Conveners:

Gabriele Budach (University of Luxembourg) & Anastasia Badder (University of Cambridge)

Title of the symposium:

Re-thinking language: Explorations from (post-)human perspectives

This symposium aims to explore language beyond its conventional meaning. It includes, first, a conceptual part in which original research adopting (post)human perspectives on language is presented, and, second, a practical part which engages the audience in an experimental workshop activity aiming to create an opportunity for participants to experience (post)human inspired educational practice first hand. Contributions presented in the conceptual part share the authors’ individual research work based in ethnographic and philosophical approaches. At the same time, authors make links to an experimental workshop (organized at AILA 2023 in Lyon) in which contributors participated and the experience of which spurred the idea of extending the discussion to a broader audience in the field of sociolinguistics.

The symposium aims to provide a space to make tangible, experiment with and reflect on notions of (post)human theory that is often perceived as jargoning, opaque, and difficult to grasp. It is guided by the following questions:

*What can sociolinguistics and educational linguistics gain by rethinking language beyond the human?

*How can we draw from an understanding of language as embedded, material and decentered from the human to inspire educational practice and create more inclusive environments and practices of knowledge creation?

Conceptually, the symposium challenges theories of language as they developed within the northern episteme and conventional linguistics. In these theories, language was seen as the ‘quintessentially human’ facility, as ‘what makes us human’ and what differentiates humans from other forms of life and the material world, and as enabling the capacity for rational thought and as representational. Contributions to this symposium adopt perspectives that explore humans as entangled with the environment, involved in forms of agency seen as distributed and embodied, and as engaging in practices which are often far from ‘representational’. Drawing on work by Kell (2015) on the role of objects “making people happen” and by Pennycook (2018) on distributed and spatial repertoires, contributions to this symposium take the exploration of language further, understanding it as an assembled and more than human phenomenon, emerging from the intra-action (Barad, 2007) amongst human and more than human material and immaterial forces and entities.

Practically, the symposium aims to create a context in which (post)human ideas can come to life, be experienced first-hand and be appreciated by the participants as an attempt to create more inclusive educational approaches enabling new forms of sharing and creating knowledge. In doing this, we aim to go beyond the critique of ‘named languages’ and their detrimental use as instruments of power and domination in contexts of nation building and colonialism, and we attempt to envisage educational activities helping to overcome the mechanisms of existing ideologies of language that reproduce relation of oppression and domination in classrooms.     

The symposium is structured in the following way: The first part includes an introduction to the aims of the panel and a brief presentation of key concepts of posthuman theory (e.g. assemblage, affective flow, rhizomatic growth). This is followed by four 10 minutes presentations looking into the ways in which language is embedded into material and immaterial processes asking what we might gain by (1) thinking of language as one of many diverse artefacts that contribute to meaning making and practice (see abstract 1), (2) troubling the idea of human reasoning and judgment as the sole source of language and languaging (see abstract 2), (3) acknowledging language as necessarily material to enable different forms of communication (abstract 3) and (4) appreciating language as a repository of fragmented chunks of human knowledge that become assembled and reconfigured alongside and in the presence of other material objects (abstract 4).

Responding to the call for innovative, more engaging formats, in the second part, we propose a 40-minute long experimental workshop activity, to which we particularly invite colleagues who are less familiar with posthuman conceptual frameworks. Ordinary, everyday objects will be explored and used as prompts to elicit memories, stories and knowledge shared by the participants. Participants are invited to reassemble these objects into a display, thereby reconfiguring chunks of stories and knowledge in a horizontally flat fashion.

The symposium will be concluded by a 30-minute discussion with contributors and participants. This includes time for Q&A about post-humanist frameworks and the opportunity to exchange about the workshop experience and the proposed method as an approach to stimulate sharing and the building of more horizontal, socially just relationships in multiply diverse classrooms.

