AAA 2004 Panel Call for Papers: Discourse, War, and Terrorism

[Adam Hodges]

AAA 2004 Panel Call for Papers:  Discourse, War, and Terrorism

Dear colleagues,

I am preparing a panel for the 2004 American Anthropological Association
conference in San Francisco (November 17-21) on Discourse, War, and
Terrorism, and welcome submissions from interested researchers.

The panel’s theme is designed to explore various aspects of language
relating to international terrorism and the Bush administration’s ongoing
war on terror.  My own desire to explore this topic arises from work I have
done on the framing and conceptualization of international terrorism in
presidential discourses through metaphors of war.

Language is a primary tool used in the socio-cultural construction of
identities, ideologies, and frameworks of cultural understanding.  The goal
of this panel is to explore these issues in relation to war and terrorism in
a globalized world.  For example, how are individual and group identities in
times of modern military conflicts or in the wake of terrorist events
constructed through discursive practices?  How are enemies defined and
identified as other?  How does the discursive production of nationalist
ideologies affect the conceptualization of international terrorism?  How do
relations of gender inform discourses of war and terrorism?  What does
Arabic or Arabic inflected English represent or implicate in such
discourses, e.g. what does Arabic index and iconize in Western cultural
understandings of the Arab Middle East?  How are discourses surrounding
terrorism framed by particular religious perspectives, e.g. jihad, crusade,
etc.?  How are identities and ideologies constructed differently with
regards to domestic vs. foreign perpetrators of terrorism?  How do language,
culture and cognition overlap in individual and collective understandings of
terrorism?

This panel is most interested in papers that analyze empirical language data
to explore these topics.  Different methodological paradigms and academic
perspectives are welcome.  An attempt will be made to form a panel that
represents a diverse approach to these topics, drawing from work in
linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, and
socially oriented discourse analysis.  Please address questions and/or send
250-word abstracts to Adam.Hodges at Colorado.EDU by February 1, 2004.
Informal inquiries and expressions of interest are welcome in advance of the
due date.

Sincerely,
Adam Hodges
Department of Linguistics
University of Colorado