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Gavin Steingo, "Interspecies Communication: Sound and Music Beyond Humanity" (U Chicago Press, 2024) Aug 10, 2024

Show notes

In Interspecies Communication: Sound and Music Beyond Humanity(U Chicago Press, 2024), music scholar Gavin Steingo examines significant cases of attempted communication beyond the human--cases in which the dualistic relationship of human to non-human is dramatically challenged. From singing whales to Sun Ra to searching for alien life, Steingo charts the many ways we have attempted to think about, and indeed to reach, beings that are very unlike ourselves.

Steingo focuses on the second half of the twentieth century, when scientists developed new ways of listening to oceans and cosmic space--two realms previously inaccessible to the senses and to empirical investigation. As quintessential frontiers of the postwar period, the outer space of the cosmos and the inner space of oceans were conceptualized as parallel realities, laid bare by newly technologized "ears." Deeply engaging, Interspecies Communication explores our attempts to cross the border between the human and non-human, to connect with non-humans in the depths of the oceans, the far reaches of the universe, or right under our own noses.

Gavin Steingo is Professor in the Department of Music at Princeton University. He is also affiliated with the programs in Media and Modernity, African Studies, and Jazz Studies. Steingo’s research examines sound and music as fundamental features in the construction of global modernity, with research specializations in African music, sound studies, acoustic ecology, and music and philosophy. Methodologically, his work is united by a mode of inquiry where theory, history, and ethnography form part of a shared constellation.

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Sign Language Brokering in Deaf-Hearing Families Jul 29, 2024

Show notes

Emily Pacheco speaks with Professor Jemina Napier (Heriot-Watt University, Scotland) about her book, Sign Language Brokering in Deaf-Hearing Families (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). The conversation focuses on child and sign language brokering, the innovative methodology Dr. Napier employed in her study, and the impacts of researching sign language brokering as a languaging practice.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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Muslim Literacies in China Jul 23, 2024

Show notes

Tazin Abdullah speaks with Dr Ibrar Bhatt about heritage literacies, particularly as they are practiced by Chinese Muslims. Bhatt is the author of A Semiotics of Muslimness in China (Cambridge UP, 2023). About the book:

A Semiotics of Muslimness in China examines the semiotics of Sino-Muslim heritage literacy in a way that integrates its Perso-Arabic textual qualities with broader cultural semiotic forms. Using data from images of the linguistic landscape of Sino-Muslim life alongside interviews with Sino-Muslims about their heritage, the author examines how signs of 'Muslimness' are displayed and manipulated in both covert and overt means in different contexts. In so doing the author offers a 'semiotics of Muslimness' in China and considers how forms of language and materiality have the power to inspire meanings and identifications for Sino-Muslims and understanding of their heritage literacy. The author employs theoretical tools from linguistic anthropology and an understanding of semiotic assemblage to demonstrate how signifiers of Chinese Muslimness are invoked to substantiate heritage and Sino-Muslim identity constructions even when its expression must be covert, liminal, and unconventional.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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Eric Reinders, "Reading Tolkien in Chinese: Religion, Fantasy and Translation" (Bloomsbury, 2024) Jul 20, 2024

Show notes

Approaching translations of Tolkien's works as stories in their own right, Reading Tolkien in Chinese: Religion, Fantasy and Translation (Bloomsbury, 2024) reads multiple Chinese translations of Tolkien's writing to uncover the new and unique perspectives that enrich the meaning of the original texts.

Exploring translations of The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, The Children of Hurin and The Unfinished Tales, Dr. Eric Reinders reveals the mechanics of meaning by literally back-translating the Chinese into English to dig into the conceptual common grounds shared by religion, fantasy and translation, namely the suspension of disbelief, and questions of truth - literal, allegorical and existential. With coverage of themes such as gods and heathens, elves and 'Men', race, mortality and immortality, fate and doom, and language, Dr. Reinder's journey to Chinese Middle-earth and back again drastically alters views on Tolkien's work where even basic genre classification surrounding fantasy literature look different through the lens of Chinese literary expectations.

Invoking scholarship in Tolkien studies, fantasy theory and religious and translations studies, this is an ambitious exercises in comparative imagination across cultures that suspends the prejudiced hierarchy of originals over translations.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Life in a New Language, Part 6: Citizenship Jul 17, 2024

Show notes

This episode of the Language on the Move Podcast is part of the Life in a New Language series. Life in a New Language is a new book just out from Oxford University Press. Life in a New Language examines the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America over a period of 20 years. It’s co-authored by Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Motaghi Tabari, and Vera Williams Tetteh.

In this series, Brynn Quick chats with each of the co-authors about their personal insights and research contributions to the book.

Today, Brynn chats with Dr. Emily Farrell, with a focus on citizenship, Othering, and belonging. The conversation also homes in on the joys and challenges of juggling book writing and motherhood, and leaving academia for a career in publishing.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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Life in a New Language, Part 5: Monolingual Mindset Jul 10, 2024

Show notes

In this series, Brynn Quick chats with each of the co-authors about their personal insights and research contributions to the book.

Today, Brynn chats with Dr. Loy Lising, with a focus on low-skilled migrants and how their experiences are shaped by monolingual ideologies.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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Language Policy at an Abortion Clinic Jul 04, 2024

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Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Ella van Hest (Ghent University, Belgium) about her ethnographic research related to language diversity at an abortion clinic in Belgium. The conversation focusses on a co-authored paper entitled Language policy at an abortion clinic published in Language Policy in 2023.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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Life in a New Language, Part 4: Parenting Jul 03, 2024

Show notes

In this series, Brynn Quick chats with each of the co-authors about their personal insights and research contributions to the book.

Today, Brynn chats with Dr. Shiva Motaghi Tabari, with a focus on parenting in migration.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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Life in a New Language, Part 3: African Migrants Jun 26, 2024

Show notes

In this series, Brynn Quick chats with each of the co-authors about their personal insights and research contributions to the book.

Today, Brynn chats with Dr. Vera Williams Tetteh, with a focus on the experiences of African migrants.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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Adam B. Seligman and Robert P. Weller, "How Things Count as the Same: Memory, Mimesis, and Metaphor" (Oxford UP, 2019) Jun 24, 2024

Show notes

In How Things Count as the Same: Memory, Mimesis, and Metaphor (Oxford UP, 2019), Adam B. Seligman and Robert P. Weller address a seemingly simple question: What counts as the same? Given the myriad differences that divide one individual from another, why do we recognize anyone as somehow sharing a common fate with us? For that matter, how do we live in harmony with groups who may not share the sense of a common fate? Such relationships lie at the heart of the problems of pluralism that increasingly face so much of the world today.

Note that "counting as" the same differs from "being" the same. Counting as the same is not an empirical question about how much or how little one person shares with another or one event shares with a previous event. Nothing is actually the same. That is why, as humans, we construct sameness all the time. In the process, of course, we also construct difference.

Creating sameness and difference leaves us with the perennial problem of how to live with difference instead of seeing it as a threat. How Things Count as the Same suggests that there are multiple ways in which we can count things as the same, and that each of them fosters different kinds of group dynamics and different sets of benefits and risks for the creation of plural societies. While there might be many ways to understand how people construct sameness, three stand out as especially important and form the focus of the book's analysis: Memory, Mimesis, and Metaphor.

Theo Stapleton is a PhD student in Social Anthropology at Cambridge University, whose fieldwork was conducted at the first Chinese Buddhist temple in Tanzania.

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