STAL organizes a monthly seminar on issues related to the study of slurs, pejoratives, and evaluative and expressive terms in general, from less studied languages.
The titles and abstracts of the talks in the 2024-2025 academic year can be seen here.
The titles and abstracts of the 2023-2024 academic year can be seen here.
In the 2025-2026 academic year, the STAL seminar takes place on
MONDAYS, 14:30-16:00 Central European Time.
The next seminar is
JANUARY 19, 2026
Daisy Dixon (Cardiff University)
"Aesthetic Slurs"
ABSTRACT:
I present a novel account of what I call the ‘aesthetic slur’. Inspired by Patricia Hill Collins’s notion of ‘controlling images’, I delineate images which behave in much the same way as linguistic slurs, analysing particularly their feature of ‘effluence’; how their harmful content can leak out and not be insulated by intention or context. I then use this analysis to explain what went wrong with Makode Linde's controversial artwork Painful Cake (2012).
The schedule for the 2025-2026 academic year is the following:
OCTOBER 27, 2025
Luvell Anderson (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
"Theories of Reclamation"
NOVEMBER 17, 2025
Claire Horisk (University of Missouri)
"Derogatory Speech: Conversations, Hearers, and Listeners"
DECEMBER 15, 2025
Xavier Villalba (Autonomous University of Barcelona)
"Expressivity Cross-linguistically: A Corpus Study of Expressive and Evaluative Adjectives in Romance and Germanic"
JANUARY 19, 2026
Daisy Dixon (Cardiff University)
"Aesthetic Slurs"
FEBRUARY 9, 2026
Elisabeth Camp (Rutgers University)
TBA
MARCH 9, 2026
Leopold Hess (Jagiellonian University)
TBA
APRIL 20, 2026
Robin Jeshion (University of Southern California)
TBA
MAY, 2026
Yim Binh Felix Sze (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
TBA
JUNE, 2026
Mingya Liu (Humboldt University of Berlin)
TBA