Speaker Panels

In the public discussion around education in China, vocational school students have been labelled as losers and "low-quality groups". In the hierarchical ideology of Chinese society, vocational school students are stigmatised in opposition to the modelling Chinese youth with a bright future. However, stigmatisation is not a static and objective reality, but is constantly interpreted and reconstructed in the interaction between the discriminated group and the social environment. This paper examines the dialectical relationship between group stigma under hierarchical social ideology and identity constructions of vocational school students through an internal lens. The semiotic analysis in this article revolves around short videos uploaded by a vocational school vlogger on a Chinese social media platform. The study shows that vocational school students reconfigured the differential axes of stigmatized identities and invented new identity subcategories in their discursive practices by performing and commenting on stigma. In the identity crisis of vocational school students, the fractal recursion of stigma becomes a strategy for vocational school students to position themselves. Vocational school students' performance of stigma is neither a culture of group resistance nor a simple reproduction of hierarchical ideology. Rather, it is a negotiation of the destigmatization of personal identity through the reinterpretation of group stereotypes. By distancing themselves from the "criticized image," vocational school students can create a socially acceptable image for their own benefit. This semiotic process is a social action of vocational students as marginalized group in education system trying to find their place in Chinese society.

How should social semiotics analyze explicit moral norms? Here I examine an 1882 written Mandarin lay ethics for Orthodox Christians, The Teaching’s Rules Outlined and Described (jiaogui lüeshu 教規略述), composed by anonymous Russian Orthodox missionaries and their Chinese collaborators at the Beijing Orthodox Mission. The Mission was a Russian imperial institution that did more intelligence work than proselytism, and relied repeatedly on informants from a small group of nominally Orthodox Chinese families for whom the text was written. The grammatical resource of deontic modality is deployed through this text to construct a normative framework of Orthodox life cycle ritual. This framework sought to regiment Chinese kinship and social reproduction to Russian Orthodox norms, while also inviting a talented few to spiritual self-transformation through study and devotional practice. Using this text I theorize deontic modal co-textuality – deontic co-text – to model "a morality" as the emergent product of an entextualization event. Ultimately, the Rules were not accepted by all of their audience to the same degree. The text nevertheless inaugurated a period of increasingly visible Orthodox Chinese religiosity. Tragically, these Chinese subjects’ public association with their Russian confessors led to their massacre in the anti-foreign Boxer Rebellion of 1900. In the aftermath and thereafter, survivors embraced ever closer collaboration with Russian patrons. In the long term, the dissemination of an Orthodox lay morality (what I analyze as deontic co-text) appears to have strengthened the intergenerational loyalty and availability of Chinese intermediaries for the Russian imperial project in China.

A hallmark for one of the most profound paradigm shifts in gender studies, West and Zimmerman’s “Doing Gender” is often read as a theory of how people signify femininity/masculinity via “gender performance.” This prevailing interpretation falls short of what the theory calls for—an ethnomethodologically informed analysis of the emergent “naturalness” of gender. To further this agenda, I advance a theory of “gender uptake,” which extends structured action theory from expressive acts to interpretive acts and elaborates an ethnomethodological theory of categorization with a pragmatist theory of meaning. Shifting our analytic focus from the performance of social actors to the uptakes made by their audience, I argue the “naturalness” of gender remains underdetermined until the audience makes four ideological moves that cannot be predetermined by the “performer”: typification, anchoring, downshifting, and erasure. With an empirical analysis of how feminist parents account for their kids’ gender-stereotypical interests, I illustrate how centering the audience helps us approach the interactional production/naturalization of categorical differences processually as open-ended negotiations of sign relations, where meaning emerges from selective attention.

Building on canonical raciolinguistic scholarship (Alim et. al 2020, Alim et. al 2016, Shankar 2023), I postulate “ethnoraciolinguistic gaslighting” as a consequence of Tamazight officialization and standardization in Morocco whereby (certain) people use discursive strategies to position themselves as “not being discriminatory.” This paper incorporates data from my spouse’s dissertation defense at Hassan II University regarding the works of Amazigh poet, Mohamed Moustaoui, and the pressures of Indigenous Amazigh literature to conform to hegemonic written literature. The dissertation committee members use various strategies including censorship, interactional alignment/positioning, and Arabo-Islamic ideologies to erase, deny, and dismiss the inferiority of Tamazight (and Imazighen) within the representational economy (Keane 2003). The paper interrogates the affordances of the analytic of “afterlives” in examining the haunting past of colonialism(s) and Arabization, and how it shapes the present (and future) (cf Birch, Chomorro) of the language/semiotic ideological assemblage in Morocco (Kroskrity 2018, Keane 2005). Finally, I conclude with some reflections on the dilemmas of fieldwork of a “Dutiful and Shameful Foreign ‘Wife’” (cf Abu-Lughod 1988), a personal, frequently negotiated ethnographic stance for me in Morocco.

