Joshua Babcock, Maureen Kosse, and Wee Yang Soh During the spring of 2023, students and early-career scholars at the University of Chicago and the University… Read More »Talking Politics 2023: Conversations and Public Pedagogies Beyond the Webinar
On the streets of Liestal in Switzerland, a former elementary school teacher gathers signatures to launch a cantonal initiative to teach “clear, linguistically correct, understandable… Read More »Gender Gaga vs Normal German: language, gender and education in Switzerland
The Society for Linguistic Anthropology (SLA) panels and other events at the upcoming AAA Annual Meeting (November 16-20 in Minneapolis,MN) promise to be exciting ones.… Read More »AN News: “SLA at the 2016 AAA Meeting” by Aaron Ansell and Anna Babel
These media and social media links were recommended by SLA members or correspondents. Some appeared earlier on our Twitter or Facebook pages.
Word choice played an important role in Japan and South Korea’s agreement to support one another’s applications for UNESCO World Cultural Heritage listing. Japan’s Foreign Minister told reporters that ‘forced to work’ does not mean ‘coerced labor’. But that depends on what “mean” means.
Anthropology News Article On November 24, 2014, St Louis prosecutor McCulloch announced that the grand jury trial did not indict Officer Darren Wilson for the… Read More »AN News: “Digital Counterpublics: Black Twitter in the Aftermath of Ferguson” by Mariam Durrani (University of Pennsylvania)
Aaron Ansell of Anthropology News investigates language ideology and the US Supreme Court with a look at recent decisions related to campaign spending and First Amendment rights, “Auctioning American Democracy”.
In 2011 the American Dialect Society listed ‘the 99%’ among its Words of the Year. In 2012 ‘47%’ became the new politically-charged number. These numbers are connected in a way that might not be obvious.
Mitt Romney was recorded declaring, “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what.” Because they pay no income tax, Romney suggested, 47% of Americans are dependent on government. This resembles a charge made in 2011 by conservative activists at the53.tumblr, which in turn was a response to the Occupy Wall Street-affiliated wearethe99percent.tumblr.
The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer says conservative Evangelical Christians view President Obama as “the avatar of godless socialism”. Do American Christian conservatives use ‘socialist’ to mean ‘insufficiently religious’? If so, their usage parallels that of Osama bin Laden.
NPR’s Morning Edition and the Sunlight Foundation suggest that congressional speech-making is becoming less sophisticated. The presentation appears to validate conventional wisdom that American politics has taken an anti-intellectual turn of late, but the story shows flawed methods coupled with confirmation bias.
“Socialism” and “liberalism” are poorly defined in US politics; the former is over-applied to left-of-center positions, and the latter used in two almost reverse ways. “Neoliberalism” is a hot topic in contemporary anthropology, but the word is sometimes used without sufficient reflection. One way to spot the best work is to look for authors who take pains to define the terms.
Stanley Fish notes that critics of the so-called ‘Ground Zero mosque’ see the terrorist attacks of September 11 as an act committed by Islam, for which all Muslims are responsible. In contrast, the stabbing of a cab driver by an attacker who reportedly asked the driver if he is Muslim is seen as “the act of a disturbed individual,” not a representative of an anti-Islamic position.
Many things happening with SLA members…
The Arizona Department of Education is asking school districts to remove teachers who speak “heavily accented or ungrammatical” English from classrooms where students are learning English. In response, the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona has drafted a statement summarizing research on language variation and its effects on language acquisition.
In this edition of our bi-weekly Roundup: the satirical journal Speculative Grammarian tackles fieldwork; the Muscogee (Creek) Nation is discussing a resolution condemning Arizona’s new immigration law; work summarized in Science Daily suggests that loss of hearing in one ear affects children’s scores on language tests.
The word socialism seems to be much in vogue in the United States recently, primarily as an epithet for one’s political opponents, especially for representatives of the Obama Administration or the Democratic Party, but also for “the Media” collectively.
I was therefore pleasantly surprised to find two recent blog posts pointing out how this usage differs from the traditional definition of socialism as a political position.