The 57th Annual ILA Conference is honored to have the following three plenary speakers (links for presentation title and abstract to follow in the coming weeks):
Betsy Rymes
Communicative Repertoires and Institutions
Walk into any school or down the street in any major metropolitan area. Look around. Listen. Stroll down the hall. Step into a classroom. Or put on your headphones and listen to the radio. What do you see? What do you hear? Chances are there are dozens of languages, ways of speaking, gesturing, looking and dressing in play, many of which are only minimally understood by you. As a linguist or a language teacher, a professor or a student, how can you navigate this complex communicative terrain? What are your responsibilities? How could you possibly be the “expert”? What would you be an expert of? In this talk I argue for a new understanding of language as a set of communicative repertoires that fluidly circulate through institutional contexts. I begin by defining “communicative repertoire” and its historical precedents. Then, I illustrate a variety of communicative repertoires in context. I conclude with a few tips for how one might navigate institutions as a post-modern-repertoire person.
Srikant Sarangi
Role-mediated institutional/professional orders of D/discourse
Some fifty years ago, Berger and Luckmann argued for a linkage between the study of institutions (in the broadest sense) and their knowledge structures via role analysis at both macroscopic and microscopic levels. The concept of role, however, remains under-utilised among discourse scholars studying the interactional orders within institutional and professional domains (these domains need to be kept distinct – conceptually and analytically). The analytic focus of most previous studies has been on how language is used to categorise institutional and professional practices.
Starting with a characterisation of institutional and professional orders, in this presentation I review the theoretical and performative dimensions of role – especially drawing upon Merton’s notion of role-set – which can be mapped on to Goffman’s and others’ attention to situated role-performance, including activity-specific roles. I use illustrative data from health and social care settings to underscore how D/discourse analysis in the institutional/professional sphere remains incomplete without role analysis. I conclude by reflecting on the ‘role-set’ the discourse analyst inhabits in their research endeavour.
Elana Shohamy
Linguistic landscape as institutional discourse:
Negotiating for greater justice and contesting marginalization in the public space
Linguistic landscape, referring to language displayed in the public space, is often perceived as a ‘free’ zone that enables language displays and consists of varied discourses and genres types which are characterized by multimodality and multilingualism (especially in the ‘bottom-up’ flows). Yet, the ‘free’ public space is an arena of ideological and political struggle for ownership of space, representation, and control. Questions about ‘who owns the public space?’ are at the center of protests and demonstrations currently taking place around the world demanding social justice and greater participation and voice in the public space. These movements include demands for justice and participation of diverse populations such as immigrants and indigenous groups, especially within the context of uniformity vs. diversity. In this paper I will report on a number of studies where different groups struggle against the institutionalized nature of the public space. Each of these studies reflects the struggle for greater participation. The first study shows citizens demanding greater representation of marginalized groups in the city of Tel Aviv in city-sponsored centennial festivities. Two others focus on the marginalization of Arabs in the city of Jaffa and at an Israeli university where Arabs represent a large proportion of students. The last focuses on the demands for social and political participation during demonstrations in the summer of 2011. These cases demonstrate clearly that institutional talk representing rigid and homogenous narratives does not go unnoticed; rather it creates feelings of marginalization that lead to reactions and protests that call for greater justice and inclusion in the public space, activism, actions, and change.
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