[Linganth] Last Minute AAA CFP: "The Politics of Conversational Civility"

[Sidorkina, Maria Alexandrovna]

Call for last minute submissions to the AAA panel below. If interested, please submit an abstract by April 13. I will notify everyone interested by this weekend.

The Politics of Conversational Civility
How is conversational civility (or incivility) used to signal competing political projects and alignments? This panel examines the state of the conversation in our socio-political moment. What are the stakes of our fixation on models of mutually coordinated, orderly face-to-face interaction for understanding social and political life (Haviland 2010; Warner 2002)? How have these models evolved, especially as the political potency of incivility has become more apparent following the last U.S presidential election? From early Quakerism to #Shepersisted, incivility has often been used to signal a counter-hegemonic political agenda (Bauman 2008). Yet, dialog and conversation have remained the central metaphors of participation in liberal democracies. Civil conversational procedures—equivalent turns at talk, on-topic responses—have been valorized in dreams of an ideally moderated social media, and discovered to be central to human development, producing “greater left inferior frontal activation” in the brain (Romeo et al. 2018). Yet, many social activists aim to critique this “radical proceduralism” of liberal democracy by demonstrating that there are no essential links between styles of interaction and larger social projects. Ultimately, our discussion will aim to trace how people manage their political alignments at least partly via speech, as well as shed light on the “reciprocally reflexive” effects of interactional textuality and ideological elaboration at different scales of sociability (Agha 1997; Lempert 2012).
NOTE: Panel abstract will change to reflect additional submissions.
Please send abstracts (250 words max) with paper title and presenter information to Maria Sidorkina (msidorkina at fas.harvard.edu<mailto:msidorkina at fas.harvard.edu>) by the end of the day on Friday April 13th. If included on the panel, session participants must be registered AAA members, and must register for the meeting by April 16th.
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