36.2293, Confs: Language and the Material Culture of Music (Workshop @ÖLT49) (Austria)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-2293. Wed Jul 30 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.2293, Confs: Language and the Material Culture of Music (Workshop @ÖLT49) (Austria)

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Date: 30-Jul-2025
From: Elias Schmitt [elschmitt at uni-koblenz.de]
Subject: Language and the Material Culture of Music (Workshop @ÖLT49)


Language and the Material Culture of Music (Workshop @ÖLT49) (Austria)

Date: 05-Dec-2025 - 08-Dec-2025
Location: Klagenfurt, Austria
Contact: Elias Schmitt
Contact Email: elschmitt at uni-koblenz.de

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics; Discourse Analysis;
Philosophy of Language; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics

Submission Deadline: 30-Sep-2025

When linguists investigate musical culture, its discursive character
is usually mostly explicated through the analysis of journalistic
texts (see e.g. Bär 2024; Stöckl 2011; Thim-Mabrey 2001). This focus
on finished musical works and their mediated representations, however,
often obscures the creative practices and discursive dynamics ‘in the
making’ beyond symbolic references – that is, language use embedded in
and shaped by embodied, material interactions (cf. Peirce 1998
[1894]). In contrast, posthumanist (cf. Pennycook 2017) and
praxeological (cf. Spitzmüller et al. 2017) perspectives direct
attention to the ways in which musical action is described from what
Foucault calls a subject position (cf. Foucault 1973: 75),
acknowledging the embodied experience of music (cf. Hiekel & Lessing
2014; Oberhaus & Stange 2017) and the material agency of
musical-cultural artefacts (cf. Barad 2012).
This interdisciplinary workshop seeks to explore communicative
practices of musical and musico-cultural action in relation to the
materiality of culture. Possible topics for contributions include:
 - How can we conceptualize the experiential relations communicated in
different situations where (musico-cultural) objects play an agentive
role?
 - Which philosophical, sociological, or anthropological assumptions
are relevant for analysing such communicative practices in musical
contexts?
 - In what ways do material agency and concrete language use interact
with one another?
 - How can this interdependence be analysed from a linguistic
perspective?
 - To what extent are material (and bodily! cf. Gallagher 2020) forms
of agency constitutive of both language use and communicative
practice?
 - How might usage-based cognitive linguistic theories (cf. Zima 2021)
offer new interpretative frameworks here?
 - And how can media, in their material dimensions, be productively
addressed from a mediolinguistic perspective?
Our goal is to discuss the following interrelation: First we want to
address the relationship of language and the non-linguistic, as
theorised in posthumanism (cf. Braidotti 2013), material culture
studies (cf. Samida et al. 2014), and new materialism (cf. Coole &
Frost 2010). These frameworks allow us to reconsider cultural
discourse beyond purely constructivist paradigms by grounding it in
material and embodied realities. This raises questions about the
relationship between material culture and immaterial phenomena, making
language and music – often assumed to be disembodied – particularly
fruitful objects of study. Based on these two specifically human
capacities, we aim to revisit the interplay between the human and the
non-human in creative and communicative practice and ask: Can
reflecting on musical culture in these terms provide methodological
insights for understanding cultural discourse more broadly?
To reflect the interdisciplinary scope of our topic and objectives,
the workshop will consist of five 20-minute presentations (each
followed by 10 minutes for discussion), as well as an introductory
keynote and a brief closing discussion.
Please send abstracts of 150 to 300 words by September 30, 2025, to
elschmitt at uni-koblenz.de. Submissions should follow the Unified Style
Sheet for Linguistics for references and citations. If possible, we
prefer the speakers to be physically present, but a digital
presentation is of course also possible.



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