Shifting your deictic center.

When I tell people that I am a sociolinguist, the first response is often, “What can you do with that!?” And as Director of the MA program in Language and Communication (MLC) here in the department of Linguistics at Georgetown, I teach a course called the MLC Professionalization seminar to help students answer precisely that.

As I see it, there are three pieces to the process.

• First you need to figure out where the skills and training that you possess are needed and valued professionally.
• Next, you want to learn something about your motivators and values surrounding work (what will make you not just stay in a job, but enjoy the work that you do).
• And finally, you have to enact a shift from student to professional from saying “What should I do?” to “Here’s what I am going to do!”

In this post, I will focus on the last of these three, what I call “shifting your deictic center” simply because it presents as a language puzzle, which we as sociolinguists are well equipped to tackle.  I hope to give you a sense for our course by showing you what it means like to look at the job search through a linguistic lens.

So first of all, what do I mean by “shifting your deictic center” Recall that deictics are “pointing elements” in language which reveal contextual information about speaker/hearer and their relationship. To enact a deictic shift in the job search is to begin thinking about things from an employer’s point of view and to begin talking that way as well. One easy way to start is to pay attention to your deictic markers in the texts and interactions that comprise the job search.

Cover Letters

Cover letters are the job-seeking instrument in which I hear the most striking examples of the need for a deictic shift. I often hear “I want this job because….” or “this job would be a great opportunity for me…” Your (potential) employer knows this. They know that this opportunity will benefit you. What they need to know is why their investment in you will help them. Show that you understand this in your cover letter by explaining how it is that your unique skills, interests and abilities are a great fit for their current needs and goals as an organization. Also, show that you are excited about this fit!

Your LinkedIn profile

To enact the deictic shift in LinkedIn, simply imagine that you were someone using the site to search for you. How would they find you? What keywords would they use? Do these words return your profile? Another trick: search for your last name. When you find yourself in the list of returns, look for a button that says “similar.” This will show you who it is that LinkedIn thinks is like you. See if this seems right.

The job interview

If there is one question that you are likely to be asked and one for which it is crucial that you be paying attention to deixis it is, “Tell Me About Yourself.” This question is not an invitation to tell stories about growing up on a farm. There are timescales and there is a formula, and I would argue that this is: present → immediate past → immediate future. Talk about some aspect of your present., draw a connection to some aspect of your immediate past. Then link o a future vision or goal that you then describe with a bit of detail.

The analysis of interaction cultivates empathy and an ability to shift perspectives and look at things from a different point of view. To engage that muscle in the interview context is to recognize that a job interviewer is at least as nervous as an interviewee. They are worried about making the right decision, about finding a qualified colleague who will function as part of the team, and make them look as though they did their job well in hiring you. So to enact a deictic shift is to begin thinking about things from their point of view and to begin talking that way as well. You may not feel it yet, but we all also know enough about the linguistic construction of identity to understand why this exercise is valuable!

THEY need YOU

The absolute most important thing to understand as a job seeker is that THEY need YOU. Understandably as a job seeker, you probably see and feel it the other way around right now, but your skills and training have tremendous value, and when you get out there and put your vision into action, drop me a line, I want to hear all about it!

[The preceding is a guest post by Anna Marie Trester.]

Members of AAA and SLA can vote by logging in at www.aaanet.org with your online username and password and clicking “Vote Now” from the information page.

The ballot includes information about the candidates for each position. Click “Details” below each candidate’s name.

If you have any technical problems or difficulties, please email elections@aaanet.org for assistance.

Candidates for SLA positions are listed below. For AAA positions, other sections, and for more detail please refer to the ballot.

