The Fourteenth Annual Conference on Language, Interaction, and Culture
>> May 22-24, 2008 <<
Plenary Speakers
Asif Agha - Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
Kris Gutiérrez - Education, University of California, Los Angeles
Douglas Maynard - Sociology, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Suzanne Wertheim - Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles; University of Maryland
Asif Agha
The Sponsored Self
In the age of mass-mediatized brands, commercial discourses configure cultural values and social aspirations as semiotic partials of the commodity form, and people of flesh and bone find themselves in shadow conversations with social personae semiotically incorporated within (indeed, embodied as) commodities-personae saturated with markers (indexicals) of class, gender, lifestyle, sexual desirability, and national belonging. These personae can become aspects of ourselves, we can "own" them, or find ourselves (or others) replicating them as readable partials of actual behaviors. The paper explores a particular figure of subjectivity that emerges under these conditions: "the sponsored self," a figure defined by the footings consumers take with respect to mass mediatized images of consumption. By examining a corpus of commercial advertisements, the paper shows that desire for commodities is typically formulated as desire for social personae, identities, and lifestyles linked to commodities. The paper discusses five different genres of advertising discourse in comparative terms-'hard sell,' 'soft sell,' lifestyle marketing, commodity totemism, and brand marketing-arguing that the last of these is the most elaborate of the set. An analysis of the corpus shows that advertisements formulate social images not only of the commodity but also of the advertisement's 'virtual viewer' (the would-be consumer) and performatively invite audiences (especially, members of target markets) to align themselves with these figures. When such figures find footholds in actual audiences they partly reconstitute them as sponsored selves. Finally, extending the analysis of brand marketing principles beyond the special case of commercial advertisements, we find that the sponsored self is now a figure of subjectivity that animates many forms of 'public opinion,' incrementally reconfiguring the practices that constitute the public and its opinions (from the dreamscape of alleged propositional ratiocination about 'the issues') into practices that create emblematic affiliation to political or policy brands.
Kris Gutiérrez
When Non-dominant Languages are Unmarked: Using Students' Linguistic Repertoires of Practice to Learn
Increased transnational migration, new diasporic communities, and the proliferation of media technologies have resulted in a variety of intercultural activities in which a wide range of linguistic practices become available to members of non-dominant communities. The resulting "linguistic bricolage" (Pavlenko & Blackledge, 2004, p. 32) creates a complex link between language and identity; in some contexts languages function as markers of national and ethnic identities, as forms of symbolic capital, or as markers of intercultural competence. In yet other contexts, such as the English-only and anti-bilingual education movements, language can become a means of social control. Of relevance to this paper, in the U.S., English is the unmarked language, the normative language in schooling activities, and, thus, non-dominant languages and their speakers are always marked. This paper examines how learning is expanded in learning ecologies in which the languages and language varieties of non-dominant communities are unmarked. These robust learning environments afford new identities and opportunities for language-crossing (Rampton, 1995) that have cognitive and social consequences.
Douglas Maynard
Small Talk, High Stakes: Interactional Disattentiveness in the Context of Prosocial Doctor-Patient Interaction
This research is collaborative with Pamela Hudak. The literature on "small talk" has not described the way in which this talk, even as it "oils the social wheels of work talk" (Holmes 2000) enables disattending the instrumental tasks in which one or both participants may be engaged. Small talk in simultaneity can disattend the movements, bodily invasions, and recording activities that are all functional to the instrumental tasks of medicine. In that case, prosociality can be pursued as an end in itself while instrumental tasks are being completed. Small talk in sequence occurs in sensitive sequential environments. Doctors may use small talk to focus away from equivocal complaints or psychosocial concerns of patients. Patients may use small talk to disattend physician recommendations regarding disfavored therapies (such as exercise). Accordingly, small talk in sequence may be used to ignore, mask, or efface certain kinds of agonistic relations in which doctor and patient are otherwise engaged. We explore implications of this research for the conversation analytic literature on doctor-patient interaction and the broader sociolinguistic literature on small talk in work settings.
Suzanne Wertheim
Style and stylization: Performing at the margins
This talk is an exploration of "performance" styles of speech - particularly in contracting languages in the process of losing speakers, functional domains, and stylistic options - and their relationship to marginality. Performance styles are comparable to Bauman's (1975) conception of verbal art, in which performers assume accountability to their audience for "the way in which communication is carried out, above and beyond its referential content," although in these presentations of minority identity the boundaries between "performer" and "audience" are less distinct than in more prototypical examples of verbal art. Closely monitored by standards keepers, the considerable attention paid to form and to code boundaries in these ways of speaking can cause issues with expressivity and affect, and alter their social meaning and acceptable domains of usage. Performance styles can be contextualized within a broader framework of human expressivity, with suggestive parallels found both in highly stylized forms of Western artistic expression such as opera and ballet and in physical manifestations of style on or involving the body, including clothing, accessories, and body modification. "Authentic" performance, including performance of group membership and identity, involves the emphasis and potential intensification of iconic features along with diminished attention paid to less salient features. A consideration of the more general phenomenon of emphasis, especially as part of the construction of group or individual identity, suggests a correlation with movement towards the margins, either linguistic or social/socio-political, and sometimes both. Due to the remarkably fine-grained human ability to discern distinctiveness and create cognitive categories, gradations of emphasis may be extremely subtle; other emphatic shifts away from norms may be exaggerated to the point where they are perceived as available only to more extreme or hard-line adherents of an affiliation, and subject to parody and mockery.
Registration is free. However, space is limited. Please register electronically before May 12th.