CFP AAA 2013: Voices as Multimodal Constructions

[Aslihan AKKAYA]

We are proposing a panel for the 2013 AAA Annual Meeting on Voices as Multimodal Constructions.

If you are interested in being considered for this panel or would like more
information, please contact Aslihan Akkaya at aa1395 at georgetown.edu

Please submit your name, your affiliation, your contact details, a title,
and an abstract limited to 250 words by 4/5/13 via email.
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VOICES AS MULTIMODAL CONSTRUCTIONS

Ethnographic studies of voice from linguistic anthropologists demonstrate
the fluidity of the concept and its usefulness as a unit of analysis (Hill
1985, 1986, Hill and Irvine 1993, Keane 2011, Mendoza-Denton 2011). Drawing
from the Bakhtinian notion of heteroglossia, Hill (1985, 1986) gave
attention to multiple and competing voices - and hence “the productivity of
[the] clash of voices” as Keane (2011) calls it - instead of so-thought
bounded ideolects, dialects, and languages in her analysis. In linguistic
anthropological inquiry voice is seen as an act of stance-taking that is
inherently evaluative (Chernela 2011, Hill 1985, 1986, Jaffe 2009, Keane
2000, 2011). Social actors through staging and playing with different
voices crystallize the voices to mark their affiliation and so to
construct/index social personae. However, as Jaffe (2009) pointed out, such
a process never ends as social actors change their affiliations within and
across discourses. Jaffe (2009:19-20) referred to this as “trajectories of
stance-taking”. Voices to be perceived in discourse point to worldviews and
the positioning of social actors within these worldviews. Analysis of voice
thus benefits from analysis of indexicality, interdiscursivity, social
typification, characterogical images, and hence, icons of personhood (Agha
2003, 2007, Silverstein 2003, Webster 2010). In everyday discourses we use
several modalities and media to interact and index multiple personae within
and across discourse. For instance, Kuipers (2004) presented discourse
instances from Sumbanese rituals and U.S. clinical settings, demonstrating
how voices are multimodal and collaborative constructions -social actors
mediate and negotiate a rich variety of stimuli in discourse. We do not use
only verbal communication to construct social personae, but also various
other modalities in a given discursive encounter. This panel seeks to bring
together scholars working on voice in multimodal performances. More
specifically, we will examine how voice is constructed and perceived within
a discourse and/or across discourses semiotically via the use of various
different modalities and media. We, as ethnographers, are increasingly
starting to work with video recordings of our consultants, in addition to
examining their use of various new media tools in everyday life discourses.
In this panel, we will explore the fluidity of voices and how they are
constructed, indexed, and managed collaboratively (such as through
perceptions of fluency and dsyfluency) and multimodally via the mediation
and negotiation of various semiotic resources and hence their links to
worldviews.




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Aslihan Akkaya, PhD

Visiting Scholar
Department of Linguistics
Georgetown University

Adjunct Faculty
Department of Anthropology
Southern Illinois University Carbondale