Lissie Wahl-Kleiser, Seth D. Hannah, Michael T. Nathan

Contextualization is sine que non for anthropological interpretation. Applied industries, in contrast, favor literal interpretation of written and oral communication. Contextualization is notoriously absent from interpreting industry codes of ethics and standards of practice and when mentioned at all, it is given marginal attention. Does anthropology have anything to offer the processes of interpretation outside its own discipline? If so, how, when, and where? Do interpreters and the institutions they work for have flexibility to employ a more contextualized approach to interpretation? Might such questions uncover other struggles and negotiations over meaning? What is the consequence of decontextualized interpretation in diverse situations? What kinds of processes and forces obstruct contextualization? Absolute answers to these questions cannot exist, as cases and contexts vary?

We invite anthropologists working with a cultural, social, medical, psychological, linguistic or political economic focus to think about the space given to context when interpreting medical communication in diverse institutional settings. While the organizers of this session have been conducting research on medical interpreting, we welcome those interested in furthering thinking about medical communication in diverse institutional contexts.

We invite presenters to compare institutional factors calling for the existence of literal translations and interpretations as opposed to those in which the meaning or sense of a text are additionally arrived at by incorporating context. We want to explore the degrees, circumstances and processes by which institutional forces promote or limit the emergence and incorporation of context in medical communication and the possible consequences of this. We invite participants to analyze the kinds of interaction that are allowed, prohibited or struggled over in a given institutional setting during interpretation, whether formally, informally, or some combination of both. We invite participants to discuss the role of history and power in hindering or promoting the kind of interaction that allows for the contextualization of meaning in medical communication.

We ask that presenters use ”field material,” in addition to theory. We request as well that each presenter consider how anthropological insight might enrich those fields of work each has researched. Time will be allotted for comparative discussion. It is our purpose to arrive at concepts, processes, and guidelines that underline the need for context in the process of communication in medical settings and industries.

Submission Deadline: May 1, 2013

The Edward Sapir Book Prize was established in 2001 and is awarded to a book that makes the most significant contribution to our understanding of language in society, or the ways in which language mediates historical or contemporary sociocultural processes. Beginning in 2012, the Sapir Prize has been awarded annually.

Submissions are now open for the 2013 prize. The SLA invites books with conceptual and theoretical focus, as well as ethnographic and descriptive works. Single-or multi-author books – but not edited collections – are eligible. Books must have been published between June 2011 and December 31, 2012 to be eligible for the 2013 award. Any given book is eligible only in one round of competition.

Three copies of books submitted for consideration should be sent to the address below by May 1, 2013. (Publishers will often send them at the author’s request.) A committee appointed by the president of the SLA will evaluate all submissions. The winner will be determined by late summer 2013 and the author and publisher notified in advance of the AAA annual meeting. The Sapir Prize will be formally awarded at the SLA Business Meeting during the AAA Annual Meeting in 2013.

Three copies of books submitted for consideration should be sent to:

Recent calls include:

• AAA Panel on “Intra-National” Languages (Minority Language Varieties), Alexander Thomson and Edwin Everhart
• AAA Panel CFP on Language Variation and Masculinities in Publics, Nathaniel W. Dumas and Qiuana Lopez (Deadline extended)
• CALL FOR ABSTRACTS – AAA PANEL ON A FOUR FIELDS ANTHROPOLOGY OF FETUSES, Sallie Han and Tracy Betsinger
• CFP (AAA): “Is this the good life, is this just fantasy?”: Semiotics and Ethics in Ethnographic Perspective, Erika Alpert and Jonathan DeVore
• 2013 AAA CFP Reception in Action, Christie Davis, Laura C. Brown, and Katherine Martineau
• CFP (AAA 2013) Scaling Linguistic Diversity, Kerim Friedman et alia
• CFP for AAA: “Open Sourcery”, Susan Seizer and Susan Lepselter
• Call for papers: Contemplating Intent in Temporal Heteroglossia, Andrea Smith
• CFP AAA – Personal Names and Social Identities, Karen Pennesi
• Invitation to Session for 2013 AAA Struggle Over Text and Context in the Medical Industry, Lissie Wahl-Kleiser, Seth D. Hannah, and Michael T. Nathan
• CFP AAA 2013: Voices as Multimodal Constructions, Aslihan Akkaya
• CFP AAA 2013: Multilingualism and Multimodal Interaction, Melanie McComsey
• AAA 2013 CFP: “Neither Black nor White”, Antonio Da Silva and Jennifer Roth-Gordon
• AAA panel on Dialect, Edwin Everhart and Alexander Thomson
• Call for abstracts: AAA panel on engagement in linguistic anthropology, Mary Bucholtz and Laura Graham
• AAA double session: Mediating Private and (Counter)Public Discourse: Genre, Addressivity, and the Semiotics of (not) Belonging, Lauren Zentz and Chris Taylor
• AAA CFP: Strategies and Performances of Temporal Heteroglossia, Jacqueline Messing and Andrea Smith
• panel for AAA 2013: call for papers Exploring the Boundaries of the Ethnography of Reading, Joshua Friedman, Nishaant Choksi, and Nadia Loan