Social media are optimistically hailed as a resource for language revitalization efforts (Dale et al. 2022; Moshnikov 2022; Wang, Bahy, & An 2022). Proponents assume that social media platforms have the potential to widely disseminate content in marginalized languages, virtually connecting members of endangered language communities and expanding domains of use (Davis 2018). However, the way that content reaches users is not direct dissemination from creators to communities; it is algorithmically curated by recommender systems. / How do interactions between users and algorithms affect the circulation and impact of endangered-language content? We trace the uptake (Cole & Pellicer 2012) of Kyrgyz-language cartoons on YouTube, produced by the government-funded channel Balastan, as a case study to explore the recursive relationships among users and algorithms that determine the reach and influence of online language revitalization efforts. We perform an algorithmic audit of YouTube, using synthetic Kyrgyz user profiles to determine the proportion of Kyrgyz-language revitalization content presented in response to popular children's search queries. We then use ethnographic data consisting of quotidian examples of children's YouTube usage, their linguistic practices, and language ideologies to contextualize these results. We find that government content is only recommended at frequent rates when users signal a strong interest in Kyrgyz-language content, and even under these conditions Russian language channels are recommended at similar rates. Our work demonstrates how the uptake of Kyrgyz language revitalization content is in part determined by YouTube's algorithm, yet also determined by children's interpretations, choices, and habits as they interact with the platform.

Within the Dominican Republic, language contact between speakers of Haitian Creole and Dominican Spanish has opened up a decades-long discourse on “Haitianized” forms of Spanish. This form of Spanish, often called “Haitianized Spanish,” has been theorized in a variety of ways. Some scholars argue that this form of Spanish is an interlanguage; essentially, an incomplete/imperfect acquisition of Dominican Spanish that is mainly evidenced on the phonetic and morphosyntactic levels (Ortiz López 2018). Other scholars have pointed to the possibility of a distinct Afro-Dominican vernacular arising from this language contact (Lipski 1998). And at the same time, some scholars have questioned if perceptions of an Afro-Dominican vernacular are based on linguistic reality or on racial, cultural, and regional stereotypes (Bullock and Toribio 2008). / In line with scholars who explore the role of nationalist anti-Haitian rhetoric within the hierarchization of different forms of Spanish on the island, I argue that another such form of Haitianized Spanish to consider is “Mock Haitian.” In this paper, I begin by detailing features of Mock Haitian that have circulated within popular media like comedy shows and literature. I then focus on instances of Mock Haitian used within a narrative told by a speaker of Dominican Spanish about his Haitian co-worker. I explore the various narrative and voicing strategies that this speaker uses to create alignment with his listeners while also creating this image of a Haitian man whose Spanish is almost right, but not quite—a character whose language is on the very periphery, almost unintelligible, and entirely “black.”

This paper is based on a chapter of my dissertation on migration from Pakistan to the UAE. I focus on a migrant domestic group clustered around a patron. Recent anthropological studies of Patronage have argued that such hierarchical formations offer hope and promise to clients in conditions of precarity. This very dimension of patronage, however, also fosters hostility between followers. Employing the conception of patronage as a network instead of a chain of dyads, I highlight the hostile competition between clients for the fruits of patronage. My paper investigates humor as a face-to-face modality of this hostile jockeying between clients—pejoratively called chamchas [spoons] in Pakistan. Following Judith Irvine’s argument that “a society’s principles of conduct may often be most clearly revealed in the breach[…]” (1993: 105), I analyze an interaction gone wrong wherein a collective meal was broken by a failed joke. Collective rituals like eating and laughing together symbolize mutuality and sharing. And yet, these very “media of mutuality” (Sahlins 2013: 54) also allow clients of a patron to draw boundaries, and inscribe hierarchies. My analysis reveals the tension between sharing and mutuality as widely shared ethics among working-class migrants on the one hand, and hierarchy in relations of patronage on the other.

