Rahul Advani: In your book Fada, you attend to the ways in which young men in urban Niger facing economic uncertainty sign up as members of fadas where they experiment with social norms and rehearse aspirational modes of adulthood. Could you tell us more about this dynamic and the tensions it produces?
Adeline Masquelier: Waiting has become something of an endemic condition for young male urbanites unable to secure stable jobs in Niger. The fada or “tea-circle” is where they wait. Together. In the book I describe the fada as a socio-spatial formation that is symptomatic of the destitution experienced by many Nigerien young men facing limited prospects of employment. Modelled after the chief’s court, the fada is essentially a masculine space where young men fulfill their need for sociality and self-affirmation. Male youths speak of their fadas as places where they can escape the crushing weight of social expectations and just be themselves while they engage in a variety of pastimes and projects aimed at making life livable not just in the present but also in the future. What interests me is precisely how the fada constitutes a staging ground affording both sanctuary and prospect. Centered as it is on on male activities and aspirations, the fada is well suited to nurture the dreams of the good life young men may harbor. I propose that we see the fada as a social laboratory where fadantchés (fada members) experiment with who they want to be without fearing criticism. At a time when traditional avenues of self-realization are blocked, young men imagine a future for themselves, whether that means becoming a rapper or a prime minister, or simply a self-sufficient household head. Paradoxically, some fadantchés defer adulthood rather than embrace it, using dress to fashion themselves as youth, for instance. The fada, I have argued, provides a forum for playing with the boundaries of youth and testing how life might be lived.
Rahul Advani: The young men in your book – much like the young men in north India who engage in “timepass” that Craig Jeffrey has written about – make life purposeful through killing time in the face of diminishing returns on their schooling and college degrees. What is it about time and waiting that offers a useful framework for understanding contemporary experiences of liberalization?
Adeline Masquelier: Temporality is a central concern of the book. On the one hand, young men confronted with the lack of job prospects are worried about their futures. Trapped in the imposed presentism of daily survival, they feel robbed of the futurity previous generations took for granted, as is the case in India as well. On the other hand, they often have too much time on their hands. I show how the fada attends to both these temporalities. It is a place where young men marginalized by the workings of capital seek solace and wait and hope. They share their anguish at being unable to follow expected life courses. They also learn skills and how to prepare for the responsibilities of adulthood. Now, waiting may be experienced as a suspension of time but it is not, I argue, a suspension of activity. At the fada, idleness is transformed into a rewarding experience thanks to the way that the practice of tea-drinking–a central dimension of fada life which I call teatime–shapes the texture of waiting and resituates young men in the tempo of daily life. Young men are often accused by elders of doing nothing but sip tea, but we must see the fada (and teatime) as a by-product of structural inequality. Part routine, part ritual, teatime creates ideal conditions for actualizing aspirations and cobbling together new practices of self-making. The condition of jobless youth in the global south has been described as waithood–a wait for adulthood. I find the concept inadequate to capture the micropolitics of waiting. I was interested in exploring how time is lived at the fada through its simultaneities, its tensions, its trajectories. Anthropologists have long dismissed waiting as a form of inactivity, but I am, in fact, claiming the opposite. We must attend to the work that waiting requires and to the complex ways in which people customize time when they wait, whether they wait for jobs, for the end of the month, or for the tea to brew.
Rahul Advani: The book makes an important insight into how people come together to create what you term an “infrastructure of solidarity.” Could you describe the role of conversation – from the forms of speech adopted to the activities such as tea-drinking that punctuate and facilitate conversation – in how young men at the fada navigate precarity together and make sense of the world?
Adeline Masquelier: The term “infrastructure of solidarity” was inspired by AbdouMaliq Simone’s concept of human infrastructure, by which he means the use of people’s bodies in combination with objects, spaces, and practices to create nodal points between individuals and make cities work more effectively. In urban Niger, one cannot but notice groups of young men, huddled together, that take over the street at night. They fill the space with their tea-making, their conversation, actualizing their togetherness through the clusters their assembled bodies make; once they return home, however, there is no trace of their presence, save for the name of the fada written on the wall against which they sit. The fada then has no permanent structure. As a place of and for conversation, it offers the kind of support needed after a romantic setback, a failed job search, a quarrel with one’s parents, or simply to unburden oneself of the daily humiliations inflicted by a life of precarity. Such conversation is best accomplished while waiting for the tea to brew. Tea is said to untie tongues: it enmeshes people in comforting intimacy while energizing them. Significantly, there are rules regulating fada life, including teatime. I have tried to highlight that, far from constituting “anti-societies,” most fadas have a moral code–an ethos centered on solidarity and loyalty, that, in the absence of conventional modes of generating value, lays an alternative path to masculine dignity.
Rahul Advani: In your chapter on the naming of fadas, you discuss the overseas locations and global popular culture that fada names draw inspiration from. As you note, these inscriptions reflect how young men in urban Niger project their imagined fantasies and at the same time, in spite of their social immobility, engage in their own politics of exclusion.In what ways do names materialize young men’s claims for inclusion in the city and the world beyond while also excluding other men?
Adeline Masquelier: Once a fada is founded, fadantchés typically give it a name that reveals something of their ideals, ambitions, or pastimes. Finding a name that fits the fada is critical. Names have intrinsic potency. They fix the identity of thing they are attributed to, endowing it with substance while also “activating” it. In documenting how marginalized young men affirm their presence in the city, I came to see the fada as a locus of self-narration. Fadantchés often draw inspiration from figures of heroic masculinity or they select names that conjure distant elsewheres. Names like Delta Boys, Cowboys, Dragon Show, Young Money, Texas, or Territoire des Milliardaires (Territory of Billionaires). I was particularly interested in the connection between image, topography, and language. By branding the neighborhood with the name of their fada and decorating the walls with symbols (hearts, dollar signs, and so on) and images (a rapper, a cobra, and so on) fadantchés strive for visibility: they want members of other fadas to notice them. It’s about inserting themselves in a famescape. The practice also provides a vehicle of self-realization, by putting the accent on young men’s accomplishments or future projects–chimeric as they may be. In this regard, the martial art hero and the black US rapper embody audacity and virility, signaling that fadas are microcosms of social aspirations. While they procure stability in the face of the volatility of everyday life, they also serve as experimental grounds where samari can test out a range of possibilities while nurturing aspirations of the good life. Let me stress that not all fadas are forward-looking projects. Some I’ve visited bear names like L’Internationale des Chômeurs, that put the accent on the marginalization of youth, but they are in the minority.
Rahul Advani: Anthropology has, until fairly recently, only occasionally examined men as men – that is, as engendered and engendering subjects. While your initial research intended to focus on women’s lives, upon visiting fadas, you “switched course and embarked fully on a study of the lifeworlds of young men on the streets of Dogondoutchi.” How did the fada as a fieldsite inform your method and approach, and how did your decision to focus on men and masculinities determine the kinds of research questions you asked?
Adeline Masquelier: When I started this project, I saw the fada as the mere setting for young men’s conversations around a pot of tea. Eventually, I realized that far from being a container of activities, the fada was at the very heart of young men’s preoccupations and projects. It was a world unto itself that needed to be problematized from a variety of angles. Given all that goes on at the fada, the fada turned out to be the right forum for exploring dimensions of urban life in Africa — in particular, ethical, aesthetic, and existential dimensions — that are frequently eclipsed by concerns with crisis. From the beginning, young men stressed the sense of homeliness the fada provided. I therefore tried to orient my questions towards the practices of solidarity and belonging young men fashioned. That meant focusing on the experience of teatime (which I had previously ignored as unimportant) and exploring the (spoken and unspoken) moral codes regulating fada life, something fadantchés were keen to impress upon me in the face of elders’ constant criticisms. In observing fadantchés’ diverse forms of engagements, I also came to rethink the experience of waiting. Now, questions about temporality are rarely straightforward. I turned my attention to the emergent and the unresolved, which meant considering less obvious “empirical” findings. There were lots of small but revealing moments. Often, it was the fadantchés themselves who oriented the conversation and shaped it with their concerns and questions. In the end, I did a lot of waiting and listening! In the process, I became interested in the intersecting and overlapping modalities of engagement that waiting entails, that ranged from longings for ever-receding horizons of possibilities to efforts to keep life projects alive to more ordinary struggles to navigate uncertainties, all the while stitching together discordant temporal regimes.
Toni Nieminen: First of all, thank you! Unraveling: Remaking Personhood in a Neurodiverse Age is a brilliant and a profound piece of work. For all of those who haven’t read it yet, I strongly advise you to do so. To hit things off, I want to ask you two questions about the form of and method behind this book. First, you largely use memoirs – written or ghostwritten by either persons living with neurological conditions or their relatives and caretakers – as your ethnographic data. This choice is an interesting and productive one. You do discuss this in the introductory chapter, however, for the readers of the blog, could you elaborate more on this choice and the implications it has had for this project? How does a memoir as a literary format work as an ethnographic data set? And how did you decide which memoirs to include?
Matthew Wolf-Meyer: Thanks Toni—I’m glad that you found Unraveling generative to work with. It was a challenging book to write, so learning that it’s helpful to people is always gratifying.
Unraveling really started as an exploration of why the capacity for “normal” modes of communication had become so foundational for the conceptualization of disability in the US in the twentieth century and its implications for clinical practice, the lives of disabled people, and social scientific theorizations of subjectivity. I had been doing fieldwork related to the project for several years, which included participant-observation in a neuroscience laboratory, a neurology clinic, a psychoanalytic training seminar, a special education school, and parent support networks. In many ways, it was very traditional fieldwork. As I started to write up that work, I found myself recurrently dissatisfied: the clinicians or neuroscientists or psychoanalysts kept appearing as a problem and the experiences of disabled people and their families served as some kind of correction. It felt very predictable in the “weapons of the weak” tradition that ethnography is sometimes drawn to, and I was very sensitive to how it reproduced ideas about power and resistance that satisfy some readers and really bother other ones (like me!). I was also increasingly troubled by my positioning myself as speaking for disabled people who were atypical communicators; it reproduced the problem I was seeking to solve. I wanted to find a way to attend to how disabled people were communicating on their own terms. So, I scrapped that version of the project.