[List has been updated, most recently on 5 April 2013.]

*LINGUIST List is an email service provided by linguistics professors and graduate students from Eastern Michigan University, supported primarily by reader donations.

call for abstracts: AAA panel on engagement in linguistic anthropology

The Society for Linguistic Anthropology would like to invite submissions of graduate student papers for the SLA’s Annual Student Essay Prize.  Papers should be submitted by the deadline, which is March 11, 2013.  Detailed information is below.

Due to the ongoing success of the Graduate Student Paper Prize roundtable at the AAA, we will be including another roundtable in the program this year (note, the undergraduate student paper prize competition is not affected by this and will be announced as usual).  The SLA is calling for graduate students to submit papers to the section by March 11^th; the winner and finalists will then be invited to participate in an SLA-sponsored workshop at the 2013 AAA meetings in Chicago, along with this year’s competition judges, Michael Silverstein and Kira Hall.  In order to be eligible for the award, the applicant must have been a graduate student in a degree-granting program when the paper was written; must be the sole author of the paper; and must submit the paper no more than two years after it was written.  The paper must be an original work based on original research conducted by the author.  It will be evaluated on the basis of clarity, significance to the field, and substantive contribution.  The paper should be suitable for submission to the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology and must not exceed 25 double-spaced pages, not including bibliography.  At the time of submission for this competition, the paper must not have been published or submitted for publication.

The paper must be submitted electronically in either .pdf or .doc format by the March 11 deadline.  It should be sent to Jillian Cavanaugh, SLA Member at Large (at the email below).  The cover sheet should include the title of the paper; the author’s name; the author’s email address; the author’s college or university affiliation; and the name of the faculty member who served as the student’s advisor with respect to the writing of the paper.   Please contact Jillian Cavanaugh with any questions: jcavanaugh@brooklyn.cuny.edu.

We look forward to receiving your submissions,

Jocelyn Ahlers

Chair, SLA Program Committee

It’s that time of year again: The Society for Linguistic Anthropology (SLA) invites your submissions for the American Anthropological Association’s 2013 Annual Meeting, which will be held this year in Chicago, Illinois, November 20-24.  This year’s theme is: “Future Publics, Current Engagements”.  As this year’s SLA Section Program Editor, I am writing to encourage you to submit invited sessions, volunteered sessions, and volunteered papers and posters.

Invited Sessions:  March 15 deadline

The first deadline is for the submission of proposals for invited sessions.  All proposals should be submitted directly to the AAA site.  The website will be open for submission beginning February 15; the deadline for final submissions is March 15.  The invited session proposal requires a complete list of presenters and a panel abstract (500 words). Ideally, each presenter will also submit his or her abstract as well (250 words).  In the past, panels which include both session and paper abstracts have been ranked more highly, as the submission reviewers are better able to assess the panel as a whole.  We are particularly interested in panels that feature cutting edge research and theory, topics that cross subdisciplines, and/or topics related to this year’s meeting theme.