"It is those who have been to school who don't speak French!" young mothers in Sebikotane, Senegal, often remark, puzzling over students' reluctance to speak the language that they are taught every day at school. Indeed, despite over sixty years of French public schooling in this lower-income, multi-ethnic community, the French language is rarely spoken outside of schools. Wolof is instead the dominant language of markets, shops, mosques and even schools, where teachers of different ethnic identities speak Wolof with their colleagues and students on the side of delivering French content. Drawing on ten months of ethnographic research conducted in 2023, in this paper I explain the margins of French speech in Sebikotane through a close look the pragmatic tasks teachers tend to accomplish in French versus Wolof as they teach. By viewing classrooms as key sites of production of raciolinguistic ideologies (Rosa and Flores 2017) and affects through performance (Bauman and Briggs 1990). I argue that teachers construct French as the language of authority and intelligence, and Wolof as the language of connection through play and humor. I am interested in how a language of schooling can become "sticky" with affect (Ahmed 2004), in particular shame and fear, which discourages its use outside of schools, and how informal codes become essential to performing the pragmatic work of connection and identification. I argue that this pragmatic split furthers the dichotomous enregisterment of whiteness and blackness in separate codes, while limiting the reach of white supremacy (Pierre and Beliso-De Jesus 2019).

From the late 1980s to the early 2000s, the Maya movement of cultural revindication in Guatemala was at its height, with language revitalization figuring prominently. One of its major advances was the mergence of a maximum legal authority on Mayan languages within the Guatemalan state. This autonomous state entity, the Academia de Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala (ALMG), was founded in 1990 to receive state funds but manage its own affairs directed by its Maya-led Superior Council constituted by the presidents of the 22 legally recognized language groups, labeled as Linguistic Communities (LC). One such LC is the Kaqchikel Linguistic Community. The Kaqchikel Mayan case is a theoretical puzzle. Its extensive corpus of documentary and descriptive material, alongside applied interventions, has been not accompanied by an expanded use of Kaqchikel, but rather language constriction (Cojtí 2021). This situation is diagnosed as a “point of discontinuity or contradiction” in language endangerment and revitalization, “where, practices and ideas about language diverge” (Meek 2010, 50). The political context is needed to heed Meek’s call to “focus on all (or several) aspects of the sociolinguistic environment, as a totalizing, holistic phenomenon that has both positive and negative effects, both intended and unintended consequences” (Meek 2010, 55). Accordingly, this paper politically contextualizes the case of Kaqchikel language revitalization as in a state of sociolinguistic disjuncture to ask: how has mergence of language revitalization within the state created new forms of political marginalization and what affordances emerge from this political moment of included exclusion?

In 2019, the term “entrepreneur” came to prominence in an unlikely place: socialist Cuba. Nearly ten years after the legalization of limited private enterprise, business owners across the island began using its Spanish equivalent, emprendedor, to describe themselves as a particular kind of economic actor. This paper analyzes the contours of Cuban “entrepreneurship” discourse to trace the process of self-typification among self-described emprendedores. It pays particular attention to how, far from reifying existing dichotomies of capitalism versus communism, adopters use “entrepreneurship” to index elements of both, ultimately charting a new project somewhere in between. “Entrepreneur” has become a palimpsest for new forms of personhood and economic imaginaries at a peculiar historical juncture where limited markets co-exist with the vestiges of central planning. As such, this is not only a kind of self-making, but also part of a larger political project to garner greater autonomy, and recognition from the state as important stakeholders in Cuba’s economic future. This story, however, is ultimately not one of triumphant emergence, but of the limits of self-representation and creative indexicality. The paper concludes with a brief analysis of how the Cuban government, a vocal opponent of private enterprise, has at key moments adopted this once-taboo term in what I argue are instances of political “enregisterment” (Gal 2018).