In working through how to build the project differently, I started to read memoirs written by disabled people who were diagnosed with “neurological” disabilities or the memoirs of family members of people with “neurological” disabilities. I was especially interested in texts written by people who were atypical speakers, which ended up creating a corpus of books that were mainly focused on experiences of autism, deafness, and stroke-based aphasia. It’s an unlikely set of disabilities to put together, but as a way to get at the relationship between communication, the “neuro,” and disability, it created a big canvas. My interest in the “neuro” is why I put “neurological” in quotes above: central to what Unraveling tries to do is work against the reductionism that insists that we are our brains. It’s a weird feature of contemporary science and disability activism, where neurological reductionism serves as the basis for both a medical model of disability and the basis of neurodiversity, that is, some brains are just different and lead to behaviors that are intrinsic to an individual. Unraveling tries to tackle that biological reductionism and reconceptualize how we can imagine disability without reliance on the neurological as a source of intractable difference. In making that argument in the book, I wanted to focus on how disabilities framed as neurological have been mobilized in the US over the twentieth century and tell a story about the brain and its role in American conceptions of personhood and subjectivity.
That commitment to telling an American story led me to methodologically limiting myself to memoirs by Americans and in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, since I wanted to locate the project in the U.S. and focus my attention on modern neuroscience and psychiatry. In the end, there were several dozen memoirs to choose from, and they ran the gauntlet from self-published pamphlets to mass marketed literary memoirs. They covered experiences from the 1930s through the early 2000s, were pretty evenly distributed between men and women, and were overwhelmingly white and middle class. Those last elements were a problem in terms of sampling, but were useful in working through the relationship between whiteness and normalcy, particularly as they work together to uphold ideas about legitimate forms of communication. In the end, I selected a set of memoirs that mobilized a way of conceptualizing an interactive practice—and they usually had language to describe that practice. That led to pairing memoirs as parallel cases in each of the chapters and the development of the chapters into discussions of “connection,” “modularity,” “facilitation,” and “animation.”
For some anthropologists and ethnographers, Unraveling might seem like more of a literary analysis since it’s so focused on memoirs. For me, it’s much more in line with person-centered ethnography, and I treated the memoirs as if they were long-form interview transcripts. They also provided descriptions of atypical forms of communication that grew out of intense forms of family intimacy that participant-observation would have a very hard time capturing, which addressed my concerns with speaking for atypical communicators. Rather than addressing the literary elements of the text, I was interested in the text as a form of data in itself and worked to elaborate the nested theories in the texts while also situating the experiences of disabled people and their family members alongside modes of practice in American neuroscience and psychiatry. In the end, each of the chapters is organized around one of the above-mentioned ideas that is drawn out of a memoir or two and puts those ideas into dialogue with other ethnographic, archival, or theoretical work. As a whole, Unraveling builds a cybernetic model of disability, subjectivity, and personhood that each of the chapters is integral to developing, and which draws its inspiration from Gregory Bateson’s work on consciousness. It has become very hard for me to conceive of the chapters as discrete entities—they feel inexorably woven together (which may just be the effect of my having read the book so many times during the revision and copyediting process!).
Toni Nieminen:Second, by choosing to work with memoirs as your primary ethnographic data set, what are you adding to, commenting on, or reconfiguring within anthropological writing more broadly? How does this choice of data and the analysis it enables speak to your own positionality as a researcher and writer on the topic of neurological disorders?
Matthew Wolf-Meyer: In terms of positionality and ethnography, I’m not sure that I have any easy answers.
I write in Unraveling about how atypical communication and neurological disability are things that I’ve had to work through, first with my father’s experience of Alzheimer’s and memory loss and later with my son’s apraxia. But I didn’t want the book to be about them as people, nor about my experience as a son and father who would speak for my father and my son. Those kinds of accounts of disability exist and I find them unsatisfying. That might be because they falsely substitute the experience of the writer for the experience of the written about, which is a form of refusal of what Cassandra Hartblay refers to “disability expertise” and Merri Lisa Johnson and Robert McRuer refer to as “cripistemologies.” Or it might have to do with how they substitute a sample size of one for a wide swath of human experience. Or maybe it’s both! But, in any case, my experience is important to the analysis but the analysis is not of my experience, which is a critical distinction and I try and make that clear in the book. Many of the memoirs resonated with me—and that may have done some subtle work on why I selected the books that I did—but assembling them into the evidentiary body of Unraveling was very grounded and organic in that I really wanted to focus on accounts that gave language to otherwise ignored elements of communicative interaction.
In terms of ethnography as a practice and written form, I might have too much to offer in response. My early training was in literary analysis and historiography, and I came to anthropology late and only in my Ph.D. work. As a literature student, I grew increasingly tired of just reading books and treating them as representative of something. Ethnography drew me in as a way to triangulate between texts, everyday experiences, and my role as an analyst, and in the beginning I was really drawn to the ethnographic work that motivated the Birmingham school of cultural studies. When I started my Ph.D. program and had to read E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s The Nuer, I was astonished at what anthropology actually was. These days, I’m troubled by how much ethnography solely focuses on what people say in interviews and what ethnographers observe—as if there are no other forms of data available to them. If anthropology really is the study of humankind, you have to spend a lot more time watching TV, reading books, and scrolling social media—or else you’re ignoring the integral role technology has always played in human experience (which Evans-Pritchard was actually pretty good at!). Some people might object that these are phenomena of different orders and that may be true—but it’s true based on your ontological position about what phenomena are and how they can be categorized. If, in the end, you rely only on human speech, you’ve successfully cut a wide swath of people out of being part of the humankind you’re interested in studying or representing, which is either explicit or implicit ableism. Either way, it reinforces particular kinds of people and forms of expression as “normal” and others as abnormal or pathological.
Which leads me to my grumpy feelings about contemporary written ethnographies: There’s been a generic shift away from the old functionalist models of Evans-Pritchard where “kinship” and “political structure” motivate individual chapters and toward a model of ethnographic writing where each chapter has an idea based on an extant theory and each chapter feels separable from the others in the book because they don’t really build on each other. I express versions of this with some regularity, but a chapter about the Freudian uncanny next to a chapter about Foucaultian technologies of the self is theoretically impoverished—they believed in fundamentally different conceptions of subjectivity, consciousness, and power! Books should be ontologically consistent and change the way readers interact with the world. I don’t know if I accomplish this, but it’s what I strive toward. And it’s what we should all work toward as scholars. If we want to forward knowledge, there needs to be some consistency in the ontological basis of that knowledge. Otherwise, it’s just a mishmash of theoretical concepts and examples. That said, I’ve learned over time to subtly invoke my ontological commitments—which are to a Spinozist materialism—because I find their invocation to be disruptive to generic conventions and they ruffle the feathers of peer reviewers. But they’re there and motivate everything from why I do what I do to how I analyze what I’m analyzing.
Toni Nieminen:You position epiphenomenal communication in opposition to symbolically, historically, and culturally significant communication and language. You suggest that – especially in the context of neurological disorders – epiphenomenal communication can be used as a modular technology to facilitate different kinds of speakers, hearers, and interpreters, thus making space for what you call cybernetic subjects. Would you like to gloss these concepts, how and why do you use them in your book? Further, could you say more about the possibilities for facilitating cybernetic subjects in institutional settings that privilege – and in many ways gain from privileging – certain kinds of (neoliberal, normative) subjects?
Matthew Wolf-Meyer: You’re right to focus on epiphenomenal communication as the heart of the text. It’s my attempt to offer a corrective to the idea that communication is always embedded in a continuous and transparent, individualized subjectivity. In the US (at least), the dominant assumption is that what we communicate is based on a version of the self that is consistent over time and that how we communicate is with language that is straightforwardly interpretable to an audience. So, when I ask my partner what she wants for dinner tonight, what and how she answers is indebted to a version of her self and culinary desires that are continuous and transparent—and that I’m intimate with. If she says “pasta” or “tacos,” I know that there is a subset of both of those categories that is meaningful to her (and to us as a family): serving her pasta con le sarde or carne asada tacos would be upsetting to everyone involved and would be a betrayal of both her history of desire and her present expectations.
For the most part, assumptions about continuity and transparency are just fine in our everyday lives, but when you’re living with someone who doesn’t communicate in those ways—say a toddler who is new to speech or a person with dementia for whom language is not as referential as it once was or a disabled person who communicates atypically—you can’t rely on interpersonal history or the conventions of interpretation to do the heavy lifting of communication. Instead, you need a practice that attends to needs and desires in the present, which communicative interactions provide a window onto. My call for epiphenomenal modes of communication is meant to draw attention to that and to how our interpretive labor is always working through what we know about the past of a person and what they need in the present.
Language is a technology, and like other technologies, it obscures a wide variety of labor through its efficiency. When we obscure all of the labor that is embedded in language, we run the risk of naturalizing language as a necessary feature of communication. But attention to nonhumans shows how diverse communication can be. And attention to varieties of human communication—including gestural forms—demonstrates how unnecessary spoken and written language are to subjectivity. Focusing on disability experiences of communication opens up what communication can be—and is a challenge to anthropology’s reliance on speech as a transparent medium of communication and semiotics as a unproblematically isomorphic mode of referentiality.
Displacing the naturalness of language as the basis of subjectivity and personhood also serves to describe subjectivity and personhood in more complex ways. Anthropologists from Marriott McKim to Marilyn Strathern to E. Valentine Daniels have been invested in the idea of the “dividual,” or the necessary interdependence of personhood on connections between bodies, which American forms of individualism obscures. Similarly, disability studies scholars like Mia Mingus and Alison Kafer have long drawn attention to how interdependence is a better description of how human sociality works—rather than the rugged independence that underlies American ableism. Unraveling tries to describe how dividualism and interdependence work as the foundation for communication, and reliance on ideologies of transparent communication of the self tend to obscure this. Cybernetic subjects—and I’m really indebted to Bateson on this front—are comprised of (at least) processes of connection, modularity, facilitation, and animation as described by the memoir writers who make up the spine of Unraveling. Focusing on those processes provides ways to describe how subjectivity and personhood are made through ongoing interactions between people, between people and institutions, and between people and their environments.
My hope—and this is the kernel at the heart of my critique of value and discourses around “quality of life” in Unraveling—is that drawing attention to the processual aspects of subjectivity and personhood serve to disrupt the dominance of neoliberal models of subjectivity that rely on the individual as a discrete individual. It’s wild to me how many anthropologists want to critique neoliberalism and then fall back on the individual as the base unit of analysis—and as the base unit of interpretation through a reliance on self-representation through speech acts. It’s also wild to me how many people want to critique capitalism and yet rely on “value” in their analysis: we have to find ways out of capitalist imaginaries and their compulsory terminology. That doesn’t mean foregoing critiques of capitalism, but finding means of critique that actively help to build new imaginaries that are inclusive and sensitive to the needs of others.
