Oberlin College and Conservatory

Scaling Fluency: Barbra Meek, speaker

Wednesday, April 23, 2014 at 4:30pm to 5:30pm

King Building, Room 127
10 North Professor Street, Oberlin, OH 44074

Barbra Meek
Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
 

Language “endangerment” is an ideological condition in which scale matters, especially as this condition involves an acute awareness of the shrinking of number of speakers through assessments of fluency.  

Emblematized in bureaucratic reports and human rights discourse, the scaling of endangerment has happened in a variety of ways, as degrees of loss, universal value, identity and so forth (e.g. Hill 2002).  Other scales manifest in the planning and implementation of revitalization projects, most acutely in the structuring of participation.  

Relatedly, scales of participation emerge in performances of indigenous speech that circulate on the ground and through more popular genres, such as film and television.  Even in the entextualization of grammars, scale matters in the process of language documentation.

Concerned with the scaling practices and scaling of practice that configure American Indian language(s) and speech, this talk investigates these ideological and practical dimensions through the concept of dysfluency. That is, it focuses on seemingly benign acts of standardization that become instrumental in epitomizing and scaling participation and difference in/through/as dysfluency. 
 

Event Type

Lectures/Symposia/Workshops

Departments

Academic, Anthropology

Contact Person

Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway

Contact Phone Number

erhoffma@oberlin.edu

Contact E-mail Address

55014

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