In this contribution, I consider the semiotic labor involved in preparing a specific historic and geographic terrain in southeast Europe for 21st-century geopolitical and human rights interventions via its rebranding as the “Western Balkans” (WB). Drawing on textual materials from preliminary fieldwork with women’s rights workers in West European capitals and WB countries (ex-Yugoslavia minus Slovenia plus Albania), I discuss how activists assess barriers to and possibilities for cooperation in pursuit of desired outcomes by strategically citing facts of geography and chronology. For scholars, the Balkans has been a famously fertile geography for thinking about fraught relationships between cores and peripheries, centers and margins. In contrast, ex-Yugoslav and Albanian women’s rights activists and their European colleagues cultivate visions of the terrain in which they work that concertedly occlude broader spatial imaginaries. Extracting specific “in-country contexts” from a background of European geopolitics and political economy allows activists to posit structural similarities across contexts of intervention while eliding contiguity and connection in space and time. NGO workers’ spatial practice (Lefebvre 1974) thus produces visions of analogous but functionally non-interdependent nation-states manifesting an identical set of afflictions (patriarchy, post-conflict tensions, resurgent authoritarianism, weak civil society) and possibilities for ameliorating them. I consider what is accomplished by activists’ framings of their cross-border work and ask what it might tell us about the shape of internationalism after the Cold War.

The emergence and evolution of stand-up comedy in China within the post-Tiananmen socio-political context present a complex interplay of individual expression, societal dynamics, and state control. This paper explores the role of digital mass media in shaping the trajectory of Chinese stand-up comedy, focusing on the influential program "Rock & Roast." Through an exploration of the role of digital mass media, particularly the online stand-up comedy competition show "Rock & Roast," this study investigates how Chinese stand-up comedians navigate the margins of societal norms and state control to establish their comic identities, based on an analysis of the final round of season 5 of "Rock & Roast" alongside interviews with comedians. The paper elucidates how comedians affectively engage audiences and negotiate ambiguity for public and authoritative endorsement. Furthermore, it explores the complex relationship between comedians, their audiences, and state authorities, revealing how comedy serves as a form of social critique and cultural expression within contemporary China. Ultimately, this study questions the boundaries between resistance and incorporation, the space between political exclusion and inclusion, by highlighting stand-up comedy as a microcosm reflecting broader societal shifts and digital dynamics.

In this paper, I would investigate how values such as ‘tolerance’ and ‘pluralism’ are invoked in the Hindu nationalist discourse to differentiate an ‘all-embracing’ Hindu civilization from the ‘exclusivist’ and ‘colonizing’ Abrahamic religious cultures like Islam and Christianity. Particularly, this paper focuses on the semiotic constitution of Hindu nationalist ideology that involves producing a dichotomic image of a vulnerable Hindu civilization that is facing threat from ‘belligerent’ and ‘coercive’ Islamic and Christian cultures. In addition to that, the same scales of values such as ‘tolerance’ and ‘pluralism’ are also invoked for differentiating ‘less intolerant’ and ‘more trustable’ Sufi Islam from ‘fundamentalist’ forms such as ‘Wahhabi’ or Salafi Islam. Although there are works that shed light on these phenomena, a semiotic approach that systematically traces how every interpretation/ideologization involves comparison and differentiation along an axis - and how such axes of differentiations fractally recurse and encompass to enable the constitution of different identities and alliances - gives us an opportunity to map the discursive terrain of Hindu nationalism. Moreover, it also allows us to make sense of the discursive common grounds that the secular-liberal characterizations of Hinduism and Islam share with the Hindu nationalist ideology, therefore enabling one to understand how Hindu right’s prejudices and violence against the minorities are made understandable and at times palatable in the Indian public discourse. In order to demonstrate it, this paper takes up a particular instance of a speech delivered by a young and hugely popular Hindu nationalist idealogue called Sai Deepak who delineates the essential characteristics of Hindu civilization in the speech.

After the Sino-Japanese War (1894-95), the Qing court sent 13 Chinese students to Tokyo, Japan, in pursuit of modern education, inaugurating a large-scale modernization oriented intellectual mobilization. This study takes up the translation society founded by study-in-Japan students from Hunan province, China, to understand how translation, as a process that purports change yet retains similarity, facilitated the axis of dierence that marginalized and merged “China” into the nation-state discourse in early 20th century. I will show that the linguistic ideology of “nationalism” was the fabrication of a complex semiotic exchange that includes localism, globalism, and racial hierarchies. / Building upon Susan Gal and Naoki Sakai’s reection on translation as a metasemiotic process that is not limited to yet unfolds itself through and denes language, I theorize translation as both a spectrum of semiotic exchange and the simultaneous materialization of it. Through examining “Tokyo” as a indexical chronotope, the linguistic boundary between “Chinese” and “Japanese,” and the provincial sentiments in journal published by the students, I argue that the marginalization of “Chineseness” was materialized through the double gap registered behind translation – it embodied the indexical process of turning from “what one is not” to “what one will never be.” Mergence in this case means the students’ attempt to reconcile this double-gap and to formulate China into the nation-state discourse. Under such encounters of marginalization and mergence, the student translators turned to local provinces for “authentic Chineseness,” and thus translated it into a racialized stage where the forever yearning of the nation occurred.

