Center for the Study of Language and Society (CSLS)

Guest Lectures

These guest lectures are part of the Forum SLS. Registered MA and PhD students receive 0.25 ECTS for attending.

Registrations are possible via KSL.

Feeling like an English speaker: affect, language and political economy in India

with Katy Highet

Date & Time

When: 4 March 2025, 16:15-17:45h

Where: Unitobler, F-112

Zoom: https://unibe-ch.zoom.us/j/7931254771

 

Scholarship on neoliberalism has shown how employability discourses compel students to invest in English. What remains underexplored is the role of affect in these processes, and how it works to anchor these discourses deep within people’s subjectivities. Drawing on ethnographic data from an English-teaching NGO in Delhi, I explore the affective economy of English in India in order to demonstrate how and why English becomes desirable, for whom, and with what consequences. In doing so, I map the webs of complex logics and actors that not only discursively (re)produce English as a thing to be desired, but also draw boundaries around who can and should desire it.

 

Bio

Katy Highet is lecturer in English Language & TESOL at the University of the West of Scotland, where she is currently engaged in a Carnegie Trust funded project entitled ‘Alternative spaces of ESOL: an exploratory ethnography of English Language Teaching and activism in Glasgow’.  She was previously an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at UCL Institute of Education. As a Critical Sociolinguist, her work focuses on language, political economy, inequality and activism in both India and the UK. Her work has been published in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, the Journal of Sociolinguistics, the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, and Language and Communication.

 

 

Commemoration, affect and politics at Il Memoriale della Shoah in Milan

with Tommaso Milani

Date & Time

When: 13 May 2025, 16:15-18:00h.

Where: Fabrikstrasse 6, Room 102.

Zoom:

Afterwards, an apéro will be held.

 

In this presentation, I analyze Il Memoriale della Shoah, the memorial of the victims of the Shoah in Milan, which was inaugurated in 2013 and was turned into a night shelter for destitute migrants in 2015. To understand the rhetoric and politics of the Memorial, I bring together the notions of affective practices (Wetherell 2012), découpages du temps (lit. slices of time) (Foucault 1986) and multidirectional memory (Rothberg 2009). This analytic approach allows me to examine the nonlinear shape of remembering, the dialectic relationships between the spatialization of time and the temporalization of space, the ways in which emotions are brought into being semiotically in context, and the ethical questions that these feelings raise. Through detailed multimodal and affective analysis of the affordances of the built environment and its soundscape, the curation of the Memorial, the contextualization of three guided tours (two online and one in situ) and politicized commentary on the Memorial’s decision to shelter refugees, this presentation illustrates the multi-layered character of the relationship between space and time – one in which the past, the present and the future partly overlap and mobilize political action.

 

Bio

Tommaso M. Milani is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Applied Linguistics and Jewish Studies at Penn State; he is also affiliated to the Africal Studies Program and the Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Before joining Penn State, he held positions at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa and the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He is currently working on a project about the politics of collective remembering, focusing in particular on the commemoration of the victims of the Shoah in Italy and Sweden. He also collaborates with the Swedish Yiddishist Sarah Schulman (Dos Nisele Förlag,Stockholm) on a project about Yiddish in Sweden.

 

Cancelled: Antisemitism is a Form of Racism - or is it?

Guest lecture with Prof. em. Dr. Nira Yuval-Davis

When: 19 November 2024, 18:15-20:00
Where: UniS S003, University of Bern

On Tuesday evening, 19 November 2024, Prof. em. Dr. Nira Yuval-Davis (University of East London) will give a lecture at the University of Bern. The evening will focus on her expertise in the fields of feminism and intersectionality, as well as racism and antisemitism.

The event is organised by Prof. Dr Erez Levon, Center for the Study of Language and Society (CSLS), and Prof. Dr Patricia Purtschert (IZFG), in cooperation with the Graduate School Gender Studies.

