[Linganth] in honor of Susan Philips

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
I am so very sad to learn about Susan Philips' passing this morning.  If
people would like to send me remembrances, I will post them on the CaMP
anthropology blog.    Please send them to my university email:
igershon at rice.edu

Best,
Ilana

From: Barbra Meek, Diane Riskedahl, and Jacqui Messing



Dear colleagues,



It is with great sorrow that we write to inform our community of the
passing of Susan U. Philips, an indelible scholar in the field of
Linguistic Anthropology. Students, colleagues and family gathered together
on October 10th in Tucson to remember what a force she was in all of our
lives.



At the University of Arizona, and in retirement at the University of
Michigan, and the University of Chicago, Susan trained generations of
graduate students, and her courses in ethnographic and linguistic
anthropological methods shaped how many of us learned to do our work, from
how recording technology can be used in the field to transcription of
discourse, visual notation and describing the broader context. She taught
us to take seriously what is often overlooked in the study of interaction.
She drew attention to the subtle dimensions of institutional racisms and
sexisms, seeing the ‘invisible’ ways that inequality works, not only in
laws and policies, but in how people take turns speaking, who is heard and
what counts as a credible voice. Through her indefatigable intellectual
curiosity we learned to look and listen closely to social interaction.



Susan came into Linguistic Anthropology at a moment of change as a PhD
student at the University of Pennsylvania, completing her degree in 1974.
In the 1960s and 70s, as social movements across the United States
confronted discrimination, the discipline shifted its footing from language
as an object of documentation to language as social action. Susan was a
leading voice in that turn and shaped what the field became.



One of her earliest contributions - and interventions - to Anthropology
took shape through her dissertation research at Warm Springs (Oregon).
Working with the Confederate Tribes of Warm Springs, Susan developed her
research in relation to community goals, goals focused on the education of
children and youth and the dissonance between teachers’ classroom
interactional styles and American Indian students’ family interactional
styles (Philips 1972, 1983/1993[cited 2732 times]). Her critical
ethnographic observation of the differences and mismatch in the
communication patterns she revealed, through close discourse analysis,
gained such traction in the field of education that this research is still
cited today to support the need for mindfulness of cultural patterns and
potential pitfalls in the classroom. She revealed not only the “invisible”
aspects of communication that can and do affect student performance and
success, she demonstrated an ethical, responsible model for research with
Indigenous groups that we endeavor to follow in our own work. A study of
the power of hegemonic gender ideologies in discourse followed. Susan’s
attention to the tacit dimensions of social inequalities ran through
everything she did.



Methodologically, her contributions emphasize participant roles and their
grounding in specific contexts alongside the analysis of the actual
discourse that participants produce in face-to-face interaction. Her
transcripts of court data, both in Tucson and in Tonga, reveal the subtle,
cultural framings in tandem with the institutional frameworks that
constrain interactional performances in service to the recognition of
truth/fact.  Her work on discourse analytic methods lays out the process by
which we as linguistic anthropologists can render “culture” salient through
the identification of units of analysis and a discourse comparative method
(Philips 2013).



Theoretically, Susan’s insights helped move the field toward the study of
language ideologies and the role of discourse in distributing power within
institutions. She pointed out that speakers regularly produce conscious
linguistic ideologies. Through her scholarship she also reminded us that
the academy is not outside these processes and we must reckon with its
complicity in reproducing intolerances, bias and marginalization.



Susan’s scholarship helped establish linguistic anthropology as we practice
it today. Her influence lives in our disciplinary questions, in our methods
and in the many of us who were shaped by her intellectual curiosity and
care. Echoing her son’s words below, she will be deeply missed.



Sincerely, Barbra Meek, Diane Riskedahl, and Jacqui Messing





>From Charlie Addison writing in August on behalf of his mother Dr. Susan
Philips to our community:



“It is with great sadness that I share the news of the passing of my mother
earlier this week.  She died surrounded by her family, and with all the
strength and courage we have come to expect from her.



For many of you, she was a respected colleague, mentor, teacher, and
friend.  For me, she was my mother.  It is difficult to separate those two
parts of her life because she brought the same qualities to both:  an
extraordinary dedication to others, an enduring curiosity, and a genuine
commitment to helping the people around her learn and succeed.



I know that she valued her relationships with each of you deeply.  She took
great pride in her work and in the people she had the opportunity to teach,
mentor, and work alongside.  Her professional accomplishments were
important to her, but I believe she would have been even more proud of the
lasting impact she had on the people she encountered.  The students she
encouraged, the colleagues she supported, and the many lives she touched
are an important part of her legacy.



On behalf of our family, I want to thank all of you for the kindness,
friendship, and respect you showed her throughout her life and career.  We
are grateful that she had the opportunity to be part of such a meaningful
community.



She will be deeply missed.”
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