[Linganth] AAA panel looking for discussants

[Maya Rachel Klein]

Please see below the panel abstract for a proposed AAA panel. We are
currently seeking discussants for this panel, although we are aware that it
is last minute. Please contact Keri Miller kmiller3 at email.arizona.edu  if
you are interested in serving as a discussant for this panel. The abstract
is mostly finished, but might be changed a bit.

AAA Abstract April 2018
Panel organizer: Keri Miller kmiller3 at email.arizona.edu, University of
Arizona
Panel members: Keri Miller, Maya Klein, Alyeh Mehin Jafarabadi, Nese Kaya

Our Language, Our Life: Language Policy, Institutions and Resistance

Global developments in migration, communication technology, and
conceptualization of human rights have contributed to increased
polarization of stances while at the same time complicating the isomorphic
relationship between language, nation-state and identity. At one end of a
continuum, voices are clamoring for the Herderian vision of “one nation –
one language”, or alternatively, one religion – one language. At the other,
groups whose voices have been marginalized by these ideals are gaining
power and political legitimacy to express their linguistic existence
(Skutnabb-Kangas 2000, Woolard 2016). Our panel explores on the one hand,
the roles that institutions play and the discourses that emerge from them,
in their efforts to manage language policy and linguistic diversity. On the
other hand, we explore styles of agentive resistances to the structures
these institutions are attempting to maintain. In each case we observe that
the players involved navigate through linguistic boundaries by way of
nuanced “heteroglossic” practices in resistance to “centripetal forces”
(Bakhtin 1981), at times aligning themselves with institutional policy, at
times against it, and at times even recursively reproducing it through
shifting and ambiguous stances (Jacobs-Huey 2006, Jaffe 2009, Barrett
2006). These studies examine the ways counterdiscourses (Chatterjee 1993,
Peters and Lankshear 1996: 2) emerge from everyday practices and
experiences resisting institutional language policies (Jacobs-Huey 2006),
as well as how institutions themselves can potentially influence discourse,
“in the nooks and crannies of everyday life” (Besnier 2009:11), in order to
reinforce hegemonic language ideologies. In the case of the Homshetsi
people who speak an Armenian dialect in Turkey, the ontological presence of
the Homshetsnak language and “camouflaged” narratives (Morgan 1993, 1995)
of encounters with Armenians cause conflicts with stances towards belonging
to Turkish nationality and constitute forms of resistance to hegemonic
discourses managed through shifting and strategic use of various linguistic
devices. Scottish Gaelic revitalization institutions are sites that both
resist hegemonic Scottish language policies that place English as the
language of anonymity, as well as sites that reinscribe linguistic hegemony
by contributing to a standard form of Gaelic most accessible to urban,
middle class Gaelic learners, while giving less space to vast dialectal
variation. Iranian citizens strategize the choosing of names, which add to
the multiplicities of identities in the face of the Organization of Civil
Registration that requires selecting from a name-list, with the further
negotiation of sociocultural differences signifying names as symbolic
capital. The geographical divisions faced by the Syrian Orthodox in the
diaspora, in conjunction with centuries of ideological divisions among the
Eastern Christian churches, have led to dis-junctures in the notion of what
counts as authentic language for the community, and complex relationships
between the institutions of the church, academia, and the various
nation-states within which the communities live. Focusing on how
counterdiscourses are constructed and negotiated through multiple,
conflicting and layered framings, stances and linguistic strategies, these
studies collectively complicate the assumed binary division between
structure and agency, with emphasis on the place of agents in institutions,
and the structural resistance that emerges from the institutions.




-- 
Maya Klein
PhD student
Joint Linguistics and Anthropology (ANLI) program
University of Arizona
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