List of presenters and titles:

(1) Gabriele Budach (University of Luxembourg), Introduction - In Person

(2) Daan Hovens (Maastricht University), Learning by Doing: A Posthumanist Perspective - Virtual

(3) Xinqi He (Rikkyo University, Tokyo), Not the language of knowing but the language of creating - In Person

(4) Anastasia Badder (University of Cambridge), Communication and its limits - In Person

(5) Ari Sherris (Texas A&M University-Kingsville), Entangled meaning making across ourselves, non-human entities and technology: Emerging textu(r)alities - In Person

Abstracts of presentations:

1) Introduction (Gabriele Budach, University of Luxembourg)

See above symposium summary.

2) Learning by Doing: A Posthumanist Perspective (Daan Hovens, Maastricht University)  

 Communities of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998) is a well-known framework that offers a set of terms or tools that helps to describe how practices emerge through daily interactions within the context of a joint enterprise. To achieve various purposes of a joint enterprise, participants typically develop reifications or artifacts that create shortcuts, so that certain actions take less time and effort and turn into relatively stable practices (Wenger 1998: 58-61). An artifact can for example be a word, such as a specific abbreviation for a company department, which can help people refer to this department with less time and effort. Another artifact can for example be a machine, which can help mass production to take less time and effort.

 Following a posthumanist approach (Latour 2005; Pennycook 2018), my aim is to explore what happens when we take the agency of artifacts in a community of practice seriously, by exploring what they enable and encourage (i.e., afford; Gibson 2015) others to do. Furthermore, I aim to explore what happens when we do not any longer distinguish ‘linguistic’ from other types of artifacts, by considering how diverse kinds of artifacts contribute to the meanings and practices that emerge in a community of practice.

The contribution further builds upon a previous posthumanist engagement with workplace learning in a linguistically diverse metal foundry (Hovens 2020). Specifically, it follows the interactions that emerged during an experimental workshop at the AILA conference in 2023. By comparing both cases, the contribution discusses whether the observations from an industrial workplace context may be valuable for other learning contexts as well, such as the ones at our universities.

3) Not the language of knowing but the language of creating (Xinqi He, Rikkyo University, Tokyo)

 Research in new materialism challenges anthropocentric perspectives in linguistic research, by expanding the idea of agency to the objects surrounding human beings (Coole & Frost 2010). While most of the research in this realm attempts to decenter humans and acknowledge the role of objects in production, the undertow of human reasoning is barely challenged. In other words, the dominant posture of researchers in academia that relies on interpreting data by imposing particular perceptions on objects under scrutiny remains largely unchallenged as the commonly recognized practice of creating academic knowledge.

Reflecting upon the new materialism workshop at AILA conference 2023, I aim to apply Walter Benjamin (1996)’s idea about language, judgment and translation to problematize the role of human reason in the relation of language and objects. In doing this, I propose to decenter human reason or knowledge production and instead to acknowledge objects, and humans as evolving together through intra-action (Barad 2007). I explore the idea that being merged in the process of production can enable the emergence of a language of creation that becomes void of (human) judgement. By abandoning the enlightenment idea of rational humans as the key locus for knowledge production, Benjamin’s concept inspires us to find more equitable educational practices.  

4) Communication and its limits (Anastasia Badder, University of Cambridge)

 This paper has two aims: the first is to draw attention to the history of common contemporary understandings of language and to reflect on some difficulties contained in this apparently self-evident term. The second is to offer some examples of the languaging work done by non-human things, drawn from the ambition of some religious communities to contact other, unseen, entities. Inspired by new materialism’s commitment to abandon the idea of language as a solely human endeavor and Keane’s (2008) argument that religious language is necessarily material, this paper wonders whether and how different religious ways of being might help us reconsider our (Protestant-inflected, enlightenment-derived) assumptions about language as primarily a cognitive and human-led activity. To explore these questions, this paper takes a speculative comparative approach (though it does not aim for any kind of universalistic claims about religion or language), building on examples from my ongoing fieldwork with Luxembourg’s Jewish communities, and from the work of key scholars (Eisenlohr 2022; Engelke 2007; Fader 2016) who have taken up the material turn in the anthropology of religion. This approach offers a view in to the wide ranging means, modes, and aims of communication in different religious contexts and the ways those shape and are shaped by local relations between language and materiality. Ultimately, this paper asks whether and how attending to religious language offers a critical lens to normative ‘secular’ language pedagogies and evaluation in educational spaces. 

