[Linganth] SLA CFP: Networks & the Communicative Imaginary

[James Slotta]

For those still looking to join a panel at the SLA meeting in March, we
have room for an additional panelist. Please send a 250-word abstract to me
(jslotta at utexas.edu) or Courtney Handman (chandman at austin.utexas.edu) ASAP.

*Networks and the Communicative Imaginary*

Over the past several decades, networks have become a prominent mode for
representing social and communicative life. From “network narratives” in
film and TV (Bordwell 2006) to the “network effects” that influence second
language learning (De Swaan 2002), from everyday experiences of “virtual
communities” enabled by internet-based applications (Miller 2013) to the
circulation of goods, people, and ideas through global flows (Appadurai
1996), social theory in its folk and academic varieties has found
“networks” good to think with. At the same time, the network concept has
proved useful in disassembling the sort of holistic social formations that
have played an outsized role in the social imaginary of modernity: nations,
societies, languages, and cultures increasingly appear to make up the
imaginary of a different time, one which can no longer be sustained in the
face of contemporary multinational capitalism, neoliberalism,
internet-based communication platforms, the fact of pluralism in liberal
democracies, linguistic super-diversity, and the like.

In this panel, we build on earlier examinations of the social circulation
of discourse (Spitulnik 1997, Urban 2001, Agha and Wortham 2005) and
“cultures of circulation” (Lee and LiPuma 2002) that have demonstrated the
key role of language-in-circulation in shaping the social imaginaries and
subjectivities intimately linked with modernity (Taylor 2003). Much of this
research has concentrated on the nation and the liberal democratic public
sphere as mass social formations constituted in part through particular
modes of circulation and the imaginaries they inspire. In this panel, we
aim to bring the analytic perspective and tools developed in this earlier
moment to bear on communicative imaginaries apart from the nation and the
liberal democratic public sphere. In particular, we hope to look at the
distinctive characteristics of networks as modes of circulation and as
elements of communicative imaginaries. How do institutionalized practices
of circulation shape network-based communicative imaginaries? How do
networks serve as a way of conceptualizing the circulation of discourse
that is distinguished from, or seen to undermine, modernist social
imaginaries of the nation and the public sphere? How does indexicality
operate relative to a network imaginary and how does this differ from
models of identitarian indexicality that have been so productive in the
analysis and critique of holistic social forms?
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