32.1970, Confs: Socioling/Switzerland

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-32-1970. Mon Jun 07 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.1970, Confs: Socioling/Switzerland

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Date: Mon, 07 Jun 2021 16:01:57
From: Yvette Bürki [yvette.buerki at rom.unibe.ch]
Subject: Challenging Borders: From Borders/Between Borders

 
Challenging Borders: From Borders/Between Borders 

Date: 11-Nov-2021 - 13-Nov-2021 
Location: Berne, Switzerland 
Contact: Yvette Bürki 
Contact Email: yvette.buerki at rom.unibe.ch 
Meeting URL: https://www.challengingborders.net 

Linguistic Field(s): Sociolinguistics 

Meeting Description: 

Starting at the end of the 1980s, the concept of  borders has been subject to
new interpretations. Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) provided
not only a different way of interpreting borders in literary studies; it also
had a notable impact on cultural studies. Notably for our purposes, the border
concept also received novel treatment in sociolinguistics, thanks to a spatial
shift coming from theoretical proposals in cultural geography, postcolonial
theoretical perspectives, and increasingly a decolonial gaze. What all these
aforementioned perspectives have in common is an understanding of borders not
as lines of demarcation and division, or as symbolizing binaries that oppose
the internal, the known, and the proper to the external, the unknown, and the
foreign (among other oppositions), but rather as complex phenomena. Borders
are peripheral but plural geopolitical spaces, places of convergence and
encounter, as well as cultural and linguistic exchange, inhabited by
contradictions that only appear as such if viewed from the center or if
understood through conventions. Borders have also been represented as crevices
that mediate between space and time (Stang 2018), as hybrid, in-between
spaces, a third space, as Soja (1996) and Bhabha (1994) conceptualize it. In
terms of gender, borders can also be conceived as a fine line between
femaleness and maleness (Zimman 2014). In short, they are discursive spaces in
which linguistic, cultural, ethnic, and gender / sex identities develop,
unfold in their complexity, and challenge the dominant and the conventional.
Thus, as Guizardi et al. (2015) propose, the border can be thought of as both
structure and agency. Lastly, they are spaces deeply traversed by cracks and
fissures that constitute their complexity and, at the same time, their
fragility (Grimson 2005; Wilson & Donnan 1998). Taken as metaphors, such
crevices become ambivalent places that undermine the stability of unitary and
hegemonic discourses (or reinforce them).  

Scholars have shown how dichotomous and binary structures have served as a
convenient and intuitive theoretical construct that also acts as a tool for
analysis, despite its failure in capturing the gray areas, complexity, and
linguistic dynamics of many social phenomena (Bucholtz & Hall 1995; Mendoza
Dentón 1999; Bailey 2007).  On the other hand, scholars continue to question
the extent to which hybridity reshapes categories or even effectively
dissolves them (Catedral 2021, Gal 2018, García & Li 2014). This conference
offers a platform to study and analyze the interstices and grey zones in the
linguistic negotiation of ethnic, class, sex/gender, etc. manifestations and
to rethink how these border zones should be treated theoretically and
methodologically in order to better understand speakers and their practices.

The conference includes the following key themes:

 - Linguistic and sociodiscursive practices in border spaces from a
sociolinguistic, anthropological linguistic, and discourse analysis
perspective. 
 - Borders as a metaphor of integration and differentiation, along ethnic,
cultural, socio-political, generational, gender /sex, and class lines, and in
the corresponding media representation.
 - Theoretical and methodological treatment of categorization in
sociolinguistic, anthropological linguistic and discourse analysis.
 

Keynote Speakers: 

 - David Britain (Universität Bern)
 - Erez Levon (Universität Bern)
 - Norma Mendoza-Denton (University of California)
 - Danae Pérez (Zurich University of Applied Sciences)
 - Virginia Zavala (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú)





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LINGUIST List: Vol-32-1970	
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