univie:summer school/GAL Research School "Metapragmatics, Language Ideologies & Positioning Practices" (Vienna, July 16-20, 2018)

External lecturers

Alexandra Jaffe

Dr. Alexandra Jaffe is a linguistic anthropologist whose primary fieldsite is the French island of Corsica, where she has studied language shift and revitalization since 1988. She has focused on issues of ideology and identity in bilingual education, minority language literacy and literature, the Corsican media, and in language policy. In addition to her work on bilingualism, multilingualism and minority languages, she has written quite widely on the sociolinguistics of orthographic choice and on the politics of nonstandard orthographies in sociolinguistic transcripts and other texts. Jaffe also works on language in the media, with a particular focus on the representation of sociolinguistic variation in documentaries, mainstream broadcasts and online fora. Both in media and educational contexts, she has made use of the concept of stance to explore how social meanings accrue to ways of speaking and their representations through the active engagement of both producers and interpreters of language and other semiotic resources.

Joseph Sung-Yul Park

Joseph Sung-Yul Park is an associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. His work focuses on language ideological processes that shape and sustain material and political relations under globalization. Topics of his research include the politics of English as a global language in Asian context, shifting conceptualization of language in neoliberalism, language and affect, transnationalism and the metapragmatics of mobility, and media representations of discourse. He is the author of The Local Construction of a Global Language: Ideologies of English in South Korea (Mouton de Gruyter, 2009), Markets of English: Linguistic Capital and Language Policy in a Globalizing World (co-authored with Lionel Wee, Routledge, 2012), and English, Neoliberalism, and Subjectivity: The Politics of Language in South Korea (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

Michael Silverstein

Michael Silverstein, on the faculty of the University of Chicago since 1970, is Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology, Linguistics, and Psychology, and Director of the Center for the Study of Communication and Society.  His research looks at language as a precipitate of social and cultural practice in relation to presumed norms of linguistic form (sentences and their parts; texts and their forms of expression; discourse genres in their micro- and macro-contexts), and conversely, pursues the functional analysis of linguistic form in relation to social institutions, human cognition and affect.  He has done linguistic and ethnographic fieldwork with Native North Americans in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. and among Wororas and related Northern Kimberley groups in Western Australia. Silverstein’s recent work has addressed the transformation of local speech communities by forces of globalization, nationalism, and mass-mediatization, powerful social institutions shaping – and shaped by – language and its use in our own society’s discursive universe.

Local lecturers

Brigitta Busch

Brigitta Busch is an applied linguist at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Vienna. In 2009 she was granted a Berta-Karlik research professorship for excellent female scientists by the University of Vienna. She has also been working for many years as an expert for the Council of Europe, where she was first involved in the Confidence-Building Measures Programme in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe and focuses now on questions of linguistic rights.

Her main research interests focus on: sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, biographic approaches in linguistics (http://www.heteroglossia.net).

Julia Sonnleitner

Julia Sonnleitner holds a Ph.D in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Vienna. Her work has focussed on the transmission of memory in South Africa which is based on extended ethnographic fieldwork in Cape Town. Awarded the prize Kulturen im Dialog, her forthcoming book release with the title Transmitted Memory in South Africa: The born-free generation's interpretation of apartheid and the democratic transition published by Peter Lang focuses on the positioning of youth in relation to transmitted memory. Her research interests include the transmission of memory with specific emphasis on intergenerational relations, youth agency, voice, and on the anthropology of space and place. Sonnleitner is a member of heteroglossia.net.