2024

CSLS Summer School 

Summer School 2024 : Language, Politics and Power

The CSLS Summer School *"Language, Politics, Power"* is an interactive two-day event featuring guest lectures and workshops with Rodney Jones (University of Reading), Geert Jacobs (University of Ghent), and Mi-Cha Flubacher (Zurich University of Applied Sciences). Participants will also have the opportunity to engage in group discussions, receive feedback on their own research, network with other scholars, and connect with like-minded individuals. The Summer School is open to doctoral students, advanced MA students, and early-career researchers in sociolinguistics.

Guest Lectures

Questions in entrepreneurial podcasting: linguistic ethnography, multimodal analysis, argumentation – and politics

In my lecture I report on a case study of the use of questions in a single entrepreneur’s six-episode podcast series. Drawing on linguistic ethnographic and multimodal inquiry I set out to identify and analyse ‘re-dramatization’ strategies, creating a sense of interaction and heteroglossia in what is essentially a monologue as the entrepreneur ventriloquizes the podcast maker’s feedback in the context of metapragmatic, so-called “language-related” episodes. Mobilizing resources from argumentation I go on to apply notions of endoxa and epideictic speech. The lecture is concluded with an open-ended reflection on issues of power, authority, leadership branding and media politics.

The power and politics of asking

There is hardly a more commonplace while also highly loaded question than “Where are you from?”. The very act of asking this question metapragmatically invokes ideologically defined positionalities and legitimacies, both of ask-er and ask-ee. The normality of the question stands in stark contrast with the implicit questioning of the other person as ‘anomality’. In my lecture I will approach the act of asking in looking at different inherent axes of power and linking them to a wider politics of racialized exclusion. Interview excerpts centring on being questioned with regards to linguistic competence/ ownership will serve as an empirical starting point, before expanding the discussion to touch on the politics of asking in academic research. The aim of this lecture is thus to transfer the ideologies of the normality of questioning and the legitimacy of speaking to the field of science and research: Who asks whom which questions? Who is understood as legitimate researcher, who as respondent? The theoretical and empirical linking of these two areas (‘everyday racism’ and science) is intended to shed light on the normalized and normalizing violence of questioning but also on the possibility of speakers positioning themselves against hegemonic discourses in claiming their own form of normality’.

Talking to AI: Metapragmatics and sociotechnical imaginaries

When people interact with “intelligent” agents, such as chatbots, they often engage in verbal provocations as a way to test the limits of the agent’s “intelligence” or apparent “humanness”. One function of such exchanges is to aid people in developing pragmatic parameters and inferential processes for conversing with machines, what I have previously called algorithmic pragmatics (Jones 2020). Recently, it has become popular to share these provocative exchanges over social media in the form of metapragmatic artifacts, such as screenshots of conversations with chatbots or videos of interactions with voice assistants. In this talk I will focus on three examples of such artifacts: 1) performances of conversations with Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri posted as short videos on YouTube and TikTok, 2) screenshots of people’s intimate conversations with the virtual companion Replika, and 3) outputs people have received after presenting provocative prompts to large language models. Based on my analysis I argue that these metapragmatic artefacts function to facilitate collective engagements with algorithmic pragmatics that feed into larger societal imaginaries, not just about artificial intelligence, but also about what it means to produce “appropriate” language and what it means to be human. References Jones, R.H. (2020). The rise of the pragmatic web: Implications for rethinking meaning and interaction. In C. Tagg and M. Evans (eds.) Message and medium: English language practices in new and old media. Amsterdam: De Gruyter Mouton. 17-37.

Summer School 2024 program.pdf (PDF, 53KB)
Language Politics and Power (9.-10.9.24).pdf (PDF, 3.4 MB)