In the heat of postmodernism, polyvocality was a key interest, but we seem to have lost that. One way to regain it—and use it as a means to unsettle the dominance of neoliberalism in our imaginations—is to adopt methodologies that disrupt the univocity of the subject, both the people who make up our evidentiary cases and our interpretive roles as social scientists. Incorporating disability expertise is one way of doing this, which treats disabled people as theorists. Participatory and community-led models of research do similar work. On some level, resisting the individual as the unit of analysis—and neoliberalism as a cultural dominant—depends on a willingness to be uncomfortable and to make other people uncomfortable, and too few scholars are willing to do this. Unraveling is purposefully disturbing. If a reader gets through it without being disturbed, I’ve done something wrong!
Toni Nieminen:You seem to suggest that facilitation – one of your core concepts – as an interactional and ethical practice builds on epiphenomenal communication on the one hand, and a kind of future oriented collaborative effort on the other hand. I might be wrong here, however, this seems to contain a tension: how is communication to draw both on immediate meaning-making in the present whilst also anticipating a kind of publicly shared modular futurity, without producing dysfunctionally functional webs of communication, as you call them? Put in other terms, how are we to scale up your analysis of epiphenomenal and modular communication beyond the interactional event?
Matthew Wolf-Meyer: This is thorny, but I’m not sure that we should scale up past the interactional event of communication. Or, if we do so, we need to know that that’s what we’re doing and what the dangers are.
One of my influences in the book—and really, in life—is Mony Elkaïm, who was a family systems therapist that was heavily influenced by Bateson. Elkaïm was of the view that most families are dysfunctional, but also that most families find that dysfunction to be functional: dysfunction serves a purpose and part of kinship is finding people whose assumptions about the world complement your own. Dysfunction can be a problem when it leads to actual harm, but for the most part, some dysfunction serves as a motor to human relations. To describe how dysfunction works, Elkaïm makes a distinction between “worldview” and “official program,” which are the difference between desire and need. Sometimes, desire and need are isomorphic; but, sometimes, they directly contradict one another, which is what Bateson described as the basis of schizogenesis, that is, meeting one contradicts meeting the other, and as a result, I’m trapped in either betraying stated desires or working against needs. For Elkaïm, surfacing the latent needs and desires of a dysfunctional family system is the work of family therapy, and is necessarily a historical project: only by knowing the history of needs and desires in a family can that surfacing work be accomplished.
I say all of that because there are times when history and continuity are important to address, but it is often the case that most communication is a response to present conditions and bringing in historical understandings of an interactional partner might just confuse things or obscure possibilities. When my younger son says he wants to watch something, I could put on the latest episode of the last cartoon he watched, but I could also allow him to express his desire by picking something new. When we only fall back on what we think we know about a person, we limit the possibilities of their desire.
The future is a collaborative act. On the micro level, epiphenomenal communication is about building a shared future between participants: we build a future to inhabit through our communication of desires and needs and the ways that those desires and needs are responded to as the basis of a shared animation. And we can scale up from there, to how we build our kinship, to how we build and interact with institutions, and to how we sustain and change our environments. When we moor our desires and needs to history, we limit the possibilities for the future—which is one of the reasons why I’m drawn to speculative fiction, which many anthropologists are. We have to find ways to be open to new desires and needs, which is about how we theorize the subject, how we make research projects, and where we seek to intervene (and how) in dominant theories.
Scaling up beyond the interactional event has a lot at stake, and what’s needed is a commitment to articulating the various needs and desires that are at play. Family systems therapy provides one model to do this kind of deliberative work, which both acknowledges the past while also seeking to articulate a livable future. But it depends on a commitment to participation and building something new, which, again, can be really uncomfortable. And we need to be committed to being uncomfortable if we’re going to build more inclusive futures. I know that’s pretty far from addressing atypical forms of communication, but it’s all part of the same project: if we want to build more inclusive futures, we need to address the forms of ableism that foreclose specific people from participation in society as full persons. We need new ways of collaborating.
Toni Nieminen: Finally, as Unraveling was published in 2020, what have you been working on lately and in what kind of ways does the work build on the thinking behind Unraveling?
Matthew Wolf-Meyer: Unraveling came out six months into the COVID-19 pandemic, and it really felt like it was a book out of time and place—there were just more immediate things to worry about. Maybe Unraveling’s time and place is returning for better and worse, since it feels like we’re returning to an old, exclusionary “normal” rather than having built a more inclusive one in the interim that the pandemic provided us in 2020-2022. As I tried to bend the lessons from Unraveling into more immediate applicability, I put together an edited volume called Proposals for a Caring Economy, which I hope comes out sometime soon. It has chapters from a wide variety of people who are working with ideas of connection, modularity, facilitation, and animation as they apply to the arts, agriculture, immigration, and more—all to demonstrate how the ideas in Unraveling are applicable outside of disability experiences.
And then I started working with Denielle Elliott on a book that comes out next year called Naked Fieldnotes, which is pretty much what it seems like it should be: a huge compendium of ethnographers’ fieldnotes and contextualizing essays, which makes apparent how ethnographers do the work they do.
The big thing is a new book called American Disgust: Racism, Microbial Medicine, and the Colony Within, which comes out in spring 2024. It was a backburner project for several years, which started with a little project on fecal microbial transplants, and then developed into this sprawling project about American dietary recommendations, racism, the use of biologics in medicine, and how settler-colonialism informs American disgust. It ends with the recent rise of fecal microbial transplants in the US and contextualizes the resistance to their use in the US as based in longstanding ideas about bodies and contamination that has motivated people like John Harvey Kellogg and is apparent in things like the inclusion of yogurt into American diets.
A lot of the last three years has been spent supporting my partner and kids—first through the early days of the pandemic and then during a year abroad in Finland as a fellow at Tampere University’s Institute for Advanced Study—and I’m kind of surprised that I’ve gotten anything done. It was really due to working with other people—either in collaborations or peer pressure—that anything got done, which has also been a great way to work against the individualization of academic labor conditions. Someone recently suggested that I should work on a project about historically important collaborations and at the time I dismissed the possibility—but I increasingly think I just might. But before that I need to finish a book called Living Technologies: Designs for the Biology of Everyday Life, which is an attempt to build social theory through bodily processes (like the dormancy of sleep) to disrupt biological deterministic ways of thinking about people and their capacities. It’s been a slowly simmering project and just needs to be put into the world, particularly because it seems like we’re constantly confronting revanchist forms of determinism that skirt—if not outright embrace—racism, sexism, and ableism in the worst ways.
In writing all that out in the context of revisiting Unraveling, you get a pretty good sense of where I’m coming from: I have some real frustration with where we’ve been as anthropologists and socially (especially in the US), but real hope that things can be different. And part of the role of the social sciences isn’t just diagnostic, but utopian. If we want a better world, we need to help build it.
Ilana Gershon: What does focusing on listening and ideologies of listening among people living in Yopno Valley in Papua New Guinea allow you to examine? What assumptions do you have to disrupt?
James Slotta: The study of political speech has a long and venerable history, going back at least to Plato. Rhetoricians, philosophers, anthropologists, communications scholars and others have all probed the role that speech and speaking play in political life: the power of words to influence and affect others, the importance of voice as a tool of politics, the role of public discourse in democratic politics, and much else besides.
I myself went to Papua New Guinea to study political oratory, a topic that has attracted a fair amount of interest among anthropologists. But right from the start of my research, I was struck by how ineffective the oratory I had gone to study was. Community leaders would make public speeches announcing a community meeting or some construction work to be done on the community school, and I would show up at the appointed hour to find only a few people there. We would sit around for a bit, waiting to see if others would come, and then give up and go our separate ways.
Needless to say, this did not seem like a very auspicious context to study political oratory and the power of words. But it helped me to appreciate something that other ethnographers of Melanesia—Bambi Schieffelin, Don Kulick, Joel Robbins, Lise Dobrin, Rupert Stasch—have remarked on: in the region, it is often listeners who are regarded as the powerful and important figures in communicative events. As I was discovering, that’s because they are!
In the literature on political communication, listening doesn’t often figure as an activity of much importance, perhaps because it is typically associated with passivity and submission. But in the Yopno Valley, people are attuned to the power and consequentiality of listening. Every time community members failed to heed an announcement, it was a reminder of the power of listeners—and a reminder of the impotence of speeches and the would-be leaders who made them. As we sat around waiting to see if others would show up for a meeting or a community work project, talk inevitably turned to why others weren’t coming. And that often focused on listening—how people should listen, why they should listen, and especially how they don’t listen.
So, I started to pay attention to norms and practices of listening in Yopno villages—how people think about it, talk about it, and do it. That gradually revealed what a complicated and fraught activity listening was for people. It also became clear that many of the listening practices involved in local village politics were also part of people’s dealings with actors and institutions from outside the valley: missionaries, government officials, environmental conservation NGOs, anthropologists, and so on. Listening became an important lens not only for understanding village politics, but for understanding colonialism, globalization, and missionization in the region.
Ilana Gershon: What is your approach for studying different ways of listening?
James: Listening is difficult to study because, unlike speaking, it doesn’t leave an immediate trace. Perhaps that’s one reason speech and speaking have received so much more attention from scholars of political communication. But people’s listening practices do leave their mark. For one, they can be glimpsed in the way people talk about listening. In the Yopno Valley, people talk a lot about listening and there are characteristic ways of talking about it—a kind of lexicon of listening—that shed light on local ideologies and norms of listening. There is also much effort made to explicitly advise and instruct people on how to listen, which puts this lexicon to use in illuminating ways.
Different practices of listening are also evident in the ways people respond to others’ speech. When few people show up for community meetings, that’s a clue to how people are listening to the speeches of community leaders. In my research, verbal responses proved to be a particularly important resource for looking at how people listen. Community meetings are important political events in Yopno villages, and much of what people do there is talk over other people’s proposals. In this talk about others’ talk, we get a palpable indication of how people are listening and a public performance of a kind of listening that is central to the politics of Yopno villages.
Finally, I focus a lot on the kinds of speech that people want to listen to. Early in my research, I was often asked to speak at public events, which made me pretty uncomfortable. As I saw it, I was there to listen, not to give advice and make speeches. My ethnographic desire to listen, you might say, blinded me to my interlocutors’ desire to listen. Eventually, as it became clear that listening was an activity worth attending to, I started thinking about why people wanted me to speak and what kind of speech they wanted from me. And I could see that often what they wanted me to talk about echoed the kind of speech that people in Yopno villages are often looking for from each other—namely, expert advice. Why is that the sort of thing listeners in Yopno villages seek out? Working out the answer to that question helped me understand why listening is such an important part of Yopno political life.
So, even though this book is about listening, it is filled with speech! Speech about listening, speech about speech, and speech that people listen to.
Ilana Gershon: Why do you call the listening practiced by people in Yopno Valley anarchic?
