Overview
The Society for Linguistic Anthropology Committee on Language & Social Justice (LSJ) will be organizing social media artifacts (tweets, Instagram posts, etc.) into a curated Storify (https://storify.com/) resulting from several events (panels, roundtables, meetings) during the AAA 2016 conference in Minneapolis[1].
Organizers
Netta Avineri (navineri@gmail.com)
Hilary Dick (dickh@arcadia.edu)
Mariam Durrani (mdurrani@gmail.com)
Kate Riley (kriley1125@gmail.com)
We are currently recruiting several LSJ members and other interested parties to act as social media respondents at the conference. These “designated tweeters” will sign up to attend specific AAA events relevant to the Language and Social Justice Committee’s work including:
(i) The SLA Presidential Conversation on Multilingual Education & Social Justice
(Thursday, 11/17 @ 12:15 – 1:30 pm)
(ii) Intersectional Perspectives on the Unethical Reliance on Contingent Labor in Academia
(Friday, 11/18 @ 8:00 – 9:45 am)
(iii) Language and Social Justice Committee meeting
(Saturday, 11/19 @ 12:15 – 1:30 pm)
(iv) AAA Committee for Human Rights Roundtable Human Rights, The Academy,
and Beyond: How Anthropologists Engage
(Saturday, 11/19 @ 1:45 – 3:30 pm)
More information about these events can be found here:
https://linguisticanthropology.org/blog/2016/10/24/language-and-social-justice-task-force-events-at-aaa2016/).
At these key events, we will also announce and hand out information about this hashtag campaign on an infographic (a visual representation that will illustrate our digitally curated project), along with written instructions on how to contribute in order to elicit relevant material from volunteer-tweeters at the events themselves. Tweeters will use hashtags in their posts (more information below), which will allow them to collect material not only during this list of LSJ panels and workshops, but also in other AAA Meeting contexts where these topics may arise.
Becoming a Designated Tweeter
If you are interested in serving as a designated tweeter, please email the 4 organizers listed above by Sunday, 11/13. We will then send you an invitation to a Google doc where you can sign-up for particular events and find out more about how exactly you will direct your tweets and other forms of social media response.
What You Do as a Designated Tweeter
We will ask our tweeters to include not only text, but also photos and screenshots, as well as possible sound bites. Their social media contributions will be pre-organized according to hashtags based on past and future LSJ initiatives including the following 13 topics (for more information, see https://linguisticanthropology.org/socialjustice/initiatives/):
Here are the hashtags that we are designating for various LSJ initiatives:
#LSJ2016: A general hashtag for all tweets during LSJ Committee panels
#LSJCalProp58: California Proposition 58-LEARN (http://www.cta.org/prop58)
#LSJRefugees: Language and refugees
#LSJHealthcare: Language and health care: discourses of doctors; access
#LSJSignLang: Sign languages
#LSJMuslims: Misrepresentation of Muslims and Islamophobic discourse
#LSJKnowYourRights: Know your Rights and police training
#LSJGender: Sexuality, Gender and Women: culture of assault
#LSJBiLxEcon: Interpreters and translators as related to bilingual/global economies
#LSJCollegeNames: University building names and history of slavery
#LSJCensus — Census Bureau’s categorization of languages and speakers
#LSJtheIWord — “illegal immigrants”
#LSJMascotNames — denigrating sports team mascots
#LSJLangGap — language/word gap and its consequences
What the Final Storify Will Include
After the AAA, we will curate the social media responses into a Storify that will include the following material: (i) the above described social media artifacts; (ii) abstracts from panels and roundtables, and (iii) transcriptions of selected portions from the various fora. The resulting curated Storify will be multimodal, multi-rhetorical (part illustration, part narrative, and part analysis), and multi-authorial. This holistic response will increase awareness of the LSJ’s work on social justice by providing an accessible window onto the diverse ways linguistic anthropologists explore the interconnections between language (its structure, use, and ideology) and a number of pressing anthropolitical issues.
The editors of the Anthropology Newsletter Society for Linguistic Anthropology Section News have agreed to publish the resulting Storify not only because of the subject matter but also because of this innovative approach to disseminating anthropological news.
[1] We are building on a couple of other previous projects: one set of curated tweets (on Storify) from last year’s AAA panel on the Language Gap https://storify.com/soclinganth/lxgap and another set from a UPenn symposium on visual and performative ethnography held last year: https://storify.com/mdurrani/visual-and-performative-ethnography-at-upenn.