[Linganth] ELAN November 23 Meeting: Economic Moralities with Chelsie Yount-André

[Barker, Meghanne]

Dear colleagues,

Please join the EASA Linguistic Anthropology Network (ELAN) for our November meeting! On Wednesday, November 23, 14:00-15:30 GMT, we will discuss Chelsie Yount-André's chapter, “Scales of Solidarity: Navigating Economic Moralities," from her manuscript-in-progress, Selective Solidarity: Talk and the transmission of middle-class moralities in transnational Senegal. We changed the day and time to make it both later in the day and earlier in the week (and not conflicting with Thanksgiving in the US), in hopes that this makes it more feasible for scholars based in North America to attend.

The abstract is below. The discussant will be announced soon, and the text circulated two weeks before our meeting. We hope you can attend!

Best,

Meghanne and Janet

Scales of Solidarity: Navigating Economic Moralities

Chelsie Yount-André, PhD
Postdoctoral Ethnographic Researcher, ERC project "JustRemit"
Institute of Security and Global Affairs
Leiden University

This text, chapter two of my manuscript Selective Solidarity: Talk and the transmission of middle-class moralities in transnational Senegal, offers a semiotic approach to “economic moralities,” (normative expectations of material obligation and entitlement). It considers the material entailments of speakers’ shifts in moral stance and alignment, analyzing how family members alternate between scales of solidarity in unfolding interaction. I highlight two notions of “solidarity” central to the material lives of middle-class Senegalese in Paris: first, that of the French government, which posits aid offered by the welfare state as contingent on immigrant “integration” and second, expectations of “solidarity” among Senegalese transnational kin, which are rooted in asymmetric but complementary relations of rank-based redistribution. I then examine how economic moralities link forms of language materiality (Cavanaugh & Shankar 2017) across domains, analyzing how speakers draw acts of material circulation into analogous relation through explicit language (moral narratives that treat food sharing as indexical of economic solidarity) and more tacit, nonreferential means like verbal registers. I trace interdiscursive connections between language that mediates everyday acts of exchange, like food sharing, and moral discourses that shape resource redistribution beyond the household, to argue that the semiotic grounding for economic practice is woven in everyday interactions among children and caregivers.

Meghanne Barker
(she/her)
Lecturer, Education, Practice and Society
IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society
meghanne.barker at ucl.ac.uk
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