James: As in many rural parts of Papua New Guinea, political life in Yopno villages is largely anarchic in character. I mean this in the etymological sense: it is a political environment without rulers, without people or institutions with the power to issue commands, adjudicate disputes, or enforce laws. Community leaders do not have the means to coerce people to act, nor is the Papua New Guinean state really able to do so in this out-of-the-way region.
The book focuses on the critical role that listening plays in sustaining this anarchic political environment. For instance, ignoring the public speeches of community leaders is a way listeners subvert the authority of would-be rulers. But other listening practices also play a part. To organize community activities consensually, without a leader calling the shots, requires a different sort of listening.
Of course, listening is important in other domains of Yopno life as well. I concentrate on anarchic listening in the book because listening plays such a visible and vital role in Yopno political life.
Ilana Gershon: Telling others what to do appears to be a highly charged speech act for people living in Yopno Valley. Why do you think it is so highly charged, and what social strategies develop as a result?
James: Telling others what to do cuts right at the heart of the anarchic, egalitarian ethos of Yopno political life. Adults, particularly men, value their self-determination and they guard it closely.
But it is important to specify the limits of this. First off, telling others what to do is not universally disapproved of. People are constantly telling children what to do and have no qualms about doing so. To an extent, husbands boss their wives around without compunction, though they often get pushback if they go too far. As Michelle Rosaldo says of Ilongot households, directives might be the paradigmatic act of speech within Yopno kin groups. Concerns about self-determination and equality really come into force in dealings among adults, especially those without kin ties to one another.
Secondly, the kind of egalitarianism one finds in the Yopno Valley and many other parts of New Guinea is what James Woodburn termed “competitive egalitarianism.” Equality among people is not presumed; it must constantly be proven. So, people must be careful to ensure they are not being pushed around, even as they are often trying to get the better of others. As Anthony Forge noted, in New Guinea “to be equal and stay equal is an extremely onerous task requiring continual vigilance and effort.”
The result is that those men who try to verbally direct other men in the community must be very very careful. Historically, community leaders tended to die young, the targets of occult violence from angry community members pushed too far. Today, with the advent of Christianity, sorcery and witchcraft are less common. Leaders may feel less besieged, but now they too don’t have recourse to threats of sorcery, which were one of the key tools leaders in the past used to get people to listen to them.
At the time of my research, efforts to direct others often involved the communication of expertise, which is a fascinating and seemingly contradictory speech act. Leaders share their purported expertise with listeners as a way to steer their actions. At the same time, listeners seek out this expert knowledge as a way to empower themselves. In other words, the communication of expertise is a way leaders attempt to exert power over listeners while enhancing listeners’ self-determination. Such a seemingly contradictory speech act is a fitting instrument for those who play the seemingly contradictory role of leaders of anarchic communities.
Ilana Gershon: What role does repetition play in Yopno Valley communicative life?
James: Repetition is a ubiquitous part of verbal life. In community meetings, the same issues are discussed and the same points made week after week. Community leaders make announcements and when no one listens they make the same announcements again. As people step out of church on Sunday, church leaders launch into a summary of the sermon everyone just heard. And throughout all of this, speakers comment on how repetitious they are being.
There are a variety of reasons for all this repetition, a primary one being that speakers assume listeners are ignoring them. They repeat themselves in the hopes that eventually their message will get through. People are attuned to how listeners listen and they fashion their speech accordingly. Repetition is one very visible result. The communication of expertise is another. Norms and ideologies of listening are part of an ecology of communication and so they shape the ways people speak. The upshot is that any analysis of speech—from research on speech registers and genres to the analysis of conversations and texts—really needs to attend to the way participants think about and go about listening.
Katja Politt: The book is not about cats alone, but also about science. It introduces many important concepts relevant to studying and describing language empirically and even provides a clawssary of them. In a nutshell: What is the most important takeaway one can gain for engaging with phenomena like purrieties in a scientific way?
Edith Podhovnik: Good question. I think, the most important takeaway is that looking at language is fun and that we can look at whatever phenomenon we want – as long as we know what we doing and how we are doing it in science. If we are interested in a phenomenon, let’s go for it. And if it is a fun subject, there is no reason not to research it. On the contrary, it makes science more relatable and approachable for a wider audience. I had a few eyebrows raised at me when I said I was looking at online cats – as if online cats were not a science-worthy subject. To be honest, that made me even more determined to research cat-related digital spaces.
The fun side of cats aside, it is important to do a proper scientific study with a proper research design and methodology. At the same time, the more theoretical approach to science and scientific thinking is nothing to be afraid of. I have been teaching undergraduate students in research-related classes and have been supervising Bachelor’s and Master’s theses, so I have encountered students’ questions about research first-hand and I always try to take away their fears of doing something wrong.
Another aim for me was to offer a comprehensive linguistic description of the purrietie, in the same way as we would describe a language or a dialect that exists in the offline world. It’s like a linguistic treasure trove: we find examples that show us how language works in general, like phonetics/phonology, semantics, syntax, and pragmatics. We can also go into more specialised fields, like computer-mediated communication. Language in the cat-related digital spaces is a living breathing thing: purrieties are evolving and changing, and that is fascinating.
I also show that online cats are not just a shortlived Internet fad but are part of our online culture. For some people, online cats might just be a silly social endeavour, but I have always thought that there is more behind the online cats than just the memes and funny cat videos. This is also what I wanted to bring across.
One final point I would like to mention is that we can do our research also on our own without, say, institutional support. There are open source tools out there. I have been working on the purrieties as an independent scholar in my free time. Admittedly, this is hard sometimes, but absolutely worth it.
Katja Politt: During the process of writing, how has the book changed from what you had originally planned, e.g. by feedback from colleagues, cats, and your survey respondents? You seem to have made a great effort in including feedback, e.g. by including the constructive additions of Purr Reviewer 2.
Edith Podhovnik: Before I started writing, I had a clear outline of what I wanted to include in which chapter, say dialectology and lexicology should be covered in Chapter “The Feline Territory of Language” and the attitude studies should be in Chapter “Cattitude and Purrception”. There was quite a lot of preparation before I started writing, and it took some time to create a good workable outline.
Additionally, I was doing fieldwork to get the data: I collected data – scraping from social media and communicating with cat account holders. This is a cyclical process: we analyse a phenomenon, get feedback and more input from the people actually producing the data, we go back to our analysis of the data, then back to the respondents, and so on.
I received really good feedback on the first draft I submitted: additional resources to include, then the narrative approach to social media to complement my chapter on computer-mediated communication; I had inconsistencies in style as my draft was too academic in some parts and too informal in others. Well, and there was Purr Reviewer 2, who was only happy when I included him in the chapter. [Purr Reviewer 2 is sitting next to me on the radiator while I am writing this. Apparently he is happy because he does not use the keyboard on his way across my desk],
The reviewers were always very encouraging and made really helpful suggestions. Based on their comments, I restructured the book. For example, it was not clear why I had a whole chapter devoted the real language of cat, and the reviewers felt that it did not quite fit in with the other chapters. That made me think about my reasons why I had included this chapter in the first place. I scrapped that chapter in the final version and kept only the bit on cat phonetics. I used the cat sounds as an introduction to phonetics in the chapter on phonetics/phonology – one reason being that I wanted to include the figure with the cat vowel chart.
Instead of the chapter on the real language of cats, I included the narrative approach that we can use to study social media, which was something I had not really touched upon in the first draft. So all the changes were geared towards filling in bits and pieces to come up with a fuller picture of the cat-related digital spaces.
I also asked authors whose data I included in my book to check if I could use their data for my book. Even though their data is freely available on github, I wanted to let them know that I was looking at their data for my own purposes and to have them give their OK to the context in which I was including their data. They also plotted some data visualisations for me, which I am really grateful for.
Katja Politt: The book features chapters on phonetics/phonology, meowphology, semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics. As a researcher, which CATegory here is your favourite to research and analyse?
Edith Podhovnik: I like all the CATegories, to be honest. They were all fun to research and to write about. And going through the cat-inspired language data was very easy to do because the purrieties and the cat-related digital spaces are lighthearted and fun. Showing the underlying linguistic processes by using the many feline examples I had come across in my research was just entertaining.
My absolute favourite CATegory is – and has always been – dialectology, I had specialised in social dialectology in my PhD, and I wanted to apply the same approach to purrieties. I just love dialects in all their variations, and with the purrieties I could study online language variation. Additionally, I was so happy when I found all the lovely dialect expressions in the English Dialect Dictionary and in the Survey of English Dialects. Well, it is phonetics and lexicology really.
When I went through the literature in the respective fields, I found that cats had already sneaked in. That meant that I could include cat-related linguistic quotes and cat-related material other linguists had used in the respective context. So, in addition to the linguistic content, I was on the lookout for cats. I am still doing that: checking if authors use cats in one way or another in their studies.
I would also like to mention that I love linguistic fieldwork. Going out to people and asking them language-related questions is something that I really like because I am fascinated by their answers.
Katja Politt: Would you say that there is also a way to describe semeowtics from a purrieties point of view?
Edith Podhovnik: Oh yes, definitely. Looking at semiotics with cats makes absolute sense – at least to me – because social media is full of cat pictures and videos. We have the memes, we have the vernacular photos, the cat gifs, cat emoji, cat stickers, cat videos, and the like. In the offline world, when we take into account the linguistic landscapes, we find cats, too: on T-shirts, on mugs, on various other consumer goods. Cats are used in advertising because they convey certain messages for us.
People are using purrieties, which means purrieties are not an isolated phenomenon but quite widespread. And they occur in other languages, too, like in French or German.
Katja Politt: Is there anything you would have loved to add to your book that you have come across since submoewtting [submitting] it?
Edith Podhovnik: Definitely. I keep coming across more examples of meowlogisms, I have found a new meowpheme (‘chonk’ as in ‘to dechonkify”, which means for a big cat to lose weight), I have collected more contributions in the digital spaces of academics and their cats, there are more books (of the fiction kind) featuring cats). As a dialectologist, I want to record all the different cat-related word formations, so I am still doing that.
I also find more meowlogisms in languages other than English, and I enjoy adding cat-inspired varieties in, say, German, French, Italian, and Russian, to my ever expanding cat-related linguistic repertoire. As the book is already submitted, I write posts about meowlogisms and purrieties in my research blog (https://meowfactor.hypotheses.org).
