[Linganth] AAA CFP: Voicing and Visualizing Community

[Josh Babcock]

Dear colleagues,

We are organizing a panel on voicing and visualizing community for this
year’s AAA meetings. We are still looking for a few papers to fill out the
session, and welcome your submissions. Please send abstracts (max 250
words) to the organizers (Joshua Babcock, jdbabcock at uchicago.edu and
Jessica Pouchet, jpouchet at u.northwestern.edu) by Wednesday, April 13.


*CALL FOR PAPERS: **Voicing and Visualizing Community*

*AAA 2016* | Nov. 16–20 Minneapolis, MN
*Organizers*: Joshua Babcock (University of Chicago) and Jessica Pouchet
(Northwestern University)
*Discussant*: TBA

Linguistic anthropological research has shown that productions of community
or other notions of group-ness—whether nations, speech communities,
professional associations, and the like—are pragmatic achievements brought
about by the deployment of signs-in-context, paradigmatically (though not
exclusively) through uses of language (Gal and Woolard 2001, Gal 2006, Lee
1997, Silverstein 2010). As such, they involve the production and
projection of differentiable voicing strategies and effects (Bauman and
Briggs 2003, Agha 2005). While such voicing strategies and effects have
been productively explored from the perspective of language, this panel’s
aim is to consider the pervasive presence of graphic forms—brands,
advertisements, mascots, logos, flags, maps, documents, branded or
quasi-branded commodities, to name a few—and how such forms are mobilized
in the production and reception of such voicing strategies and effects.

With this in mind, papers in this panel will explore questions that
include: what are the semiotic processes and technologies whereby the
nation and other groupings are reconstituted through visual signs or
graphic forms? How do processes of uptake, de- and recontextualization
transform visual signs or graphic forms? What are the affordances,
constraints, and implications of differential degrees of access to the
ability to recontextualize signs? How do the material affordances,
attendant discourse registers, and ideologies of specific media contribute
to the formation of figures of personhood that range from individuals (Agha
2011) to communities (Spitulnik 1997) or beyond? What is the “regime of
multiple centers and peripheries” from which semiotic forms emanate,
circulate, and thereby generate value (Silverstein 2013)? Beyond these
specific questions, this panel aims to contribute broadly to approaches in
linguistic anthropology that consider the ways in which visual and voiced
signs work in tandem to produce, sometimes accidentally, the groupings that
comprise notions of community, estrangement, and aspirations of belonging.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/linganth/attachments/20160409/17f3d243/attachment.htm>