As in the past, all panels submitted for invited status by March 15 will be reviewed and ranked by a panel of reviewers.  (If you are interested in serving in this capacity, please get in touch with me.)  All AAA sections receive a set number of invited session slots; last year we had two invited sessions (one single and one double panel) on the program.  Co-sponsored sessions are one way to spread those slots further by sharing the time allotment with another section; please indicate on your proposal if there is another section that might be interested in co-sponsoring your proposed invited session.

Notifications will be made by April 4.  Panels which are not accepted for invited session status will be automatically rolled over into volunteered session submissions (those submissions can be altered on the AAA website, if desired, between April 4 and April 15).  Those panels which are accepted will have until the April 15^th deadline to finalize their submissions on the AAA website.  Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions about your proposal, but do remember: all submission must be made to the AAA website – if you just send them to us, then they are not officially submitted.

Volunteered sessions, individual papers, individual posters:  April 15 deadline

Proposals for volunteered sessions, individual papers, and individual posters must be submitted to the AAA website by April 15.  Please be sure to indicate, for all individual papers, whether you are willing to present a poster as an alternative if necessary.

General information and other thoughts:

The Society for Linguistic Anthropology would like to encourage panel organizers to make use of the SLA website for the building of sessions: www.linguisticanthropology.org .  We encourage SLA members as well as nonmembers to visit the site and post descriptions of panels-in-progress.  This is potentially a great way to find other scholars working in your area of interest.  The email linganth list is also a great place to advertise panel ideas; for information on how to subscribe, visit
http://www.linguisticanthropology.org/resources/mailing-lists/.

The AAA has again asked Program Chairs to encourage their memberships to consider allotting more time for discussion and experimenting with non-traditional formats.  Sessions can be one of two lengths: 1.75 hours or 3.75 hours.  While all of the 15-minute time slots in the sessions must be scheduled, the SLA Program Committee is eager to consider variation in the way that they are used.  We also encourage submissions and presentations in languages other than English, a development that is obviously of great interest to us as linguistic anthropologists. If you are thinking of submitting a bilingual or multilingual panel, I encourage you to contact me in advance, as I will need to set up appropriate reviewers for assessing the submission.

The AAA adheres to a very strict “one paper/one other role” rule.  A person can give one paper and be a discussant or be a chair. Organizer/chair counts as one role in the same session.  No exceptions: one paper plus one other role. Participation in special events like chairing a business meeting or leading a workshop are not included in this calculation.

The organizer of a volunteered session MUST be clear in directing the session to a particular section for review, and the same goes for authors of volunteered papers.  If session organizers or authors are in doubt as to where their proposals will be best received, please contact all of the relevant section program editors for preliminary assessments before completing your submission.

Session organizers must check the progress of the session to make sure each participant registers and/or submits a paper/poster by April 15. If a participant role is incomplete -either by not registering or by not submitting an abstract – the participant will not appear as part of their session in the preliminary or final program.

If a panel includes a non-anthropologist, this person may apply to have the Association membership waived but must still pay the meeting registration fee.  The non-member (not the organizer of the panel) can apply for the waiver when they go through the submission process.

Please contact me if you have any questions (jahlers@csusm.edu).  I’m looking forward to another exciting AAA Annual Meeting with strong SLA participation!

Jocelyn Ahlers
Chair, SLA Program Committee

NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY

Flagstaff, Arizona

The Department of Anthropology, Northern Arizona University offers one of the country’s best anthropology MA programs.Our MA program in linguistic anthropology provides students with opportunities for scholarly development and applied work grounded in strong theoretical and methodological foundations. Strengths of the program include an emphasis on professionalization and on developing skills in the use of technology and making presentations. For example, ANT 514 (Linguistic Anthropology Lab) provides experience in collecting audiovisual data, the use of technology in editing and transcribing those data, and a setting in which students regularly present their emerging analyses and arguments.

