Ana Luísa Amaral (University of Porto)
Estranhar o Estranho: Que Tempos São Estes?
Assistimos hoje, no mundo ocidental, ao desmoronamento dos direitos sociais, a novas formas de violência social e económica e de coerção de liberdades, assim como a sucessivas tentativas de apagamento da democracia. Vemos ainda emergir e consolidar-se o avesso da hospitalidade e do exercício da ética do cuidado. Simultaneamente, e no que às políticas sexuais diz respeito, novas configurações de organização social e de afectividades têm vindo a emergir, surgidas de um tipo de pensamento emancipatório grandemente devedor dos feminismos e dos movimentos sociais dos anos 1960. Procurarei debater a convivência destas duas realidades: o profundamente estranho, sobretudo para uma geração que viveu a segunda metade do século XX, destas novas formas de autoritarismo; e de como a teoria queer (=estranha, esquisita), com todas as suas implicações de activismo e de pensamento radical, é vista pelas forças reacionárias e neo-fascistas como uma ameaça. E como o pensamento novo que ela traz, ao lado dos feminismos (e de mais uns “objectos estranhos”, como a poesia), pode ser um motor de resistência a estes nossos tempos.
Alastair Pennycook (University of Technology Sydney)
Where is language? Ecologies, distributions and materialities
This paper explores questions around the locus of language. While language was traditionally, at least in scholarship in the Global North, located primarily in the human head, more recent trends have suggested viewing language from different perspectives. While humanist and cognitivist lines of thinking were concerned centrally with the idea of a language system in the brain, other approaches to language have suggested this needs to be rethought. Questions of embodiment suggest that language cannot happen without a broader understanding of voice, gesture, movement and the body. Posthumanist studies, meanwhile, question the centrality of the human, suggesting that we need to take other forms of communication more seriously and ask why we have so fetishized human language. New materialist approaches propose that many aspects of language, identity, agency, cognition and so on are better understood as happening within a much wider ecology that includes aspects of the material world. Indigenous colleagues have meanwhile insisted on a deep relationship between language and the land, not in referential terms but as emplacement. From these perspectives language is only partly, and not very importantly, located in the head. It is instead better understood in social, ecological, material, distributed and embodied terms.
Mike Baynham (University of Leeds)
Translanguaging: language borderless or embordered?
In this paper I present a “maximalist” approach to translanguaging (c Baynham & Lee 2019 ). Underpinning this discussion is the persistent difficulty noted since Whorf onwards in conceiving language as languaging i.e. dynamically, when the metalanguage is a language like English with its preference for “thingification”. This approach to translanguaging can be termed maximalist in that it extends the construct beyond its initial focus on the deployment of two or more languages in the repertoire (interlingual translanguaging) to consider the deployment of registers (intralingual translanguaging) and other semiotic orders (intersemiotic translanguaging), inspired by Jakobson’s seminal work on translation (Jakobson 1959). While the interlingual and intralingual dimensions would still be quite recognizable to Jakobson, the intersemiotic focus has expanded exponentially over the last three decades, due to work in the visual/verbal/gestural/embodied in multimodal communication (cf Adami 2017) and in linguistic ethnography and ethnomethodology by such as Charles Goodwin (cf Goodwin 2001). I propose two other types of translanguaging that go beyond Jakobson’s framework, interdiscursive translanguaging (in which what is being mediated in the repertoire are discourses rather than languages, registers or modes) and, going beyond a simple focus on gesture, to consider translanguaging at the language/body interface, informed by the recent work of Judith Butler (Butler 2015). I will conclude by discussing how this approach to translanguaging connects in interesting ways to other theoretical constructs such as the notion of spatial repertoire and assemblage/agencement. In addition this approach to translanguaging has interesting implications for how we understand the currently vexed question of borders and emborderment which I will discuss in relation to Mary Louise Pratt’s contact zones and Mezzadra and Neilson’s Border as Method. I will show how a maximalist approach to translanguaging enables productive thinking about the current tensions between the linguistic dimensions of borderlessness (aka globalization) and emborderment.
Environments: Ecologies and (In)Hospitalities 