A post-COVID-19 “return to normal” implies a continuation of the very cultural, linguistic, and economic practices that precipitated the pandemic. Scholars of language and communication must do better.
Society for Linguistic Anthropology
Making Our Meetings Work for Graduate Students
Our AAA Annual Meeting and section meetings should be spaces for graduate training. We must do more to include graduate students in our events and produce programming to prepare them for academic and alternative careers.
Dispatches from the Language and Social Justice Committee
What can we do in a time when many of us feel deeply isolated and powerless in the face of social upheaval and injustice? Take action and collective responsibility.
2019 Sapir Book Prize Awarded to Charles Goodwin’s Co-Operative Action
Co-Operative Action is a transformative reworking and integration of old and new that yields pathbreaking insight.
Society for Linguistic Anthropology 2019 Business Meeting
The SLA reports on developments in membership, the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, the Spring Meeting, section awards, and more.
Being an Ethnographer about the Tenure Process
Think like an ethnographer about the tenure process. How is it organized? What are the moments in which you are most vulnerable in the process, even if you have hit all the marks?
Anti Latinu/Anti Spanish Attacks and Anthro-Political Linguistics
It is our responsibility to challenge linguistic intolerance. An anthro-political linguistics demands it, acknowledging that language is always political and justice requires action.
Speak American
Language policing involves much more than the actions of individuals.
Speak English or Else You’ll Be Put on Dish Duty!
Have you ever been in the US and heard people speaking a language you didn’t understand? Did it bother you? Have you ever thought about why it bothered you? For folks who might tell those people to speak in English, where does that entitlement come from? Why do some people feel they have the right to tell others how or what to speak?
The Unruly Leftists and Good White Women of the New Campus Free Speech
Since the mid-twentieth century, many Americans have seen free speech as primarily serving an inclusive and egalitarian concept of public space and political legitimacy. This view draws on stories of anti-war protestors and civil rights activists, like Mario Savio and Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth. An opposing view of free speech was on offer in President Trump’s March 2019 executive order to “protect free speech on campus.” While the impact of the order itself has been up for debate, its signing ceremony was an inflection point for a conservative vision of free speech as the province of normatively gendered whiteness.