CFP: Producing Linguistic Anthropology in the Age of Social Media: tracing 'cosmopolitan' modes of distinction in digitally-mediated communities of practice

[Rachel George]

*Producing Linguistic Anthropology in the Age of Social Media: tracing
'cosmopolitan' modes of distinction in digitally-mediated communities of
practice*


*Organizers:  ** Rachel Flamenbaum **and **Rachel George, UCLA.*



Though we continue to frame our inquiries as linguistic anthropologists in
terms of speech communities or communities of practice, we nonetheless
acknowledge that contemporary social actors' communicative practices are
refracted across a complex ecology of communicative modes, many of them
digitally-mediated. These digitally-mediated spaces are just as much a part
of people's lived social realities as face-to-face encounters, and indeed
cannot be meaningfully extracted from them--complicating the neat boundary
lines of 'community' and 'context' that render anthropological inquiry
meaningful. Yet it is often in the grey zone of virtually co-present social
media where some of the most interesting, complex, and creative
communicative practices are occurring in our various fieldsites.



In this panel, we continue an ongoing disciplinary effort to grapple with
the challenges of anthropological knowledge production across mediated
terrains. In this light, we seek additions to our panel exploring the modes
of distinction made possible in (for lack of a better term as yet)
digitally-mediated communities of practice. In particular, we are
interested in the ways that digital elites use irony and sincerity to
navigate their relationship(s) to the state/public sphere/hegemonic
cultures by playing on the affordances of particular modes of social media
for de- and re-entextualization.


In our papers, for example, some elites use digital media to construct
sincere attachment to dominant institutions (such as religion), while
others playfully subvert such attachments in ironic re-entextualizations of
national or sociopolitical tropes. In what ways can these practices be seen
as forms of social and political resistance to entrenched status quos? What
are the social and political implications of these forms of resistance in
places where social actors are disillusioned with the notion of political
resistance as an effective tool for social change? How do such practices
complicate anthropological understandings of the cultivation of
cosmopolitan selves? *As practitioners, how can we better engage with sites
where our research participants are trafficking in global signs in ways
that can only be rendered sensible through local semiotic frameworks? *



We seek papers and/or data-driven provocations that engage with the
substance of modes of digital distinction, the anthropological process of
tracing such practices, or both.


If you are interested in participating in our panel, please send an
abstract to rgeorge at ucla.edu no later than *April 1st.*