In this paper, I will look at a series of online Chinese poetry recitation workshops, in which one-on-one instructions on accent reduction of “Putonghua” (the Mandarin lingua franca in China) are the main focus. These “accent reduction” instructions are usually made up of judgments, corrections, demonstrations of proper productions, and some more explicit metalinguistic comments (i.e. linguistic comments about language itself) made by the instructors on what is thought as an exemplary voice in public speaking. Growing up or living in heterogeneous linguistic environments in China usually means divergent paths in Putonghua accent reduction and public speaking coaching. For example, the trainees in this classroom are mostly older-generation dialect speakers from different Chinese dialect regions. I will also examine life stories these students share in their presentations or interviews, in understanding how imagining and pursuing exemplary public speaking in China today become strategies for different individuals who strive to improve one’s confidence in speaking in front of the public. At the beginning, it seems like a Bourdieu-inspired debate on class-based distinction, but later also with a socialist twist: what is seen as valuable, and what constitutes the symbolic capital of hyper-standard Putonghua speaking, for whom? It could simply mean a more desirable position in terms of class (urban middle-class) and region (urban Beijing or at least urban North China); but it could also index something else under a unique post-socialist neoliberal regime.

In this presentation, I propose an innovative methodological framework for examining face-to-face interactions, particularly focusing on how digital devices like smartphones act as affordances within these exchanges. Far from simply interrupting the flow, rhythm, and alignment of conversations, smartphones can play a crucial role as multimodal affordances. They enable participants to integrate social media posts, photos, or videos directly into their dialogue, thereby enhancing the conversation. This research, grounded in my fieldwork among the youth of Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, introduces the concept of digitally enhanced face-to-face interaction (DEFI). DEFI blurs the boundaries between physical and digital realms, prompting us to reconsider the essence of face-to-face communication in the contemporary era. / I do not argue for a dismissal of our existing theoretical models of face-to-face dialogue, but rather for an integration of Goffman's participation framework to understand how DEFI incorporates multiple, overlapping layers of participation. In such digitally augmented conversations, participants are not only engaged with one another within a given framework but are also simultaneously connected to distinct online participatory frameworks. This phenomenon is particularly pronounced among youth, for whom digitally enhanced conversations are standard rather than exceptional. This demographic seamlessly navigates between direct interpersonal interactions and the digital mediation of devices, challenging us to reevaluate the dynamics of face-to-face conversations in the digital age.

How do Singaporean media professionals come to be recognizable as a collectivity—as a media industry? This paper approaches the question through problems of perception—using the concept of professional vision to ask how government and media professionals come to view the industry as a coherent entity to be developed. I examine how the Singaporean media industry is represented as a collective at different moments in time.

How do people become images, and images people? / Illustrators in the US spend years developing a personal style, a consistent set of aesthetic features present across all the images they produce. These styles, while personal, are also the prized commodities of neoliberal economies based on differentiating and individualizing consumer goods and brands. Merging commodification of the personal and personification of commodities, artists, their style, and the clients who hire them become entangled in a semiotic system in which the qualities of one blur with that of another. / In this paper I examine one such moment: the recognition and scathing criticism of so-called ‘Corporate Memphis’, a stylistic trend associated with Big Tech companies and often characterized as “soulless”. Through a discourse analysis of online content, as well as interviews and an ongoing fieldwork in New York’s illustration industry, I analyze the process of rhematization that led critics to construe the indexical relation between such companies and this style as iconic, seeing certain shapes and colours as ‘corporate’. As a result, illustrators working in this style (yet not necessarily working with these companies), have been automatically characterized as ‘sell-outs’ lacking integrity. / Since stylistic closeness to Corporate Memphis flags the danger of selling out, distance with it ensures authenticity, and as aesthetic judgements about images is aligned with moral judgements about persons, margins are made visible. I suggest that these debates articulate several axes of differentiation crucial to late-stage capitalism, between authorship and automation, similarity and difference, and commodities and persons.

