[Linganth] organizing panel for SLA 2020 -- Capitalism's Genre Repertoires

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
I would like to encourage more conversations about the analytic lens 
that genre offers when examining political economy,
and so am organizing a panel for SLA to see who else in our field also 
wants to explore this direction.

If the abstract below appeals at all, please email me at:

igershon at indiana.edu
PLEASE DO NOT email me at my gmail account  -- it is a very unreliable 
way to get in touch with me.

Capitalism's Genre Repertoires
Abstract
This panel proposes a focus on genre repertoires– bounded sets of 
interacting genres (Yates and Orlikowski 1992) – as a starting point for 
exploring how aspects of the new economy become legible and 
circulatable. Linguistic anthropologists have long argued that a focus 
on the interplay of multiple genres is necessary to understanding 
community life and the practical ways meaning is made (Bauman and 
Sherzer 1974). An analytic focus on single genres – such as the memo, 
the meeting, or the media post – have led to local insights on economic 
practices, but it has led to an impoverished understanding of the ways 
genres contribute to creating the social order that capitalism requires 
to function. This realization is fueled by the fact that capitalism for 
the past 30 years has undergone enormous changes: the flexibilization of 
labor, a breakdown in traditional organizational hierarchies, and 
blurred boundaries between self and work, and between private and 
public. Scholars feel the pressing need to understand how both everyday 
people and institutional actors are using established discursive 
techniques and emergent genre assemblages to organize the necessary 
communicative predictability to respond to these fundamental changes. 
This panel highlights three new empirical and analytical sites that will 
give scholars new tools for understanding genres in the new economy: 1) 
the cross-genre formation of categories, 2) genre-centered forms of 
participation, and 3) blurred boundaries between genres and 
technological platforms. These three foci enable linguistic 
anthropologists to explore genres-in-context as integral to how 
capitalist practices sustain themselves both locally and globally.

Best,

Ilana

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/linganth/attachments/20191119/c2f0e778/attachment.htm>