AAA 2020 CFP

Language Research for Resilience: Applying linguistic anthropology in times of crisis

If interested, please send a 250 word abstract to greentonguesclimatechallenge@gmail.com by Sunday, May 10th.

      Over the past year, communities around the world have faced myriad crises, including wildfires, flooding, and the COVID-19 pandemic. These crises have been shown to disproportionately impact communities of color (Sealey-Huggins 2018), low-income communities (Mendelson et al. 2006), women (Denton 2002), and other frontline groups.

      Furthermore, we have seen that the language used to conceptualize these crises—Chinese coronavirus, climate change vs. climate crisis, and eco-anxiety, to name just a few examples—leads to tangible outcomes that likewise disproportionately affect frontline communities. Language, as we know, can mean the difference between apathy and engagement, between individualism and solidarity, between violence and compassion.

      In this panel, we envision how language research can a) address injustice in the face of crisis and b) work towards a safe, just, decolonial, and regenerative future. One vein of this research involves critical work on the discourses used by governments, corporations, and individuals in power to distract, mislead, and disenfranchise others in relation to the climate and COVID-19 crises (Carvalho 2010; Fløttum 2010; Molek-Kozakowska 2017; Stibbe 2014). Another, complementary vein of language research seeks effective, considerate ways of engaging people in community solidarity and resilience, with consideration of medium (Schäfer & Schlichting 2014; Segerberg & Bennett 2011), affect (Chapman, Lickel, and Markowitz 2017; Norgaard 2011; Pihkala 2018), identity and positionality (Jaspal, Nerlich, & Cinnirella 2014; Love-Nichols, 2020), and sociocultural and interactional context (Anderson & Williams 2015). In both these areas, we advocate for research that is accessible, applicable, community-based, decolonial, and intersectional. Some of the topics we consider include:

Examples of research

• Community-based and/or critical research on language and climate justice

• Community-based and/or critical research on language and the coronavirus

• Work that considers the intersections of the above topics with raciolinguistics (Rosa & Flores 2017), Indigenous epistemologies (e.g. Baldwin & Colebrook 2018), language, gender, and (a)sexuality, language and disability justice, decoloniality, and other topics related to language and social justice

Questions

• How can researchers within academia build partnerships with activist organizations, community stakeholders, and media outlets?

• How can we reframe the goals of our research to center immediate community needs over contributions to scholarship for scholarship’s sake?

• How can we share our work in more accessible ways?

• How can we engage people in citizen science related to themes of language and climate justice and COVID-19 justice?

• What other academic disciplines should we engage with, and how should these engagements be structured?

• How can we change the way we teach to be more accessible and more supportive of student activists?

• How can we change the way we conference to be more accessible and sustainable?

      We warmly invite contributions from researchers working on questions of language and social justice, language and the environment, language and public health, and any other related topic.