5) Entangled meaning making across ourselves, non-human entities and technology: Emerging textu(r)alities (Ari Sherris, Texas A&M University-Kingsville)

This paper explores the entanglements of humans with each other, non-human entities, and technology.  Data are taken from an experimental in-person session at AILA, 2023, on New Materialism and educational practice. This is brought into conversion with earlier work by Sherris and Adami (2019) questioning boundaries and advocating for more inclusive epistemologies and ontologies. Drawing on notions from complex adaptive systems theory, social semiotics and the idea of rhizomatic patterns (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 171), the paper makes a conceptual contribution to ethnographic research, highlighting the interconnectedness of multiple conceptual frames and the benefit of conceptual fluidity without prioritizing one theory over the next. Thinking with Mignolo (2000) and his notion of situated loci of enunciation, the paper makes an empirical contribution to educational research, illustrating how the proposed activity of assembling things afforded the shaping of nascent entanglements between human participants, non-human entities and technology while engaging with and repurposing objects. This play with resemiotising language and objects leads us to conceptualise the notion of “emerging textu(r)alities” composed of small chunks or assemblages of data that are discussed as both emerging texts (i.e., spoken, visual, and symbolic) de-centering language, and as textures (i.e., qualities of practices and phenomena), enabling us to speak, as they intertwine, from multiple loci of enunciation, legitimately at the same time.

Bibliography

Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press

Benjamin, Walter. 1996. On language as such and on the language of man. In Walter Benjamin Selected Writings Volume 1 1913-1926, edited by Bullock. M, & Jennings, M.W., 62-74. Harvard: Harvard University Press.

Coole, Diana, & Frost, Samantha. 2010. Introducing the new materialisms. In New materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Coole, D. & Frost, S., 1-43. Durham: Duke University Press.

Deleuze, Giles., & Guattari, Felix. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. De Paul: University of Minnesota Press.

Eisenlohr, Patrick. 2022. Atmospheric resonance: sonic motion and the question of religious mediation. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 28: 613-631.

Engelke, Matthew. 2007. A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Fader, Ayala  2016. "The Semiotic Ideologies of Yiddish and English Literacies in Hasidic Homes and Schools in Brooklyn." In Navigating Languages, Literacies and Identities Religion in Young Lives, edited by V. Lytra, D. Volk, & E. Gregory, 176-192. New York: Routledge.

Gibson, James J. 2015 [1979]. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception: Classic Edition. London/New York: Psychology Press.

Hovens, Daan. 2020, Workplace Learning through Human-Machine Interaction in a Transient Multilingual Blue-Collar Work Environment. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 30: 369-388.

Keane, Webb. 2008. The evidence of the senses and the materiality of religion. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14 (S1): S110-S127.

Kell, Catherine. 2015. “Making people happen”: Materiality and movement in meaning-making trajectories, Social Semiotics 25(4): 423-445.

Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mignolo, Walter D. 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs: Essays on the Coloniality of Power, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 

Pennycook, Alastair. 2018. Posthumanist applied linguistics.  Applied Linguistics 39(4): 445-461.

Sherris, Ari., & Adami, Elisabetta. 2019. Heterarchic commentaries. In Making Signs, Translanguaging Ethnographies: Exploring Urban, Rural, and Educational Spaces, edited by A. Sherris and E. Adami, 170-181. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Wenger, Etienne. 1998. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.