57th International Linguistic Association Conference (ILA 2012)

Sat Mar 17 21:42:42 UTC 2012

Dear colleagues, 

International Linguistic Association (ILA 2012) conference in New York City is less than a month away.  Please find the attached flyer, and please send it to your colleagues and students.  With three incredible plenary speakers (see abstracts below) and many incredible panels and papers prepared, we look forward to having a truly inspiring conference experience.

Register online here: http://ilaword.org/site/annual-conference/conference-registration/

Please find the abstracts for the plenary lectures posted below and the flyer for the conference/plenaries attached.  We should have a full schedule posted in the next several days.  Check the website for updates.

Sincerely,

 Maureen T. Matarese, Ed.D.
ILA 2012 Conference Chair
Assistant Professor: BMCC, City University of New York
Webpage: http://www1.bmcc.cuny.edu/faculty/fp.jsp?f=                  mmatarese
Email: mtm2025 at columbia.edu
         maureenmatarese at yahoo.com

57th Annual International Linguistic Association Conference (Theme: Language & Institutions)

Plenary Speakers

Dr. Betsy Rymes, University of Pennsylvania, United States

Communicative Repertoires and Institutions

Walk into any school or down the street in any
major metropolitan area. Look around. Listen. Stroll down the hall. Step into a
classroom. Or put on your headphones and listen to the radio. What do you see?
What do you hear? Chances are there are dozens of languages, ways of speaking,
gesturing, looking and dressing in play, many of which are only minimally
understood by you. As a linguist or a language teacher, a professor or a
student, how can you navigate this complex communicative terrain? What are your
responsibilities? How could you possibly be the “expert”? What would you be an
expert of? In this talk I argue for a new understanding of language as a set of
communicative repertoires that fluidly circulate through institutional
contexts. I begin by defining “communicative repertoire” and its historical
precedents. Then, I illustrate a variety of communicative repertoires in
context. I conclude with a few tips for how one might navigate institutions as
apost-modern-repertoire person.

Dr. Srikant Sarangi, Health Communication
Research Centre, Cardiff University, UK

Role-mediated
institutional/professional orders of D/discourse

Some
fifty years ago, Berger and Luckmann argued for a linkage between the study of
institutions (in the broadest sense) and their knowledge structures via role
analysis at both macroscopic and microscopic levels. The concept of role,
however, remains under-utilised among discourse scholars studying the
interactional orders within institutional and professional domains (these
domains need to be kept distinct – conceptually and analytically). The analytic
focus of most previous studies has been on how language is used to categorise
institutional and professional practices.

Starting
with a characterisation of institutional and professional orders, in this
presentation I review the theoretical and performative dimensions of role –
especially drawing upon Merton’s notion of role-set – which can be mapped on to
Goffman’s and others’ attention to situated role-performance, including
activity-specific roles. I use illustrative data from health and social care
settings to underscore how D/discourse analysis in the
institutional/professional sphere remains incomplete without role analysis. I
conclude by reflecting on the ‘role-set’ the discourse analyst inhabits in
their research endeavour. 

Dr. Elana Shohamy, Tel Aviv University, Israel

Linguistic landscape as institutional
discourse: 
Negotiating for greater justice and
contesting marginalization in the public space 

Linguistic
landscape, referring to language displayed in the public space, is often perceived
as a ‘free’ zone that enables language displays and consists of varied
discourses and genres types which are characterized by multimodality and
multilingualism (especially in the ‘bottom-up’ flows). Yet, the ‘free’ public
space is an arena of ideological and political struggle for ownership of space,
representation, and control. Questions about ‘who owns the public space?’ are
at the center of protests and demonstrations currently taking place around the
world demanding social justice and greater participation and voice in the
public space. These movements include demands for justice and participation of
diverse populations such as immigrants and indigenous groups, especially within
the context of uniformity vs. diversity. In this paper I will report on a
number of studies where different groups struggle against the institutionalized
nature of the public space. Each of these studies reflects the struggle for
greater participation. The first study shows citizens demanding greater
representation of marginalized groups in the city of Tel Aviv in city-sponsored
centennial festivities. Two others focus on the marginalization of Arabs in the
city of Jaffa and at an Israeli university where Arabs represent a large
proportion of students. The last focuses on the demands for social and
political participation during demonstrations in the summer of 2011. These
cases demonstrate clearly that institutional talk representing rigid and
homogenous narratives does not go unnoticed; rather it creates feelings of
marginalization that lead to reactions and protests that call for greater
justice and inclusion in the public space, activism, actions, and change.
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