PROGRAM COMMITTEE CHAIR

Josh Babcock is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Brown University. His work explores totalizing colonial images and the desires that emerge from and exceed them at sites that range from Singapore, Southeast Asia to the ghost town of Singapore, Michigan to a cocktail called the Singapore Sling and beyond.

CONFERENCE CHAIR

Dominika Baran is Associate Professor of English and Linguistics at Duke University, United States. Her 2017 book, Language in Immigrant America, is an interdisciplinary examination of language as the site for the contestation of “immigrant” and “American” identities. Her current work has focused on anti-LGBTQ+ discourses, particularly in Polish nationalist and rightwing media and politics. She is also working on a project on language, memory, and belonging in Polish immigrant women’s narratives.

ACCESSIBILITY ADVISOR

Steven Black is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Georgia State University and (sometimes) a musician. His work examines global and planetary health through the lens of linguistic and communicative practices, with a focus on ethics, performance, and conceptualizations of the future (e.g. hope, techno-optimism, environmental sustainability). He has conducted research in Durban (South Africa), Boruca Indigenous Territory (Costa Rica), and Atlanta (USA).

CONFERENCE CONVENER

Summerson Carr is the President of the Society of Linguistic Anthropology. She is also a Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Crown Family School of Social Work Policy and Practice at the University of Chicago. For the last several years, she has been studying dogs who work full-time in health and human service settings with an interest in the ethical, political and semiotic dimensions of canine labor.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE MEMBER

Aris Clemons is an Assistant Professor of Hispanic Linguistics specializing in the intersections between language, race, and identity. Spanning the fields of linguistics, anthropology, and education, her work questions the linguistic mechanisms responsible for the (re)construction and maintenance of racializing and marginalizing ideologies toward providing liberatory frames for racial justice.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE MEMBER

Dozandri Mendoza is a Ph.D. Candidate in Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara using community-based participatory art methods to investigate language, embodiment, coloniality, and social life in Puerto Rico's cuir/trans Ballroom scene.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE MEMBER

Shunsuke Nozawa is an Associate Professor at Hokkaido University. His research explores sociality in contemporary Japan as a question of phaticity, how connection and disconnection are desired, evaluated, governed, and experienced as affordances of the semiotic channel. Topics discussed in recent publications include face, masking, handshaking, voice acting, solo eating, and ASMR.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE MEMBER

Judith Pine, PhD, is a Professor of Anthropology. She is a linguistic anthropologist whose work engages with the theoretical framework of what she thinks of as linganth-flavored semiotics, marrying an ethnographic sensibility and habit of practice with the notion that meaning happens within complex fabrics of the habitual happening of meaning and that we have tools to thickly describe, and so to begin to see, the patterns in these fabrics. Her research is primarily in the Greater Mekong Subregion and she teaches both linguistic anthropology and Asian ethnography courses as well as Qualitative Methods.

LOGISTICS/LOCAL COMMITTEE CHAIR

Thea Strand is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Loyola University Chicago. Her primary research is sited in rural Valdres, Norway, examining language and political economy, broadly construed. Her current project focuses on the deeply intertwined environmental, cultural, and linguistic effects of tourism development and declining transhumant farming in Valdres’ mountain areas.