[Linganth] AAA 2017 CFP: Integrating Linguistic & Environmental Anthropology

[Jessica Pouchet]

Dear Colleagues:

Please consider submitting an abstract for the following panel I am
organizing. Apologies for cross-posting, and feel free to distribute widely.

Kind regards,

Jessica


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American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting 2017
Washington, D.C.
Nov. 29 – Dec. 3, 2017


*Session* *Title*:  Beyond the Human, Beyond the Subfield: Integrating
Linguistic and Environmental Anthropology

*Organizers*:
Jessica Pouchet                                              Joshua Shapero
Northwestern University                                  University of
Michigan
jpouchet at u.northwestern.edu                        shaperoj at umich.edu

*Discussant*: TBD

*Abstract*:
In recent years, linguistic anthropology has expanded its object of inquiry
to increasingly encompass not only human language, but semiosis more
broadly, while environmental anthropologists incorporate recent insights on
processes of meaning-making to deepen their interrogation of how people
relate to their environments relate. Accordingly, anthropologists who work
at the intersection of linguistic and environmental anthropology are
generating theoretical innovations to advance debates on topics important
to both subfields. These topics include questions of value, governance,
marginality, ontology, materiality, indigeneity, mapping and place-making,
toxicity, and multi-species living. Such scholars, while few but growing in
number, engage with semiotic theory, political ecology, spatial-temporal
politics, and linguistic diversity and change to propose new approaches to
long-standing and emergent questions. They attend to the ethnographic
detail of observable conversations, the acoustics of non-human encounters,
and the material conditions of physical landscapes, while also considering
in their analyses the broader contextualizing patterns of climate change,
neoliberal environmentalism, colonialism, and natural resource extraction.
The purpose of this panel is to therefore explore the scholarship of
environmental and linguistic anthropologists who are finding ways to
productively merge the two subfields. Through theoretical innovation and
ethnographic illustration, the papers in this panel consider the
methodological, theoretical, and analytical areas of overlap between the
subfields, and how both senior and emerging scholars bridge them to invent
new, and firmly anthropological, approaches to pressing questions within
and beyond the discipline.

We invite authors to submit abstracts addressing the these topics and
others, in hopes of illustrating the broad potential for productive
conversations between linguistic and environmental anthropologists. The
panel may consider such questions as:

   - What new lines of inquiry are emerging in linguistic and environmental
   anthropology from multi-species ethnographies?


   - How can innovations in language materiality contribute to and further
   draw from environmental anthropologists’ work on the relationship between
   humans and their ecological surroundings? And how can considerations of the
   living, ecological aspects of material forms enrich linguistic
   anthropologists' theorizations of materiality?


   - What insights are ethnographies that encompass activity social media
   yielding on processes of place-making and claims to natural resources? And,
   conversely, how do the extractive industries that enable digital life make
   new types of communication possible?


   - How do processes of language shift and revitalization inform changes
   in how people linguistically encode environmental features, and with what
   effect on natural resource use and access?

If you are interested in presenting a paper on this panel, please send your
abstract to the organizers, *Jessica* *Pouchet* at
*jpouchet at u*.*northwestern.edu
<http://northwestern.edu>* and *Joshua Shapero at shaperoj at umich.edu
<shaperoj at umich.edu>*, by *March* *22*, 2017 for consideration. Questions
and expressions of interest are welcome earlier.

 --
Jessica Pouchet
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Anthropology
Northwestern University
jpouchet at u.northwestern.edu
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