[Linganth] Panel on Negotiating Authenticities -- call for papers (IPrA 2025)

[Colleen Cotter]

Dear colleagues,
We are seeking additional papers on “authenticities” for our accepted panel – Negotiating authenticities: Stances and performances in complex spaces – for next year’s International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) biannual meeting in Brisbane, Australia, June 22-27, 2025.

The deadline is short – Nov. 1 for submission to the IPrA site – and you’ll have to separately upload your abstracts via the link on the IPrA call-for-papers page (https://pragmatics.international/page/CfP2025), which will direct you to the conference site (https://ipra2025.exordo.com<https://ipra2025.exordo.com/>). It requires membership in IPrA to submit. And there is an expectation to be in person. We realize these factors might deter, or inspire!

Please email me, or Judy or Dominika, if you have questions or want to know more about logistics. An updated version of the panel abstract is below.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Best,
Colleen Cotter, Judy Pine, Dominika Baran
c.m.cotter at qmul.ac.uk<mailto:c.m.cotter at qmul.ac.uk>
judy.pine at wwu.edu<mailto:pinej at wwu.edu>
dominika.baran at duke.edu<mailto:dominika.baran at duke.edu>


(ACCEPTED) PANEL ABSTRACT IPrA 2025
Negotiating authenticities: Stances and performances in complex spaces
The notion of “authenticity” in speech communities has long been a contested feature of language revitalization enterprises (Jones 1999 for Breton, Cotter 1999, 2001 for Irish, Jaffe 2013 for Corsican, etc.). This contestation is not new, but the discussion surrounding it bears revisiting. Meanwhile, exploration of the tension between linguistic authenticity and a universality of use has produced insights into what Woolard & Frekko (2013) describe as “the late-modern phenomena of boundary dissolution, shifting scale, cosmopolitanism, and changing ideologies of authenticity and anonymity.” At the same time, work on authenticity in the performance of identity invites us to return to Appadurai’s (1996) notion of flows, where “transnational flows have allowed for the restructuring of (imagined and physical) places and membership affiliations along multiple and more complex axes” (McEntee-Atalianis & Zappetini 2014).
On the language-and-social-meaning level, Eckert (2014) utilizes the concept of “authenticative” moves to address linguistic variation as “a more robust and dynamic indexical system” than had been envisioned by Labov, for whom authenticity is bestowed on speech/speakers by the linguist. Woolard (2016: 22) notes that within an ideological frame privileging speakers’ judgement, authenticity “must be perceived as deeply rooted in social and geographic territory in order to have value.” Meanwhile, a standard language ideology, which institutionally reifies what is authentic, can produce forms which are untethered from place, e.g., a “language elsewhere” (Mena 2022) or a “nowhere Corsican” (Thiers 1993, cited in Woolard 2016).
Combining these notions, this panel takes an ethnographically informed sociopragmatic approach to investigate what the circulation of signs (through language, communication, symbol) relies upon, questions, achieves or fails in the production of “authenticity” and legibly “authentic” identities. Recognizing the longstanding intersection between semiotics and an understanding of identity as praxis, whether understood as performativity or stance-taking, we seek to revisit the role of metapragmatic awareness as members of diasporic, transient, established, bilingual, learner, professional, and/or immigrant communities negotiate the challenges of how communities speak about themselves – whether informed by linguistic insights or developed within the community itself – as well as the extent to which related disciplines reflect on their own implicit homogeneity and resistance to change as to what might constitute “authenticity”. The signs deployed, where “legibility” varies, and how multifaceted and diverse viewpoints are contested or remain stable, are questions that come into play.
Assuming that authenticity is a complex negotiation across and for different audiences, we seek papers that examine how the notion of the authentic is metapragmatically deployed by speakers; how authentic identities are indexed; and what the relationship between performativity, authenticity, and (where applicable) indigeneity resides and how it is motivated. Authenticity in spaces where it is mass-produced for global consumption (Heller & McElhinny 2017, Thurlow & Jaworski 2011) is also entangled in the performance of locally authentic identities and its role in the linguistic marketplace indicates another dimension for scrutiny. These complex spaces can involve a range of contexts – e.g., national identity, ethnic “islands”, historic icons, place, politics, popular culture, etc. – for which "authenticity" becomes integral to the story.

==============================
Prof. Colleen Cotter
Linguistics Department
School of the Arts
Queen Mary University of London
Mile End Road
London E1 4NS, UK
email: c.m.cotter at qmul.ac.uk

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