A conversation between Slava Greenberg, Michelle Pfeifer, Vijay Ramjattan, Pooja Rangan, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, and Pavitra Sundar
In 2021, as our co-edited book Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice entered production, a Silicon Valley start-up began advertising an app that uses AI to modify accents in real time. As one reporter put it, “rather than learning to pronounce words differently, technology could do that for you. There’d no longer be a need for costly or time-consuming accent reduction training. And understanding would be nearly instantaneous.” Thinking with an Accent offers a sorely-needed alternative to this vision of a world where communication and understanding happen automatically, and seemingly magically, without translation or friction. Taking as our point of departure the idea that an accent is not an unfortunate thing that only some people putatively have, but rather a powerful and world-forming mode of perception, a form of minoritarian expertise, and a complex formation of desire, our volume convenes scholars of media, literature, education, law, language, and sound to theorize accent as an object of inquiry, an interdisciplinary method, and an embodied practice.
Thinking with an Accent was published in print and Open Access in February 2023. This summer, a few of us co-editors and contributors gathered online for a conversation about our respective contributions to the book and our thinking on and after its publication. Highlights from our virtual roundtable appear below.
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan (co-editor): It’s been six months since the publication of Thinking with an Accent (TWA). In the intervening time, I’ve been tremendously excited by how many of us are already extending and expanding our interventions in the accent volume: in new articles, in video essays, and even in just-published or forthcoming monographs. I know that my own recently completed book manuscript, on the pedagogy and accented reading of Indian English literature in the Anglo-American university, could not have been written as it is without TWA.
Pavitra, you’ve just written a book (congratulations!) in which you theorize the practice of “listening with a feminist ear.” Relatedly, your chapter for TWA theorizes “listening with an accent” as a “queer kind of listening.” In a recent video essay, you perform “listening to listening.” How do these four forms or modalities of listening relate to each other?
Pavitra Sundar (co-editor): Thanks for this question, Ragini! As you know, I was working on my book and our accent volume around the same time, which meant that I was circling around similar issues in the two projects. Both “listening with a feminist ear” and “listening with an accent” are animated by a kind of critical utopianism. Enfolded within them is a critique of current sonic regimes – of what Jennifer Stoever, for example, calls the racialized “listening ear” – as well as a challenge to those regimes. My concepts turn on the belief that we can re-tune the listening ear. In my book, Listening with a Feminist Ear, I bring a sonic sensibility to the analysis of Bombay cinema, examining how specific voices, languages, genres, and sounds come to be understood as they are. So the questions at the heart of my monograph are similar to the ones we ask in Thinking with an Accent: how do we hear accent/cinema? Can we hear it differently?
In my essay for TWA, I play with a wonderful poem by Aracelis Girmay to re-theorize accent in relation to place. Accent is often thought to be tied in place by place. The aural trace of the place in which we were born or raised is taken as a sign of our national, ethnic, and/or racial identity. I take that potentially essentializing notion and apply it to myself (the listener or reader) instead of the accented speaker. Rather than listening for the place audible in others’ tongues, I ask how my own listening is placed. From where do I listen? In your feedback on my draft, you noted the proximity of my framework to standpoint epistemology. You’re absolutely right! But where standpoint epistemology tends to mobilize visual metaphors (regarding how one sees the world) I emphasize the aural. How does my social location, including and especially my experiences with language, shape the ways in which I listen? To what extent is that place from which I listen fixed? How might I re-orient – or, better yet, disorient – the standpoint I habitually occupy as a listener?
In these projects and in my recent video-essay work, I’ve been inspired by Nina Sun Eidsheim (another of our TWA contributors!), who, in her brilliant book The Race of Sound, calls on us to “listen to listening.” To shift attention away from the sonic object (voice, in particular) and to the naturalized ways in which we make sense of voice through listening. Relatedly, I’ve been thinking about your work on voice, Slava. One of the things I love about your TWA chapter, “Accenting the Trans Voice, Echoing Audio-Dysphoria,” is that it forces us to think about voice and accent in relation to each other. Could you say a bit about how your thinking on either or both of those categories developed over the course of writing the essay?
Slava Greenberg: Thank you, Pavitra, for the opportunity to share my writing process, some of which was inspired by conversations with you, Rigini, Pooja, and Akshya, and which have also influenced my work on the unauthorized biography of gender dysphoria. When I first sat in front of a blank document to write my chapter, a childhood memory from preschool in Kyiv typed itself. It was about hearing a disembodied voice that sounded like my mom, speaking Ukrainian, which drew me out of the classroom and onto the school grounds, where I found a child on a tree on the other side of the school fence being scolded by my teacher in Russian while surrounded by my classmates. I told the kid to wait for me because my mom would be able to understand. The next thing I remember is the three of us eating sweet strawberries in our kitchen. What was actually at the core of that memory was my dad’s condescending jokes about my mom’s Ukrainian accent. It wasn’t that she gladly spoke Ukrainian – with whoever was willing (or not), particularly her two siblings, at any and all occasions – but her accent that became the punchline of his jokes. My mom laughed along, paying it no attention and carrying on with pride.
I deleted the story, realizing that I had conflated voice and accent because they were both the butt of my dad’s jokes, and the kid was just speaking Ukrainian in a Russian-speaking-dominant city, not Russian with a Ukrainian accent as I initially remembered. I also deleted the bit about my dad’s favorite joke merging the two by provoking my mom to respond with a word that sounded like a bark to a Russian-speaking ear (how). As an accented speaker, I am experienced with training for vocal assimilation. As a trans man, I am experienced with the transition of my voice on hormone replacement therapy (HRT) into a deeper, yet somewhat grinding-sounding and, as I elaborate in the chapter, feminine-sounding voice over the phone. The accenting of my voice and speech are intertwined.
Activating and then deleting this childhood memory was how I knew that the only representation of this entangled voice-accent phenomenon that resonated with me was in a film centering an accented trans woman who does not utter a word but sings one karaoke song, echoing someone else’s words and muffling her accent and trans voice at the same time. Hiding an accented trans voice for safety has brought back to me the memory of the child up on a tree, proudly yelling back in their own voice and language, and the taste of those strawberries my mom sprinkled sugar all over, which we shared.
Michelle, I would like to extend the same opportunity to you now, to share a shift in your thought process as you were writing your chapter, “‘The Native Ear’: Accented Testimonial Desire and Asylum.” Is there a deletion, omission, perhaps a scene or moment of forgetfulness that you’re now rethinking? I’d love to know more about the motivations behind your thinking through the synthetic voices and the possibilities of migrant testimony.
Michelle Pfeifer: Thank you so much for your question, Slava. I started working on linguistic analysis and migrant testimony in 2015 when Germany took center stage in the so-called European refugee crisis. While Germany was hailed as a benevolent, liberal, and humanitarian center of Europe – supposedly “welcoming” refugees with open arms – what we were actually observing on the ground was an intensification of border and asylum regimes. One way in which this intensification took place was through different technological, biometric, and data-driven tools that were used to determine the identities and countries of origin of people seeking asylum in Germany. One of those tools is a dialect recognition software that supposedly can distinguish between different, mostly Arabic, dialects on the basis of a speech sample with an average length of 25 seconds. This software was used to contradict the statements people made in their asylum interviews and ended up further restricting the right to asylum in Germany because people’s claims to asylum could be and still are regarded with suspicion.
As I started to research this dialect recognition software, it became apparent that its use, development, and functioning were shrouded in intentional secrecy and obfuscation. So, the motivation for my research was twofold. First, I wanted to find, collect, and publish information on linguistic analysis and asylum in order to expose and challenge how it reproduces and intensifies the precarity of people seeking asylum. Second, I wanted to dig deeper into the underlying assumptions and claims of linguistic expertise of voice recognition and asylum to show and critique how applicants are placed in a double bind: they are incited to speak during asylum procedures, and then simultaneously have their testimony scrutinized and placed under general suspicion. My contribution to TWA shows one of the directions of this research. I focus on predecessors of dialect recognition software and the convergences of linguistic expertise and law, as well as the longer colonial continuities that produce what I call a linguistic passport that, like other passports, distributes both possibilities and impossibilities of movement and mobility.
Since writing my chapter, I’ve been thinking about linguistic mobilities more broadly, including within the classroom setting. Vijay, your chapter, “Accent Reduction as Raciolinguistic Pedagogy,” ends with a discussion of possible strategies for a counterpedagogy to accent reduction programs. This discussion was very generative for my thinking on my own pedagogical practice and experience navigating educational institutions. Would you like to share an example (or examples) of these counterpedagogical strategies from your teaching, research, and/or writing practice?
Vijay A. Ramjattan: Thanks, Michelle! As someone who teaches listening and speaking to international students, who may experience anxiety about their accents and thus seek out accent reduction, my counterpedagogy attempts to alleviate this anxiety by challenging the alleged effectiveness of accent reduction. While this service is marketed as a means to become intelligible, its conceptualization of intelligibility is problematic, to say the least. Instead of being a quality of an individual, intelligibility should be understood as a goal requiring the collaboration of speaker and listener (in the case of oral communication). The problem with accent reduction, then, is that it requires the speaker to undertake the entire burden of communication without ever considering how the listener needs to put in some effort as well. This is particularly concerning when listening practices can be informed by ideologies of oppression and thus unfairly position certain speakers as orally deficient no matter how they sound.
In my chapter, I imagine a counterpedagogy in terms of and at the scale of institutional change. However, as an educator, I realize that counterpedagogies first form at the micro level. To counteract the idea of intelligibility as an individual trait and place more importance on listening, I try to have students develop listening strategies, which can range from paying closer attention to the context of an utterance to decipher unclear words, to recognizing how other semiotic practices such as gesture help to communicate a message. Wherever possible, I also have classroom discussions that explore how accent helps to reproduce racism, xenophobia, and other interlocking systems of oppression in educational contexts and beyond. Inspired by these discussions, students have given presentations on accent discrimination.
To return to the matter of scale, I continue to imagine how what I do in the classroom could be translated into a collective effort to undo the pernicious effects of accent reduction. Ragini, I wonder if you might similarly describe your chapter “Is There a Call Center Literature?” as a micro-instance of a larger possible intervention. In your chapter, you use the idea of call center literature to pursue the accentedness of reading. For example, your discussion of Megha Majumdar’s debut novel A Burning highlights your own accented perception that Majumdar is writing for a non-Indian Anglophone reader. For readers who may be uninterested in “call center literature” as such, what are some key takeaways from your chapter that you would like to emphasize?
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan: A terrific question, Vijay. You’re very right that I hope my essay on call center literature might offer an intervention at multiple scales. On the one hand, it is an inside baseball response to academic debates on World Literature. On the other hand, I intend it to be a more generally applicable performance of thinking and argument-formation that takes seriously the ways that all of us variously pronounce our desired interventions into any critical conversation. Call center literature is an archive, a method, and an object of desire. It is also, I argue, a literature of accommodation that draws our attention to what we might call, following Jennifer Stoever, the “reading ear” and how it is primed to perceive the non-Western Anglophone text. To repeat Pavitra’s questions about listening with a difference: from where and how do we read, and how do our own accented readings in fact produce the texts we read?