NAU linguistic anthropology students presenting at the 2012 AAA meetings

Application information (deadline February 15)

Current linguistic anthropology faculty:

James M. Wilce (departmental webpage)

Janina Fenigsen (2012 recipient of Ruth Benedict Global Citizenship Award from the Center for a Public Anthropology)

Wilce and Fenigsen are planning a discourse-centered collaborative study of “emotion pedagogies” and New Age emotional healing in Finland and Sedona, AZ (just 45 minutes south of our campus).

Find Wilce and Fenigsen on academia.edu.

Our linguistic anthropology MA students conduct original research or complete internships in a variety of applied settings. Theses successfully defended in 2012:

Applied MA projects (research and internship): Language revitalization and other areas

What can you do with an MA in linguistic anthropology?

An MA in linguistic anthropology can be a terminal degree offering many professional opportunities. It can also be a step toward a PhD. Many of those who graduate with an MA in Anthropology, including those in linguistic and sociocultural anthropology as well as archaeology, have been admitted to leading PhD programs in the country. Recent alumni of the MA in linguistic anthropology have gone on to PhD programs at UCLA and CUNY Graduate Center.

Graduate courses in linguistic anthropology:

ANT 514 Linguistic Anthropology Lab

ANT 581 Language, Power, and Medicine

ANT 599 The Semiotics of Madness and Culture

ANT 614 Ethnography of Communication

ANT 714 Advanced Seminar in Linguistic Anthropology

Linguistic anthropology MA students take many of their courses with peers in sociocultural anthropology and benefit from our strong relationship with faculty in allied fields:

Connections to related programs (coursework, committee members, etc.):

Medical Anthropology, English Graduate Programs (e.g. , Applied Linguistics, Rhetoric); Graduate Certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies.

Contacts: Jim Wilce (928-523-2729, jim.wilce@nau.edu) and Janina Fenigsen (928-523-2286, jfenigsen@gmail.com), linguistic anthropologists;

Walter Vannette, (928-523-9514, Walter.Vannette@nau.edu ),Graduate Program Coordinator and applied cultural anthropologist;

Robert T. Trotter (928-523-4521, robert.trotter@nau.edu), Department Chair and medical anthropologist

How to apply now (deadline February 15)

This year AES will be sponsoring four faculty-students workshops and one workshop for recent PhDs to provide an intimate environment for discussing issues important to AES as well as graduate students. These workshops may also be of interest to SLA student members who are equally encouraged to apply.

AES is also happy to announce there will be subsidies available for graduate student workshop
participants. AES will provide $160 for each workshop participant to cover the costs of one night in the
conference hotel.

These workshops include:
Workshop 1: Methodological and Ethical Issues in Ethnographic Research on Conflict and
Violence.
Facilitators: Sally Engle Merry (NYU) Carolyn Nordstrom (Notre Dame)
4-5 participants, subsidies provided
As anthropologists focus more explicitly on situations of conflict and violence, they encounter new
challenges ranging from the difficulty of engaging with both sides of a conflict to concerns about personal safety. One of the challenges of this work is representing violence in a way that reflects experience without offering voyeuristic accounts. Another is the tension between the ethnographic stance of detachment and the pull of engagement. As anthropology moves toward recognizing the importance of engagement to an ethical anthropological practice and effective field research, this question becomes ever more important. Conflict situations often contain competing theories about the ideal way to resolve problems. To understand, if not to agree with, both sides requires some detachment while the terms of conflict ask for engagement. This workshop will consider these issues in the context of the co-leaders’ own experiences and those of the participants.