 

 

Mapping variation in multilingual postcolonial settings: The case of Namibia

with Prof Gerald Stell

When: 27 November 2024, 16.15 - 17.45 
Where: Unitobler F001, University of Bern
Zoom: https://unibe-ch.zoom.us/j/7931254771

The sociolinguistic study of the multilingual Global South suffers from self-imposed methodological limitations inherited from the assumption that its language dynamics are too ‘fluid’ to be accounted for systematically. Multilingual Namibia might disprove this assumption, if one looks at it from combined quantitative and qualitative perspectives. I first show, based on Namibian real speech data, that Namibian language repertoires, which one could characterize as combining indigenous languages, Afrikaans, and English, vary along two salient dimensions, namely, degrees of ethnic marking and degrees of urbanity. Afrikaans, Namibia’s historical lingua franca and the native language of most Namibian Whites and ‘Coloureds’, acts as a low-status symbolic attribute of urbanity that one feels pressured to combine with English, the high-status language. Experimental phonetic and grammatical data on Afrikaans and English closely reflect Namibia’s language ideologies, which are inferable from real speech data. Namibian Afrikaans reveals high ethnoracial fragmentation, in line with its low status, while Namibian English displays women-driven convergence into a high-status South-African-sounding variety linguistically aligned with the Afrikaans-speaking ‘Coloured’ middle classes against a backdrop of lingering White-Black polarization. These observations suggest that mixed methods can deliver fruitful and accountable insights into variation in the Global South, whose patterns can be fit into adjusted variationist frameworks. 

Bio

Gerald Stell is currently an associate professor at the University of Lausanne after holding faculty positions in Hong Kong and the West Indies. His field of expertise focuses on multilingualism and variation in postcolonial lingua francas. His current research projects focus on Namibia’s multilingualism, as well as co-variation patterns in African Englishes and Frenches.    

Citizen (socio)linguistics - a way of returning language study to the people in the complexity of our times

with Prof. Bente Ailin Svendsen

When: 2nd of October 2024, 16.15 - 17.45 
Where: Unitobler F023, University of Bern
Zoom: https://unibe-ch.zoom.us/j/67076342582 

Sociolinguistic research has traditionally envisioned itself as a politically neutral field of study that floats above the messy fray of everyday life, instead focusing on linguistic variation. One consequence of this view has been the siloing of sociolinguistic knowledge for consumption and production among a small community of experts, accompanied by a self-reflective recognition that “Linguists have not been good about informing the general public about language” (Bauer and Trudgill 1998:xv). Recent developments in citizen linguistics aim to rectify this imbalance by engaging lay people in some or all stages of the research process with an aim of “returning language study to the people” (Pennycook 2024:112). This paper discusses the potentials and challenges of citizen (socio)linguistics by presenting previous and ongoing co-produced research with young people who explores the role of language in their lives; how and why language matters to them; as well as to whom they include in their study. It argues that co-produced research opens up new avenues for research and science communication at the intersection of citizen linguistics and environmental/(eco)linguistic citizenship in a time of immense environmental challenges; on youth as key actors in the production of knowledge and communication about sociolinguistic, socioeconomic and environmental concerns.

Bio

Bente Ailin Svendsen is Professor of Multilingualism and Second Language Studies at the University of Oslo, known for her research on multilingual socialization, identity, and linguistic practices in urban settings. She co-developed MultiLing Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan and was Adjunct Professor at the University of South-Eastern Norway (2019-2023), attached to the research group Linguistic variation and change in society and education. Svendsen has furthered citizen science in sociolinguistics (Svendsen 2018) in one of the recent top cited paper in Journal of Sociolinguistics. She has an extended outreach activity, particularly through her role as the project leader of the language exhibition Oslo says. Language in the City and the Language Lounge at the Oslo City Museum (2016-2018). Further, she has served as an expert witness in court involving bilingual development, custody and the Norwegian Child Welfare Service.

Svendsen, B. A. 2018. The dynamics of citizen sociolinguistics. Journal of Sociolinguistics.

 

 

Guest Lectures Archive

Here you can find an overview of our past guest lectures.