I mentioned earlier that I recently completed a book manuscript on the pedagogy of Indian English literature. In that work, I try to further develop a method of accented reading that combines close textual exegesis of literary texts with discursive analysis of critical debates and responses to the texts. The result is a metacritical mode of engagement with literature that strives to attend to the cross-pollinating and co-creative dynamics of reading and writing. When we read any work of literature, we have to ask not just what the author is saying, but rather what they are saying to whom in what disciplinary and curricular contexts – or, for that matter, what the text is being made to say by a critic or pedagogue in order to advance some particular argument. In this way, I seek to build on TWA’s signal revisioning of the relationship between listening and speaking through an elaboration of accent as a non-indexical mode of perception, and not simply as an identitarian marker.
It’s been such a joy to do this work alongside all of you! Looking forward to our next opportunity to think together with and about accent.
Xiao Ke: Thank you so much for accepting my interview invitation. After reading this book in detail (again), I just want to reaffirm what I said in our personal conversation – that I admire this book, and I believe, for many years to come, this will be an indispensable reference for people who work in China-related topics and beyond. My first question is the following: Your dissertation, which Terror Capitalism is based on, is titled Spirit Breaking. I was wondering, in both the research and writing stages of this book, how you were able to reflexively balance your witnessing of unprecedent psychological trauma of a people (possibly the totality of 11 million Uyghurs and 1.5 million Kazakhs) and generalizations of terror-colonial-capitalist processes that are “more complex than interment camps” (p.5)?
Darren Byler: Balancing the obligations I feel toward the people who shared some of the most difficult moments of their lives with me and scholarly impulse to analyze the colonial structure they were dealing with was one of deepest challenges I faced in my work. One of the ways I dealt with this was by committing to engaging my interlocutors as complex social figures and as storytellers. I strove to frame the book around their stories, allowing them to narrate its shape, and use their voices to develop the concepts such as enclosure, devaluation, and dispossession that I, and they, saw driving the capitalist-colonial structure. But, of course, at times it still feels like the language of social science overwhelms the affective dimension of their worlds, and there was a great deal of their emotional labor that I was unable to adequately represent in a single book. As I mention in the final chapter of the book, that ethnographic storytelling can evoke the pain of others, it can help readers sit with it, but in the end it really cannot offer much protection to them. I suppose that one of the ways I balance my witnessing of all this, is not much of a balance at all, but rather a practice of holding onto the affective experience of the powerless rage that some of my Uyghur friends felt, and letting it shape my own outrage at the capitalist-colonial structures that still dominate the world.
Xiao Ke: Following proposals in your book, what is both the purchase and difficulty of thinking China’s Xinjiang, Apartheid South Africa, Palestine/Israel, India’s Kashmir, US’s War on Terror together? In making analogues between these historical-geopolitical entities now, what are the arguments to be made trans-regionally (possibly beyond Robinson 1983 and Stoler and McGranahan 2007)?
Darren Byler: This is such a great question. I do want to be careful about shallow comparisons that can flatten out the particular histories and dynamics of particular colonial situations in the world. I’m inspired for instance by the work of scholars such as Iyko Day and Peter Hudson in looking at specific genealogies and applications of concepts related to racial capitalism and settler colonialism. For me the most fruitful way of thinking beyond analogy is related to both discourse and materiality. The first has to do with examining the specific transfer of colonial and policing strategy, the ways in which Chinese politicians and police are reading and emulating Israeli, European, and U.S. policing and colonial theory in their own words. The second has to do with the way specific technologies are built, transferred and transformed beyond the nation form. So for instance I see the Chinese state contractors buying U.S. and Israeli counter-terrorism equipment and then developing versions of Palantir and Cellebrite of their own. Or I see them hiring graduates from the same computer science programs. That sort of thing can provide a grounding to the claim that these are interrelated phenomena, that Chinese policing and anti-Muslim racism is different not in kind but in scale and intensity. I also find the internal forced migration and labour, the racialized banning of certain populations from positions of economic and political power, and the global economic forces, that were present in 1970s Apartheid South Africa, especially useful for understanding the capitalist-colonial dynamics of contemporary Xinjiang. But of course there are some major dynamics that set Xinjiang apart from all of the places you mentioned. A colonial project centered around a mass thought reform campaign that utilizes cutting-edge automated surveillance systems and is carried out by a post-Maoist state, that is also itself a former semi-colony made up of 1.4 billion brown people (here a comparison to Kashmir could be made), is a singular structure. That is to say, contemporary Xinjiang, is both an outcome of the contemporary global world system, and yet in its specifics, it is unprecedented.
Xiao Ke: One of the really interesting features of your book is how you tie literary and ethnographic figures together, for instance: Yusup and “Iron Will…” (p.82-92); Ablikim, The Backstreets and the sad “ending” of an anticolonial homosocial friendship (p.148-162); or even Chen Ye and his reading collection of the lone, critical poet Bei Dao (p.179). How does thinking with and talking about contemporary literature help your ethnographic research and writing of this book?
Darren Byler: I remember rereading Benedict Anderson’s work on imagined communities in graduate school with the anticolonial scholar Chandan Reddy, and really being struck by the way Anderson discussed the work of literature as staging, for a mass audience, something that is held in common. Great literature condenses and makes sensible things that many readers experience. For someone like me who grew up outside of both the Uyghur and Chinese world, their literature gave me a way of accessing deeply felt experiences of life in rural Xinjiang. It showed me how Muslim migrants on the run in the Chinese city, and also Chinese poets, could evoke a refusal of the pull of the authoritarian, ethnonationalist project of the state. Literature and poetry gave me a language, an archive of evocative portraits of times, places and people that would have otherwise been inaccessible, but which spoke to the life experiences of the people I was building relationships with. So, in that way reading and translating literature with my Uyghur and Han friends helped me to ground my writing in the concepts and experiences of people whose worlds were not my own.
Xiao Ke: You described the longer history of utilizing social media among young men to share Islamic teachings in Xinjiang. The initial media optimism makes a stark, almost ironic, contrast with the later digital enclosure they find themselves in. How do you see your book contributing to the field of media anthropology, its turn to digitality, as well as contemporary discussions of surveillance and artificial intelligence?
Darren Byler: The transition from techno-optimism to techno-pessimism that the narrative of Terror Capitalism presents mirrors a similar growing unease that many technology consumers and a minority of technology producers experienced over the past decade. As I completed my dissertation I was surprised to come across Shoshana Zuboff’s book Surveillance Capitalism and to see how quickly it found a mass audience. I was seeing similar things in a radically different space and independently developing my own conceptualization of “Terror Capitalism”—as a technology driven frontier of the global economy that centered on the production of the terrorist data subject and terrorist-worker.
The primary difference between the two frames, is that in my research I was focused on the way racialized minorities are differentially affected by the same, or similar tools, to the ones Zuboff examines among white middle class global North consumers. The rise of smartphones as digital tracking devices of online behavior has literally decimated Uyghur society—resulting in more than a tenth of the population being placed in forms of material confinement as well as a dramatic subtraction of Uyghur knowledge production and autonomy among the remaining 10-11 million yet-undetained. In this sense, the Uyghur experience functions as a limit case for the way population management technologies can be used to aid already existing colonial-capitalist systems. So, the story is useful in media anthropology, in that sense, as a worst case scenario.
At the same time, over the same period of this study, colleagues of mine such as Carolina Sanchez Boe and Michael Jefferson have shown that similar technologies are also being used in ostensibly liberal political systems such as the United States to target asylum seekers and other racialized groups. This simultaneity—and the blurring between intentional racialization in illiberal spaces and the so-called misuse of similar tech in liberal spaces—will, I hope, push media scholars and technologists to signal the alarm and demand accountability from technology companies and governments who incentivize the building of harmful technology. It’s gratifying to see scholars like Brian Massumi and technologists like Signal’s president Meredith Whittaker engaging my work precisely in this manner.
Xiao Ke: When reading your writings about how Uyghur male bodies and desires (bonding over anticolonial homosocial solidarities) are placed at the intersection of Native/indigenous dispossession, proletarianization, racialization, demographic subtraction, as well as global Islamophobia, I cannot help thinking this is almost an exemplary case for Jaspir Puar’s (2007) observation on how “queer terrorist corporealities” are produced against the normative white patriotic imperial expansion. Can you help us make sense of the differences and relations between whiteness (that US-based scholars often talk about) and Chinese-ness in the context of your book?
Darren Byler: Scholars such as Iyko Day have shown precisely how Chinese-ness is racialized relative to whiteness as having a supposedly machine-like automaton quality, a permitted, even model, difference that could be put to work to build the infrastructure of the U.S.’s internal colonial empire. This framing of the Chinese other was also in play in semicolonization of the Chinese mainland by the U.S., and other global North powers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
However, within China, before and after the Maoist revolution there has been an acceleration of something that Shanshan Lan frames as racial learning. Even as Chinese leaders strove to build Third Worldist solidarities with the formerly colonized—something well examined by a recent book by Jay Ke-Schutte, they also drew on what Nitasha Kaul refers to as the moral wound of past colonization as a way of justifying their colonization of non-Chinese within the borders of the revolutionary nation. The modernist project of sub-colonial nation building and the racial learning it entailed was really first operationalized with something Grace Zhou conceptualizes as settler socialism in the 1950s, but was radically accelerated I argue in Terror Capitalism as China became a capitalist nation in the 1990s and 2000s
All this is to say that within China, Chinese-ness has taken on all of the features of an ethnonationalist racial supremacy—something that is similar to the Hindutva movement we see in India. At the same time, outside of the nation state, Chinese bodies are still racialized relative to whiteness. What I hope my book shows is that the racialization of normative bodies relative to phobias directed toward queer, terrorist others is temporally and spatially situational, nested in the nation state form which are themselves within the world system.
Xiao Ke: Not to get into the nitty-gritty of the digital enclosure system in your book, but I have a set of remaining questions: When large volumes of biometric data of ethnoracialized subjects are collected (say, in order to detect embodied signs of religiosity), how is this data marked, sifted, and categorized, according to what kinds of metrics and thresholds? Where do these metrics and thresholds come from? Did the system often succeed or fail in achieving its goals? And finally, what other consequences might we expect from such installations under which Xinjiang might be a global frontier?
