AAA 2011 CFP: The Legacies of Pathological Language Ideologies in Contemporary Ethnographies of Variation and Identity

[Nathaniel Dumas]

Dear Colleagues,

Due to the widespread interest in the panel and responses from many of you, I have decided to accept abstract submissions until March 10th. Also, please note that Arthur Spears has now been named the discussant for the panel. I have re-pasted the description of the panel below for those who may still be interested.

Best,
Nate Dumas

The Legacies of Pathological Language Ideologies in Contemporary Ethnographies of Variation and Identity
Organizer/Chair: Nathaniel Dumas, University of California, Santa Barbara
Discussant: Arthur Spears, City University of New York

The pathologization of communicative practices is a culturally specific and spectral process that often involves contingent relations between multiple social fields (e.g., medical institutions, mainstream media, government bodies, schools). This process ranges from embodied and tacit dispositions of stigmatization to metacommunicative discourses that problematize certain language practices and users, such as the industry of speech-language pathology. Linguistic anthropologists who study sociolinguistic variation and/as identity continue to confront these legacies of modernity (Bauman and Briggs 2003) as they define their objects of inquiry. In forming linguistics and linguistic anthropology, the disciplinary founders constituted certain communicative practices and speakers/hearers as ‘normal’ and, thereby, relevant to study, relegating others to be studied within the pathological realm (Canguilhem 1989). Such scholarly constitutions of variation have not remained stable. Scholars have reconceptualized many communicative practices from the pathological to the dialectal: African American English, pidgins and creoles, code-switching of Spanish and English, and sign languages across the world, to name just a few. New ethnographic research on previously understudied varieties, such as American Stuttering English (Dumas 2010), tactile sign languages (Edwards 2010), and home-sign languages, is continuing this work of categorical shifts alongside research on the aforementioned varieties and languages.

While linguistic anthropologists and scholars in related fields have been successful in this project of redefining within academe, the legacy of pathological language ideologies and their historical institutionalization still looms large in many areas of broader society. In some cases, research participants who speak such varieties even view themselves as pathological speakers and, for various reasons, resist such efforts at reconstituting their identities. Thus, in these communities, our scholarship becomes caught in a politics of representation that finds itself accountable both to intellectual goals and to political goals of sociolinguistic justice within and beyond our fieldsites. This panel aims to understand how our positionality and research on historically-pathologized communities explicitly and implicitly remains in conversation with these previous discourses of pathology. In this vein, this panel solicits papers that engage in a reflexive discussion on the conceptual, methodological and political challenges of doing research in communities that have seen their communicative practices pathologized within and beyond academic institutions. This panel seeks to push forward new lines of inquiry and methodological innovations that retain an ethnosensitivity (Baugh 1983, Alim 2004) towards such communities. Papers may address, but are not limited to, the following:

•	How have the legacies of pathologization, themselves part of the legacies of modernity, constrained as well as provided agentive opportunities for rethinking and calling attention to the power of drawing lines between normal and pathological language in our scholarship?
•	How do these legacies of pathologization provide opportunities for innovating contemporary methods in ethnographic research on such previously marginalized speech communities?
•	To what degree do the legacies of pathologization still affect our attempts for outreach and social justice for communities in areas such as education and legal policy?
•	What does a focus on a shift from deficit to difference reveal about the limits and possibilities of linguistic anthropology as a subdiscipline with regards to scholarship and activism?

Papers are also sought that address the dilemma of what happens when our research participants themselves critically engage with, including resisting, academic shifts in defining their communicative practices, and what this reveals about the politics of representation in the study of language and culture.

If you are interested in participating in this panel, please send a 200 word abstract to Nathaniel Dumas (ndumas at linguistics.ucsb.edu) by March 10th, 2011.