[Linganth] Talking Politics with Joshua Babcock and Ilana Gershon

[SLA Online]

*Talking Politics withJoshua Babcock + Ilana Gershon*
*“How Does the State Ignore? The Contested Case of U.S. School Boards, from
the Screen to the Meeting Hall”*


*Friday, May 19 | 11:00 am Central (U.S.) | On Zoom
<https://uchicagogroup.zoom.us/j/91355921345?pwd=aGhwL0RlYThzeW8vRndwQUJlYjFBUT09#success>
*
*About the Webinar*: With the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, public
commentary at U.S. school board meetings became an important ideological
battleground for citizens to air their dissatisfactions to the state.
Entertainment media like SNL reflected this dissatisfaction, crafting
comedic fantasies of shutting down the voices of undesirable others. Yet it
turns out that the state got there first. This webinar doesn't focus on
arguments for or against specific policies. Instead, we ask: how does the
state work to ignore (potentially) everyone? What effect does this have on
speech in democratic contexts? And how do citizens understand democratic
utterances that seem to revolve around voice without uptake in both
fictional and real-world contexts?

*Joshua Babcock*
Josh is an Associate Fellow at the Center for the Study of Communication
and Society and Lecturer in the Departments of Linguistics and Race,
Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. His research
focuses on colonial images as they circulate across media, sites, and
scales, from the image of global Singapore to images of the state and
(liberal) democracy in the U.S. and Southeast Asia to images of indigeneity
among 19th-century migrants from British Malaya to New Orleans.

*Ilana Gershon*
Ilana is a Professor of Anthropology at Rice University. She has conducted
fieldwork in New Zealand and the United States with Samoan migrants. She
has also written about Maori members of the NZ parliament as well as U.S.
corporate practices of hiring and U.S. college students’ uses of new media
when breaking up. She is currently involved in a project tentatively
titled *The
Pandemic Workplace*, in which she explores what the pandemic reveals about
how U.S. workplaces function as incubators for both democratic and
autocratic citizens. Her research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren,
SSRC, NSF and fellowships at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the
Behavioral Sciences and Notre Dame’s Institute of Advanced Study.

*Moderated by **Sarah Adams**, University of Colorado Boulder.*

This virtual series is free and open to the public. Events will be followed
by a live Q&A session where you can ask questions and engage in dialogue
with the speakers.

*All events in the Talking Politics 2023 series will use the same Zoom link*.
Check out the full schedule on the Talking Politics 2023 website
<https://cscs.uchicago.edu/talking-politics/> and use the button or link
below to join our events on May 19 and May 26:

*Zoom link*: *bit.ly/TP2023webinar*
<https://bit.us18.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d422ccbea39a741b7e5cd13d7&id=de7881b294&e=d859389166>
*Passcode*: 494955

-- 
*Society for Linguistic Anthropology Online*
Digital Media Directors: Catherine Tebaldi (Universite du Luxembourg),
Shannon Ward (University of British Columbia Okanagan)
SLA Social Media Manager: Nora Tyeklar (University of Texas at Austin)
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