Darren Byler: The automation-driven digital forensics tools I have looked at most closely are devices that were built originally to utilized cyberhacking software from the Israeli company Cellebrite, but were then adapted to the specifics of the Chinese campaign against so-called “foreign” or normative Islam. These systems were trained to detect images, text, and video content that seemed to be connected with Islam, images of women dressed in hijabs, men with beards, Arabic script, that sort of thing. Having downloaded or sent such images, texts or recordings in the past would be a reason to be interrogated and likely detained. If a user possessed a certain quantity of such items—5 or 10 or 20 or more, depending on how they were categorized—they would likely be criminally prosecuted and sentenced on terrorism related charges. Having a certain quantity was taken to be an indicator of intent to distribute. Such people could be characterized as the ringleaders of “black” or “evil” terrorist gangs.
That is to say, as in U.S. policing, when it comes to the quantification of intent much of the rhetoric around the war on drugs has been applied to the so-called war on terror; and though blackness or darkness has a different genealogy than the racial discourse of the U.S. slave economy it is nevertheless attached to Muslim difference and thus participates in the same global discourse of anti-Muslim racism. So called extremist ideas, and the digital possession of particular quantities of such ideas by racialized people are taken to be not only a predictor of future violence but being suffused with violence itself. These tools produce a shift from what Brian Massumi might describe as policing of imminent danger to a policing of imminant threat that demands and endless process of elimination.
Because it is part of a colonial elimination project, the system is often used in an extremely blunt way. Many assessments which might be described as false positives—like a student using a VPN to upload her homework to a University of Washington Canvas server for instance—nevertheless were taken to be positive indicators of terrorist guilt. What this signals, is the danger of the blackbox effect of technology evacuating the space for critical thought, and instead being taken at face value as an indicator of truth. This is particularly the case in racialized, colonial spaces where technological assessments are simply reinforcing preexisting prejudice. Police in the United States who successfully detain black and brown men using such tools, like police in Xinjiang detaining Muslim men, would undoubtedly say that such smart tools have accelerated their work and given them greater confidence in the precision of threat elimination. They refuse to recognize the sweeping and intimate violence that these tools strive to hide. One of the lessons of Xinjiang for me is the way technology can be used to accelerate and justify racialization processes. Powerless people everywhere suffer when this happens.
James Slotta: A couple of decades ago, paeans to the liberatory potential of the internet were common. Since then, the mood has darkened considerably as the capacity of digital media to buttress all manner of domination and inequality has become clear. In this book, you argue that there is truth to both digital optimist and digital pessimist perspectives—that, in fact, it is this Jekyll-and-Hyde quality of digital media that needs attending to. What led you to this ambivalent—unsettled—view of the digital and how does it shape your analysis of digital media?
Sahana Udupa: I have been researching political cultures of digital media and digitalization for about two decades now. It started with my ethnographic study on news cultures in early 2000s when print journalists had started to worry about the “specter of digital media” that haunted them. I explored these tensions in my first monograph, Making News in Global India, observing how digital networks were beginning to reshape the conditions of mediated political discourse. The expansion of interactive social media amplified the momentum around digital networks as novel constellations for political participation. What form this would take remained an open question, but liberal technocratic ideology advocated especially by Silicon Valley pundits helped ramp up the euphoria around digital media as radical enablers of civic participation. Although digitial social media have no doubt offered pathways to enter and alter political discursive fields for multiple publics, it became apparent in the later years that the democratizing force of digital media did not necessarily portend a progressive future.
My fieldwork took me to the darker sides of digital discourse and growing incidents of intimidation and abuse on social media. Ironically, abusive exchange had also opened up lines of political participation for a diverse range of actors who had been excluded or found themselves alienated from the serious tone of political deliberation and official centricity. The analytics of “gaali cultures” [gaali is an emic term for vitriol] developed in this work prompted me to collaborate for a global ethnographic inquiry around online extreme speech. Taking a closer look at this phenonmenon in the Digital Hate volume, I started to center decolonial perspectives in ways to emphasize ethnographic and historical sensibility and to depart from technocentric and leader-centric analyses common in this field of research.
These efforts helped me to open the broader question around decoloniality and the digital. In a 2020 e-seminar paper, I approached coloniality as a global unfolding of the interrelated relations of the nation-state, race, and market, arguing that coloniality continues to shape the macro-historical structures within which proximate, affect-intensive battles of words are fought online, often with grave political consequences. Collaborating with Gabriel ignited more lines of inquiry around varied entanglements and ambivalences of the digital in relation to decoloniality. Unsettling for us functions as a heuristic that helped us to probe the ambivalences but this not a sort of balancing act. Far from it, it highlights the profound unevenness of the digital condition. In my view, ambivalence does not just signal transcending an either/or dyad. It is about the specific ways in which digital networks entrench, rework and reinforce longstanding and novel forms of heirarchy while co-creating multifarious conditions to challenge them. We have sought to advance this approach in Digital Unsettling.
Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan: I first started writing about digital media in 2011. I had recently begun following a group of emerging hip hop artists from socially and spatially marginalized locations in Delhi. As I watched them develop their aesthetic, creative, and playful audio-visual interventions online, I grew enamored with how these young men were taking up the participatory condition, to borrow a term or concept from one of the major and early proponents of the liberatory potential of the internet, Henry Jenkins. It seemed, at first glance and from afar, that the otherwise deeply segregated, classed worlds of Delhi were opening up for them in ways that would have been unthinkable just a few years prior, before the advent of 3G networks and flood of inexpensive smartphones in India. It was only when I started doing on-the-ground fieldwork with various hip hop crews in Delhi that I saw the complicated ways that digital media at once opened new opportunities—social, economic, even political—for these young men even as it reinforced their racialized and classed positions in the city and country. In my first book, The Globally Familiar, I grappled with this contradiction.
From this on-the-ground experience (as well as other ethnographic and personal forays into the worlds of digital media in the last decade) I have developed an increasingly ambivalent position towards digital media and its circuits of flow. As Sahana rightly suggests, ambivalence is not an affective register that marks a transcendence from an either/or dyad. Rather, it is a disposition towards the relationships between online and offline words that locates the distance between what is performed and what is lived and that, crucially, engages with the political economies and histories that frame and engender (social) media production, circulation, and consumption. I approached writing Digital Unsettling with Sahana with this analytical stance.
James Slotta: Beyond analysis for analysis’s sake, the book is deeply interested in the role of digital media in activist, decolonial projects. What makes digital media particularly well suited to facilitate such projects? What dangers lurk for these projects when they embrace the digital?
Gabriel and Sahana: In social movement contexts, digital/social media enables a way to quickly and efficiently communicate goals, set agendas, and coordinate action. Digital/social media also creates opportunities to broadcast interventions and direct action—as we discuss in the book—in ways that put pressure on institutional actors to change policy and/or practice by generating public spectacle while creating the potential to spark or invigorate action across borders.
The dangers to using social media/digital media in service of social movements – particularly commercial, mainstream platforms – are multiple. Social movement actors, once identified as such, are under constant surveillance and exposure can lead to various forms of risk and, potentially, violence and harm. Mainstream social media companies, as we have seen across national contexts, have very little motivation to protect individuals (or collectives) given that their platforms run at the discretion of state interests.
Another danger, of course, is the appropriation and commodification of social movement symbols, methods, and intellectual projects. As we briefly discuss in the introduction, decoloniality has suffered from its pop discursive success in online circuits and academia in ways that have taken away from materially grounded, historically rooted struggles where decoloniality has been developed as a rigorous praxis.
Finally, creating online affinities towards addressing social issues doesn’t necessarily translate into embodied forms of action. Often, liking a protest or commenting on a movement agenda offers a way to feel like one is doing something while not necessarily putting anything on the line.
James Slotta:The book moves across an impressive array of settings—from campus protests to content moderation to right-wing movements to your own online lives. Why did you decide to bring all of these different contexts together here? Is there something about digital media that compels such a multi-sited approach?
Gabriel and Sahana: There are three key factors, we think, that produced the montage of sites/settings/encounters in Digital Unsettling. First, each of us brought a different set of cultivated research relationships and inquiries to the table. Sahana has been working with content moderators and on right-wing movements for several years. Gabriel had been engaging with campus movements and various, heterogenous online (creative) knowledge projects. As we began to discuss the book we felt these different sites/relationships/encounters spoke to each other in important ways, ways that gave shape to the kind of unsettling that the digital has engendered in the last decade.
The ethnographic method we developed to theorize these multiple unsettlings works by placing events and spaces each of us have encountered in our respective long term projects—similar to a timeline on a social media site—into radical juxtaposition. Our reimagining of comparison as digital method puts distinct locations in productive relation with each other in ways that hold the potential to reveal the enduring structures that connect contexts.
As important was our decision to bring a reflexive, personal engagement to the book. We were, in the tradition of feminist approaches to ethnography, committed to creating a text that offered a rigorous view from somewhere, that sincerely located each of us in the contexts we analyzed and in relation to one and other.
Finally, the pandemic shaped our approach and writing. The majority of this book was written in 2020 and 2021, when forced quarantines, lockdowns, and rising death tolls seismically impacted the world. It seemed fitting and appropriate that, as we watched this unfold on our respective social media timelines, we took up a multi-sited approach to this project.
James Slotta: Throughout the book, you stress the need to decenter the perspectives and experiences of white male elites when researching digital technologies. What do we gain when we bring other perspectives to the center of our analysis, such as those from the global South?
Sahana and Gabriel: The digital has touched the lives of millions of people around the world, especially in the global South, and staying close to how it unfolds in the lived worlds of diverse actors is an essential approach to any grounded study. This is not just an empirical task but also an epistemological challenge.
In the book, we emphasise that decentering hegemonic perspectives is a critical step towards unsettling the conceits and deciepts of liberal thinking. One example in our book comes from the Capture chapter. We begin the chapter by revisiting the vastly popular Netflix production, “Social Dilemma.” The docudrama highlighted how big tech firms have imbedded polarization as part of the business model, driving democracies to the danger point where animosities are hardwired into the business models of mega corporations rather than spilling out as unintended effects.
While laudable for stirring public consciousness around the pitfalls of internet communication—at least among its audiences—the film nonetheless diverted attention from the diverse stakes of the political economy of digital capitalism. At the outset, by reproducing the white, male, tech elite as the central moral subject and eventual savior, it reinstated the terms of debate within the European-Enlightenment racial paradigm of the reflexive interiority of the white subject as the bearer of the authoritative view of the world and concomitant curative capacity. By pinning the focus on well-meaning white guys whose passionate creation has now transformed into Frankenstein’s creature beyond the original intentions or control of its creators, the film, despite its title, ironically had little to say about “the social”—the entangled complex of histories, institutions, interests, and mediations—that compose the actual grounds on which technology emerges and expands, in turn deepening and disrupting the grounds that seed it.
