend well after a prison term, each of which
employ technologies of surveillance and various limitations on civil
rights. Confinement is further employed in the management of migrants,
refugees, and "cultural others" through different forms of surveillance and
profiling and in the seemingly benevolent confinement of the poor, the
sick, the mentally ill, or the elderly in conditions that are meant to
provide care but which also pose severe restrictions on personal movement
and choice. Anthropologists have a tradition of studying how humans exert
agency within confined conditions such as imprisonment, internment,
detainment or "deportability" (de Genova 2002, 2007). This panel focuses on
exploring how people who are subject to various forms of confinement use
semiotic means of meaning-making to exert agency within the limitations,
restrictions, and surveillance created by their confinement. It combines
ethnographic approaches to language and semiotics with anthropological
research on resistance as a “diagnostic of power” (Abu-Lughod 1990: 42) to
better understand the power relations forged through the types of
confinement explored and the possibilities for change. We ask: How can
voices be cloaked, re-encoded or re-directed to bypass surveillance or
barriers? How can semiotic systems be devised to create new forms of
sociality and care within confined environments? And how can deliberate
forms of language use and communicative strategies serve as an instrument
with which to work towards liberation? *



The panel fits well with the conference theme of “Why Anthropology Matters”
by interrogating what a linguistic and ethnographic lens can offer in terms
of understanding and resisting the carceral state. It also fits well with
current research from the fields of linguistic, political and educational
anthropology, as well as the anthropology of labor and migration - and the
organizers are particularly interested in papers that are theoretically
grounded in the fields semiotics, phenomenology and the study of language
and communication.





-- 
Magnus Pharao Hansen, PhD.
Postdoctoral Researcher,
Department of Cross-cultural and Regional Studies
University of Copenhagen
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