Workshop 2: Managing Careers, Balancing Personal Life
Facilitators: Andrew Buckser (Purdue U)
4-5 participants, subsidies provided

As a discipline, we tend to ignore things like family issues when talking about careers with students. Instead of focusing singularly on finding a job or managing early career publications, this workshop explores the possibilities for managing a career, a family, outside interests as well as other community or social demands. We hope that by having a workshop like this we can debunk the idea that the interaction of career and family is taboo. We can explore the extent to which career life is separate from personal life, with benefits and consequences, as well as issues surround parenting while completing a PhD.

Workshop 3: Becoming a Practicing Anthropologist
Facilitator: Riall Nolan (Purdue U)
10 participants, subsidies provided to graduate students but open to recent PhDs

From Dr. Nolan about the workshop:
“I have always been very interested in applying what I learned as an anthropology student to real-world problems and opportunities. So after getting my doctorate, I lived and worked overseas, not as an academic, but as a development planner and project manager. I worked for large development agencies, consulting firms, NGOs, and several national governments. I lived for years in Papua New Guinea, Senegal, Tunisia and Sri Lanka, before coming back to the US in 1984 and taking a university job. When I finally re-entered academic life, I found that many students (and not just in anthropology) were very interested in non-academic careers, but unsure of how to proceed, or even unsure as to whether this was the right path for them. Today, I’m a Professor of Anthropology at Purdue University in Indiana, and I give workshops several times a year, here and elsewhere, on how to work outside the university. It’s easier and less stressful than people think. In my experience, people with graduate degrees (MAs and PhDs) who start considering AES Spring Conference Workshops non-academic employment suffer from two handicaps, both easily overcome. One is an uncertainty about what it is that they really know how to do. The other is a lack of confidence in approaching the world outside the academy.”

Workshop 4: Conflict and New Media
Facilitators: Ilana Gershon (Indiana U)
4-5 participants, subsidies provided

This workshop explores how to study new media’s role in conflicts. What does new media bring to conflicts that is “new” and how should we as anthropologists talk about this newness? How does the organization of communication shape how conflicts unfold? How do new technologies change who participates in conflicts and how publics around conflicts are formed? This workshop will discuss what analytical tools are already available in anthropology to address these questions and more.

Workshop 5: Grant Proposal Writing for Recent PhDs
Facilitators TBA
No subsidies provided

TO APPLY:

To join one of these workshops, participants are asked to submit a brief description of no more than
250-300 words (i.e., one-page) about your research project. You are encouraged to include in the
description specific questions for the workshop leaders and for the group as a whole to consider.
Descriptions will be shared with fellow workshop participants and workshop leaders in advance of the
meeting. Send applications to Jessica Hardin, jahardin@brandeis.edu by February 15th.
Applications will be accepted on a first-come first-serve basis, noting the following:

1. The project descriptions are closely suited to the workshop themes
2. Students and workshop leaders are from different institutions
3. Students are a member of the AES

Please send your application as soon as possible for consideration as the workshops fill up quite quickly. Again, it is first-come first-serve, so please submit immediately.

If you are not yet a member of the AES, but would like to join at the modest student rate, you can do so
easily on the AAA website: http://www.aaanet.org/membership/join.cfm. Membership comes with a full
print subscription to American Ethnologist.

Please feel free to forward this to interested students and do not hesitate to contact me with any
questions you may have.
Best,
Jessica Hardin
Graduate Student Board Member, American Ethnological Society
—————————————————————————————
AES Spring Conference Workshops

To apply, please visit http://recruitment.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthropology/opensubfield/ and submit (a) an application letter including statement of research and teaching interests, (b) curriculum vitae, (c) up to three publications or article-length writing samples (d) names and email addresses of three references who will write letters of recommendation. Please reference Recruitment Job #1085-1213-01. Review of applications will begin on January 31 and will continue until the positions are filled. Salary will be commensurate with qualifications and experience; Ph.D. is required at the time of appointment. The appointment can begin as early as July 1, 2013.
The University of California is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer devoted to both excellence and diversity; women and members of other under-represented groups are encouraged to apply.