FOS: Ethnicity and variation reading group

[Wagner, Suzanne]

FOS,

I'm convening a reading group on the topic of Ethnicity and linguistic variation. It'll meet weekly on Thursdays, 10:30 - 11:30 AM in the Socio Lab. Below is a short description of the reading group's goals, followed by some specifics. If you'd like to join us, either e-mail me to be added to the D2L site, or just come along on Thursday to the first meeting.

Description

‘Ethnicity’ is a flexible social category that can encompass nationality, cultural heritage, religious affiliation, clan and much more, as well as more traditional definitions, such as race. ‘Linguistic variation’ means probabilistic distribution of semantically- and/or functionally-equivalent linguistic variants from all modules of human grammar (e.g. phonetics, syntax, lexicon), all language modalities (e.g. speech, text, gesture, sign) and to the extent possible, many different languages. This group will mainly take a quantitative variationist perspective on ethnolinguistic variation, but will intentionally incorporate perspectives from more qualitative paradigms and from adjacent disciplines such as linguistic anthropology and sociology of language.


​Participants will:

  *   Get a broad overview of how ‘ethnicity’ has been operationalized in social science and in sociolinguistics since the mid-20th century, in the US and beyond.
  *   Be familiar with landmark studies of ethnicity in variationist sociolinguistics.
  *   Gain some exposure to the most recent sociolinguistic research on ethnolinguistic variation.
  *   Understand how sociolinguistic studies of ethnicity connect to broader social and political movements, especially with regard to social justice.
  *   Appreciate the intersectional nature of ethnicity i.e. how it is complicated by gender, social class and other social characteristics.
  *   Get a sense of how these papers link to each other, as well as to other scholarship that you know.

Expectations
Show up as often as you can, read everything (~1 paper/week) and participate verbally and/or in an online discussion. Optionally: Suggest a paper for us to read, and present a summary of it.
I'd like to keep the group small, so please only come if you're genuinely interested and committed.

First meeting

Thursday, Jan 16th, B-411 Wells Hall, 10:30 - 11:30 AM

To do before the meeting (see D2L)

  1.  Read the entries on ethnicity and race in the Concise Encyclopedia of Sociology. PDFS on D2L in the \General folder. If you have time, read related entries on e.g. ethnic enclaves, ethnic groups, race (definitions of), ethnocentrism.

Optional extras on D2L in the same folder:

  *   Paul Spickard's annotated bibliography of sociology scholarship on ethnicity. (Terse, biting and occasionally quite funny). Worth skimming through, and noting anything you'd like to explore further, either this semester or in the future.
  *   Vally Lytra's chapter on language and ethnicity, from the 2016 Routledge Handbook of Language & Identity.

Suzanne



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Suzanne Evans Wagner | she, her, hers
Associate Professor of Linguistics and Director of Graduate Studies
B-401 Wells Hall
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824

Tel: +1 (517) 355-9739
wagnersu.msu.domains<http://wagnersu.msu.domains>
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Office hours: http://swagner.youcanbook.me<http://swagner.youcanbook.me/>

Co-editor, Routledge Studies in Language Change<http://www.routledge.com/books/series/RSLC/>
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