[Linganth] CFP AAA 2021 - Addressing Activism: The Politics of Address Terms in Ethico-Political Movements

[Yeon-ju Bae]

Dear All,

Please consider this CFP for AAA 2021 and forward it to anyone who might be
interested.
If you'd like to participate, please send abstracts (250 words) to
yjubae at umich.edu by May 1.

Best wishes,
Yeon-ju



Session title:

*Addressing Activism: The Politics of Address Terms in Ethico-Political
Movements*



Organizer: Yeon-Ju Bae (University of Michigan)



Discussant: Jack Sidnell (University of Toronto)



What happens when those who participate in or advocate for a reform
movement and those who don’t agree with it or even stand against it come to
encounter one another? In what ways would their different ideologies about
social relations and power structures be manifested and created through
their uses of person address, person reference, and pronouns? Rather than
focusing on activist or reform movements in isolation, this panel explores
negotiations, contestations, and accommodations that may occur as activists
or reformers interact with those who do not (yet) share their ideals. This
panel is particularly concerned with the politics of address terms and
pronouns, since those politics often serve as a critical locus where
people’s ethical stances on social relationships are co-created and
negotiated (e.g., Seidel 1975; Urban 1996; Sidnell 2010). Address terms
have been a classic sociolinguistic topic (Brown & Gilman 1960). Rather
than approaching the issues from the normative standpoint, this panel
investigates the ways in which address terms are ideologically rationalized
and practiced along with other semiotic modalities, especially in contexts
where reformers and non-reformers encounter and engage with one another
(Bauman 1983; Luong 1988; Saft 2017). Throughout the interactional process,
while differentiation and contestation may occur, collaboration and
accommodation might take place as well. In what ways are new emergent
meanings of address terms and pronouns brought into play especially in
negotiating cultural notions of hierarchy/equality (Howard 2007),
inclusion/exclusion (Stasch 2002), and so forth? In what ways do different
norms of address terms that are politically charged get interactionally
evaluated and challenged by one another in a way that contributes to
creating or altering ethical ideologies of speech and social relations?



This panel seeks to discuss the politics of address terms in
activist/reform movements across a variety of regions and from various
analytical approaches.





*Works cited:*



Bauman, Richard (1983) *Let Your Words Be Few: Symbolism of Speaking and
Silence among Seventeenth-Century Quakers*. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.

Brown, Roger and Albert Gilman (1960) Pronouns of Power and Solidarity. In
Thomas Sebeok (ed.), *Style in Language*. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp.
253-276.

Howard, Kathryn (2007) Kinterm usage and hierarchy in Thai children’s peer
groups. *Journal of Linguistic Anthropology* 17(2): 204-230.

Luong, Hy Van (1988) Discursive practices and power structure:
Person-referring forms and sociopolitical struggles in colonial
Vietnam. *American
Ethnologist* 15(2): 239-253.

Saft, Scott (2017) Documenting an endangered language: The inclusive
first-person plural pronoun *kakou* as a resource for claiming ownership in
Hawaiian. *Journal of Linguistic Anthropology* 27(1): 92-113.

Seidel, Gill (1975) Ambiguity in political discourse. In Maurice Bloch
(ed.), *Political Language and Oratory in Traditional Society*. London:
Academic Press, pp. 205-226.

Sidnell, Jack (2010) The ordinary ethics of everyday talk. In Michael
Lambek (ed.), *Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language and Action*. New
York: Fordham University Press. pp. 123-139.

Stasch, Rupert (2002) Joking avoidance: A Korowai pragmatics of being
two. *American
Ethnologist* 29(2): 335-365.

Urban, Greg (1996) *Metaphysical Community: The Interplay of the Senses and
the Intellect*. Austin: University of Texas Press.



Yeon-ju Bae [jən-dʒu b̥ɛ]
(she/her/hers)
Doctoral Candidate
Linguistic Anthropology
University of Michigan
yjubae at umich.edu
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