What does it mean to approach writing as a form of social care? How do readers and writers negotiate and cooperate to achieve specific affective experiences in a text? As digital platforms increasingly become the place where such collaborations happen, what are their roles in the accomplishment of writing-as-care? These are not just research questions for scholars of culture but also daily puzzles for participants of Piaxi, a kind of amateur voice-acting activity where participants perform dramatic scripts on voice chat platforms in real time. Also active on these platforms are amateur script-writers who routinely hold script-testing meetings (shibenhui 试本会) to solicit feedback for their new scripts. In these events, voice actors first perform the scripts with their own voice and then make suggestions for revision. Commonly highlighting their own amateur status and limited abilities in delivering complex emotions, these voice actors communicate to the writer the textual and narrative guides they need in order to achieve the feelings (ganjue 感觉), moods (xinqing 心情), and atmospheres (fenwei 氛围) they hope the script could provide. Grounded in one such script-testing event, in this paper, I focus on the ways in which participants display and talk about their affective experiences in relation to their collective imagination of how the script should be revised. In so doing, I hope to unpack the specific processes through which the writing of a dramatic script becomes a site of communal care.

In 1989, when the electrochemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons announced that they had achieved cold fusion in a tabletop experiment, there was a frenzy to reproduce their unusual results. A replication crisis rapidly ensued; major labs announced their inability to reproduce the experiment, and the experiment was declared a fluke or fraud. The field was soon pronounced dead on arrival and relegated to the realm of pseudoscience. Despite the disavowal of this field in mainstream circles, dedicated teams of scientists in the United States, Japan, France, Italy, Poland, China, and India have continued their experimental work, determined to build on the findings of Fleischmann and Pons. They have built up a massive corpus of experimental data with varying degrees of fidelity to the original experiment. At conferences, forums, and in magazines and journals, this community continues to debate how best to reproduce the "phenomenon," how to theorize it, and how to pin down its "parameter space." Three decades later, the field is being resurrected, getting renewed attention and investment from government, industry, and philanthropists. The quest for a reproducible experiment has remained and been invested with new urgency - and new visions - as scientists themselves or agencies funding the scientists push them to settle on a reproducible, replicable, portable "reference experiment," "proof of concept," or "irrefutable proof of principle," as a condition of securing additional funding. This presentation will tease apart some of the differences between these aims and ask semiotically informed questions about the tensions between them, the ways they envision movement for the immature field into the domain of mature, mainstream science, and their presuppositions and ideological underpinnings.

 This talk concerns the relationship between clinical action and economic transfers, asking: How are clinical encounters rendered into medical bills? Adapting Jack Sidnell’s argument that “action in interaction is conduct under a description” (2017), I argue that rendering clinical interaction into the basis for an economic transfer necessitates the use of glosses, through which payors may be held accountable and financial accounts may themselves be made up. I analyze depictions of therapeutic interactions in two early twentieth-century literatures: quackery exposés—newspaper reportage and fictionalized renderings exposing the methods of ‘quack’ doctors—and business manuals of varying quality advertising commercial tactics to ‘regular’ physicians. I argue that both literatures sought to raise readers’ awareness of the potential economic transfers latent in clinical interactions, parsing contradictions between vehicular actions (‘just asking,’ or ‘diagnosing’) and understood actions (‘consulting,’ ‘frightening’). Through these means, quackery exposés alerted readers to quacks’ deceptive commercial methods, geared towards evading therapeutic accountability while enforcing financial accountability upon unwitting patients; seedier business manuals taught some of the same methods to doctors willing to resort to them. Quackery exposés clarified, while business manuals muddied, boundaries between ethical practice and commercial quackery that contemporary professional organizations like the American Medical Association were hard-pressed to police. I suggest, in conclusion, that disavowals of financial interest aligned with a dominant professional ethos of philanthropy also provided subtle affordances for the production and evasion of accountability within clinical interaction.

