[Linganth] Call for Paper - AAA 2019

[Adele Liu]

Dear Colleagues,

Hi! I know this might be a last minute call but my peer Rachelle Garcia
Jereza and I are organizing a panel for the 2019 AAA/CASCA meetings in
Vancouver. In this panel we aim to discuss the increasingly applied concept
of online communities, and issues emerging from the linguistic regulation
in them, from both outside and inside. We believe that arising language
ideologies that are produced, and will react upon this process call for
exploration. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions, and
send us your abstract on Monday (April 1st)! We will be grateful if you can
share this with any colleagues that might be interested in this panel.

Best wishes,
Conyao Liu
PhD Student of Department of Anthropology
Binghamton Univrsity (SUNY)

Keywords: censorship, privacy, moderation, language ideology, online
communities
Panel Abstract:
In 2017, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook’s new mission statement:
“To give people the power to build community and bring the world closer
together.” Yet, Facebook has come under media scrutiny for its community
guidelines that draw arbitrary boundaries around what counts as
inappropriate user-generated content or content that can be construed as
intending physical harm to others. At the same time, Facebook has been
criticized for making personal user data available to Cambridge Analytica
in 2018 without users’ consent.
Online communities have changed significantly in the past decade: online
participation around the globe has increased; technological affordances
allow people separated by vast temporal and spatial distances to
communicate in real time; and corporate entities have increasing access to
user data on social media. At its most seemingly benign, user generated
content proliferates around specific media, leading to online enclaves of
shared interest or fandoms; at its most frightening, corporate social media
platforms, like Facebook, are criticized for making personal user data
available for nefarious purposes without users’ consent. This panel
investigates the full spectrum of contemporary online communities given the
current digital environment. We ask, for instance, if “online community” is
an apt term to describe contemporary online participation. What might the
term obscure or reveal about users’ experiences online? How do these
experiences shape the construction of new norms and language ideologies in
specific contexts? Finally, we ask how group identities - if they were
built in this process- influence the participants’ negotiation with the
rapidly changing online political environment, regarding the issues of
censorship, privacy, and inequalities, etc. Taking both individual and
institutional factors into consideration, we try to explore these aspects
to achieve a better understanding of emerging practices in relation to
online communities.
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