32.2519, FYI: Stoner Talk: The Sociolinguistics of Cannabis Cultures and Markets (colloquium proposal for Sociolinguistics Symposium 24, Ghent, Belgium)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-32-2519. Fri Jul 30 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.2519, FYI: Stoner Talk: The Sociolinguistics of Cannabis Cultures and Markets (colloquium proposal for Sociolinguistics Symposium 24, Ghent, Belgium)

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Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2021 07:19:35
From: Joseph Comer [joseph.comer at csls.unibe.ch]
Subject: Stoner Talk: The Sociolinguistics of Cannabis Cultures and Markets (colloquium proposal for Sociolinguistics Symposium 24, Ghent, Belgium)

 
This colloquium aims principally to shine a light on people – and/or personae
– who have been featured, both prominently and peripherally, in a great deal
of second- and third-wave sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological
research (Eckert 2012), but who have also arguably never received as much
attention as they perhaps deserve: ‘stoners’. 
Whether observed – and socially constructed – in relation to archetypal
‘burnout’ identities (Eckert 1989, 2000), frat-boy indexicalities of/for the
use of ‘dude’ (Kiesling 2004), masculine, counter-cultural figures of the
‘hippie’, ‘dropout’, or ‘surfer’, simplistic and discriminatory (and
racialized) notions of criminality, or otherwise, for many years it seems that
marijuana users (‘stoners’) have been normatively understood (if not
overlooked) in sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological work. Here, the
‘stoner’ is defined broadly and non-pejoratively as a term for a person who
enthusiastically or unashamedly uses marijuana recreationally.
Stoners’ partaking in a commonplace, yet taboo, practice has perhaps led to an
unfortunate disregard for how such a practice incrementally contributes to
articulations of self, community, political orientation, health and wellbeing,
and social belonging – nor how it impacts the below-the-sentence (e.g.
phonological) production of language (cf. Bigham 2002). In other words,
although stoners have emerged in discourse for many reasons and in many ways
over the past few decades, the discursive construction, stance trajectories
and indexical relations of ‘the stoner’ have been left under-examined and
normatively understood: with the individuals (and practices) in question
uniformly framed as othered, undesirable, and unproductive.
Inasmuch as this framework has arguably always been inappropriate, it is now
untenable. As Weiss (2015:n.p) states, “what was once an act of rebellion,
however mild, has become a leisure activity, the best way to make boredom less
boring”. Things have changed. Negative stigma has reduced. Legalization and
attempts at legalization gather pace worldwide. It suffices to say that who
stoners are, their relationship to historical and modern formations of ‘weed
culture’, and the political economy (or marketplace) of cannabis – these have
all recently changed dramatically, across many varied contexts. As Hudak
(2020:3) summarises, 
“this plant has been farmed out to the fringes of society by prohibition,
vilification, racialization, and legitimate concerns about its consequences
for public health and public safety. Yet marijuana is a pervasive part of
society – garnering attention from government, serving as a symbol of societal
protest, filling the lyrics of songs and the scripts of movies, and becoming
the most widely used substance deemed illegal by the U.S. government.”
As marijuana intersects with symbolic/semiotic practice – through lyrics,
media scripts, and policy documents alike – it becomes, clearly, an object of
sociolinguistic examination, along with its users. This colloquium,
accordingly, provides a space for such talk about ‘stoner talk’.

This colloquium foregrounds questions about ‘getting stoned’ as a practice,
and as a discursive practice: as it manifests stylistically/linguistically; as
it is mediat(iz)ed; and, as it is gendered, racialized, and otherwise
differently indexed accordingly to class, race and social privilege. As an
increasingly visible political constituency and community of practice, with
real economic clout, it is high time that stoners, cannabis enthusiasts, and
the more-recent class of ‘weedtrepreneurs’ came into the purview of
sociolinguistic study.

This colloquium is currently being planned as an online session with 4–8
participating papers.

For more information, please find the full CfP at:
https://tinyurl.com/a86rcdtd

To participate, please email Dr Joseph (Joe) Comer
(joseph.comer at csls.unibe.ch) your 300-word abstract prepared using the
conference guidelines. 
 



Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics
                     Applied Linguistics
                     Discourse Analysis
                     Sociolinguistics





 



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