The paper investigates a role-playing exercise for international law students organized at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The exercise is dubbed "experimental moot court" to highlight its innovative character and complicated relation to a popular format of international legal competitions known as moot courts. "Regular" moot courts are competitions that simulate a real court environment and allow students to practice addressing judges and presenting their positions in fictitious cases. Moot courts are prestigious and highly regulated competitive events that produce a professional culture often criticized for being conformist and uncritical of the reality of legal practice. The experimental moot court -- a creation of Wouter Werner, a law professor dissatisfied with the regular moot courts -- attempts to disrupt the image of law and the legal profession reproduced in regular moot courts by putting students in a situation where they cannot win or lose and have a freedom to push the boundaries of the accepted in the courtroom. My paper looks at how the organizers and the participants of the experimental moot court co-construct what is "regular" and "experimental" in international law through a collective improvisational role-play, and in what ways the experimental mooting tries and fails to achieve its proclaimed goals of challenging the legal professional culture.

This paper explores interactional process between two groups of people who tend to draw on different narrative scales. In a Korean Buddhist return-to-the-farm village that I studied, local elders’ and new villagers’ different agricultural knowledge and argumentation styles are associated with their class and generational difference, which become subject to ethical evaluations especially in the context of public conflict at a village meeting. Local elderly farmers, who are related to one another through hierarchical kin relations, usually draw on analogous embodied experiences that they have had. On the other hand, new return-to-the-farm villagers, who come from educated urban middle-class background pursuing alternative egalitarian ideals, oftentimes invoke abstract objective principles. The generic and specific narrative scales are ethicalized by the everyday politics of differentiation between the two groups. Within this axis of differentiation (Gal & Irvine 2019), this paper further looks into how people come to learn the other’s way of scale-making. In other words, how do they accommodate the other’s perspectives, as they come to embrace one another as meaningful interlocutors and co-dwellers in the same village? This paper argues that the ambivalence created through incongruent scale-making reflects and reconstitutes villagers’ attempts to engage with the lives of others.

Deservingness has been conceptualized in studies that look at how inequality is normalized and justified through systemically embedded moral assessments that impact distribution of, and access to, resources like healthcare, education, employment, social welfare, and legal statuses (e.g., Tošic ́ and Streinzer 2022; Willen 2012; Zakariás & Feischmidt 2021). Assessments of deservingness likewise mediate bureaucratic and legal responses to petitions for legal relief in US immigration adjudication processes. In particular, forensic mental health evaluations may offer key evidence to make applicants’ deservingness legible for a particular legal status (e.g., through figuring individuals as good victims, someone deserving of protection). / As debates intensify around inclusion/exclusion decisions in US immigration, mental health care (MHC) professionals are asked to evaluate and report on psychological categorizations that recognize suffering, trauma, and other negative impacts of a particular situation or experience. In the absence of physical signs of injury, MHC professionals are tasked with the project of seeing and reporting on “invisible scars,” a task with inherent tension and epistemic uncertainties. As documents, immigration reports become critical legal artifacts where client narratives, formal diagnostic categories, legal codes, and judicial reasoning intersect and interact to seek clarity in contexts of bureaucratic and epistemic uncertainty. As such, they should be understood as material sedimentations of historical practices as well as institutionally viable, functional artifacts. Based on analysis of 12 immigration reports and interviews conducted with the MHC professionals who wrote them, this paper analyzes how migrants and evaluators are semiotically constituted in these artifacts documenting deservingness.

In this paper I examine some of the semiotic processes through which moral “figures of personhood” (Agha 2005) are created in the genre of Sikh kathā (oral exegesis of the Sikh scriptural text Guru Granth Sahib). In the stretch of talk that I examine here, the Sikh parcharak (“preacher”) establishes a series of chronotopic scales, ranging from the most encompassing and most abstract, that of hukam (“cosmic order”), through maryada (“natural/religious order”), to the more relatable level of historical enactments of these orders (“tokens”) in depictions of the scenes of the deaths of a series of Sikh shahīds (“martyrs”). I show how he uses a process of what I call figurative calibration to convert these token-level instances into “types”. I show how this process of figurative calibration, particularly centered around the indexical icon of kes (“unshorn hair”) then allows the parcharak to laminate these figurative types across chronotopic scales, ranging from the nearest (historical instances/token-level forms) to the chronotopically furthest (that of hukam, the cosmic order) (Silverstein 1993). These types are also then presented in entextualized forms that are juxtaposed as parts of systems of “moral voices” (Keane 2011). This juxtaposition allows audience members to evaluate and identify with these figures of moral personhood, through which they can also be calibrated across these chronotopic scales. As I show through instances of the parcharak’s metapragmatic framing of his own talk, these language ideologies are not to be taken as givens, but rather (e)merge from the margins through forms of agonistic struggle.