Such an analytical turn opens up a range of questions that liberal elite moral consciousness tends to obscure—vast global disparities in content moderation, pronounced effects of extreme speech upon historically marginalized communities, domination exerted within the nation state structure, and so on. In other words, this analytical approach—what we call a decolonial sensibility—helps us to recognize that digital data practices have not affected everyone uniformly in a presumed post-political state of brute oppression.
James Slotta: This book is the result of what appears to be a close collaboration between the two of you. I’m curious how the book would have differed if each of you had written it by yourself. How did the collaborative nature of this project shape the outcome?
Sahana and Gabriel: Perhaps the book would have tilted more toward the darker side or the hopeful side, depending on who wrote it. What we have accomplished together with a theory of unsettling has emerged from continous exchange to nuance our own theoretical assumptions and conceptual frames. As a result, we have been able to excavate the potential of digital participation by tracing its vastly diverse and contradictory outcomes while staying steadfast in highlighting the reality of (neo)colonial structures that shape them.
Working together has also yielded a range of examples and experiences to think with. We critically engage with the digital in this book as the two of us—each from our distinct positions—have seen, heard, and felt the deep push for change and reckoning with the past that has created our present and our visions for the future, alongside the effects of political, economic, social, and epistemological formations that continue to immiserate the racialized poor and expropriate resources for the few.
Elias Alexander: In the preface of your work, you give us readers a wonderful insight into how your own positionality has uniquely affected your work. You also speak to the importance of looking at queer women’s lived experiences as they are often overlooked in the literature. With this in mind, can you speak further to why it is critical at this juncture to highlight queer women’s experiences and how you came to be interested in queer women’s use of online platforms in particular?
Stefanie Duguay: There are three intertwined reasons that I decided to focus on queer women’s use of digital platforms, defining queer women broadly as including a range of people who are transgender and cisgender women under the LGBTQ+ rainbow. First, as you mention, my starting point for the research was my own positionality; I came out in my mid-twenties and social media played a large role in that process, from notifying acquaintances to figuring out how I wanted to express queerness in my style and everyday life. By experiencing a context collapse among my different audiences, such as family, coworkers and close friends, it attuned me to the difficulty of conveying sexual identity through digital media in ways that reflected exactly how I wanted to be seen. This led me down the path of asking, how do people actually do this through their identity-related practices on platforms?
Secondly, the focus on queer women balances out what I observed most in the field of digital media and technology studies as a disproportionate focus on gay men. In the 2010s, there seemed to be an explosion of what could informally be termed Grindr studies. And while this research built meaningfully on careful work that looked into gay men’s online representation and sexuality in the 2000s, it seemed that one had to seek out studies about people expressing other sexual identities. With the more recent momentum gained by trans digital media studies and more scholars attending to queer women, I feel that the field of LGBTQ+ digital media studies is broadening out.
Lastly, the book stresses that a focus on queer women matters because digital platforms are integral to lives and experiences on these platforms have the capacity to impact their wellbeing. They exist at the intersection of gender and sexual identities that can place them in the crossfire of misogyny and homophobia, both of which are rampant on the internet. Given this, parts of the book ask how, then, do queer women create lives within and through digital technologies that persevere even within these conditions?
Elias Alexander: In your work you forward the concept of identity modulation. This concept is extremely relevant, insightful, and adeptly presented. I was particular struck by queer women’s almost strategic use of stereotypes surrounding lesbian, bi, and queer experiences as a way to leverage identity modulation through the axes of personal identifiability, reach, and salience across dating apps and social media applications. Could you say more about the importance of identity modulation as a concept for queer folks and how the utilization of stereotypes can potentially and paradoxically produce effective outcomes for queer women on online spaces?
Stefanie Duguay: Identity modulation is the ongoing process through which individuals and platforms both modulate, or adjust, the volume on representations of identity. In this process, individuals can make decisions about how they want to show up, and who they want to show up for. At the same time, platforms provide the means for signaling aspects of identity and also tend to respond to our activity, such as through personalization and the curation of content.
Scholars have been thinking about stereotypes for a long time and so I’m not the first one to discuss their utility and constraints. But stereotypes showed up in my research as a way to be recognizable to others. Stereotypes aid the salience element of identity modulation, since they allow people to self-represent aspects of identity in ways that ping on others’ radars. In a sea of information, if you’re a queer person who is attuned to rainbow flags or plaid shirts as a means of finding other people like you, then others signaling identity in this manner is going to be very helpful. At the same time, stereotypes can narrow our perception of what constitutes acceptable or appealing ways of expressing identity. Platforms can also contribute to this narrowing by providing specific menus or categorizing people according to rigid identity labels. So, we need to watch for where stereotypes are useful and resist when they render identities one-dimensional.
Elias Alexander: In Chapters 3 and 4 you explore the ways in which queer women engage in identity modulation across various social media sites, artfully elucidating how women’s efforts at self-branding can rightfully be understood as a form of affective labour. It seems to me that such efforts, however, may work to reify forms of homonormativity that enfolds queer subjectivities into the logic of a heteronormative capitalist agenda. Yet, at the same time, you highlight how your interlocuters like Alex, Jaxx and Chrissy, as well as Mïta, utilize the affordances provided through applications like Instagram and Vine to engage in posting images and videos that seem to subvert and challenge heteronormative standards, taking pride in posting overtly queer or more sexually themed content for their audiences. You note that these practices hold a potentiality to foster a more personalized community among your interlocuters and their followers, producing publics and counterpublics. Can you speak further to how you view the tension between the ever-present specter of homonormativity and capitalist exploitation alongside the possibility for individuals to queer these online spaces?
Stefanie Duguay: I think that so long as this activity is happening on commercial platforms, it’s going to be subject to capitalist markets in various ways. The policies and interests of platforms in appeasing advertisers and appealing to broad audiences means that they reward ad-friendly, marketable content, which can pressure social media users toward homonormativity. At the same time, there might be something to be gained by playing this game: individuals who I interviewed talked about how self-branding on social media gained them visibility and clients that were conducive to their career growth. Yet, they also often strived to post content that they felt still reflected their everyday lives. Therefore, I think we need to move away from attitudes that judge social media creators according to a dichotomy of supposedly selling out or being authentic, and rather consider how individuals are logically self-representing in ways that respond to the commercial conditions in which they’re posting. Of course, I’m not the only one saying this and I encourage folks to check out the work of Tobias Raun, Crystal Abidin and others working in this area.
Elias Alexander: Following the previous question, you further speak about how queer women’s practices of identify modulation on online platforms are buttressed, or rather constrained, by online platforms’ governance policies that are often guided by profit motives. You highlight how such polices are insufficient at protecting queer women from becoming targets of misogynist, homophobic, and racist harassment and discrimination. In today’s climate, and with the continued popularity of platforms like Instagram as well as the rise of applications like Tik Tok what particular challenges to do you see queer folks facing on social media platforms and what strategies do you see queer folks employing to navigate said challenges?
Stefanie Duguay: There are quite a few challenges that queer people face on platforms today, but I think they can pretty much be summed up as not knowing whether a platform has your back – not feeling or being protected.
This is reflected, for example, in the experiences of so many queer people who wonder if they are shadowbanned, which is a state of reduced visibility for one’s posts and activity. Alex Chartrand, a PhD Candidate at Concordia with whom I work, is looking specifically at the algorithmic imaginaries that queer people develop in response to what they observe as shadowbanning and other forms of algorithmic bias. Some of what we’re seeing, and what I heard from queer women in my interviews, is that it’s difficult to know if the platform is punishing you in this way and so you try to respond as best you can, but it really leaves you feeling uncertain.
The queer people I spoke to also didn’t feel that reporting accounts would be very effective in protecting them from harassment and they worried that others would maliciously report them for their queer content, using platform’s automated moderation against them. The main problem here is that platforms assert that they are being fair by treating all users the same. However, we know that in our society there are some people who have been historically (and presently) treated unequally. Certain groups of people, including queer people, have been targeted, discriminated against, and left to function within an inequitable social landscape. These people deserve greater forms of protection and often require specialized attention to these inequities and residual forms of prejudice. When platforms do not provide that, they become inhospitable to queer people.
Elias Alexander: I have been particularly taken by the methods you employ in your study. Your work applies a mixed methods approach with an emphasis on interviews alongside a walkthrough method. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic I have seen many of my collogues in the field of anthropology turn to online mediums to conduct fieldwork. It seems as though the pandemic has re-emphasized the importance of online spaces within the lived lives of individuals. At the same time, I have also been privy to the uncertainty expressed by many researchers of how to appropriately and ethically conduct research in online spaces. In this regard your work stands out as exemplarily. Could you speak to what challenges and possibilities qualitative research through online mediums presents for researchers, and why now, more than ever, understanding peoples use of such mediums is critical?
Stefanie Duguay: Since our lives are thoroughly enmeshed with digital technologies and media, what happens online can’t be ignored in our research. Indeed, it is extremely important to conduct this research ethically and many scholars spanning decades have thought deeply about this. I’d like to point readers to the Association of Internet Researchers’ ethics guidelines that set out key ground principles of ethical internet research.
When thinking about the walkthrough specifically, ethical considerations arise even though the method itself is meant to only engage with an app’s interface and not its users. The researcher must think about whether their profile is disruptive to activity on the app. They need to consider whether users’ personal data is being caught up in screenshots or field notes and how this needs to be protected. More broadly, researchers must reflect on their own positionality and what it means for them to be co-present in that space with others who may be using the app for very personal and intimate reasons. I’ve been thinking through such ethical implications with Hannah Gold-Apel, an MA student at Concordia who is adapting aspects of the walkthrough method to examine TikTok, and we’ve recently published our thoughts in an open access article. One main takeaway is that users must always be considered, since without them, there would be no social media.
From my first steps towards considering how Black Americans hear and represent themselves in musical sound, I have wanted to address the question of how Black musicians can effectively organize around the idea of shared musical histories and practices without straying into essentialist discourses. My goal has been to work towards understanding how sounds recognizable as Black emerge, develop, and transform over time, simultaneously offering a challenge to Blackness(es) as purely biological rather than cultural. Page 99 of my dissertation, “The Way We Play: Black American History, Humanity, and Musical identity,” is a critical point at which I make an intervention into anti-essentialist discourses. Roughly a quarter of the way through my second chapter, a case study of vocalist Alberta Hunter (1895-1984), in a sub-section titled “the qualia of Black voice,” I argue:
While Hunter foregrounds race-based suffering as a component for “authentic” blues performance, her earlier claim that Black performers possess little “tricks” of performance that others frequently overlook, situates blues performance in practice rather than biology. The instability of these tricks from performance to performance, modified intentionally (as Hunter did to avoid a stable model for [vocalist Sophie] Tucker’s mimicry) or not, further marks an underlying improvisatory aesthetic which makes a singular set of performance characteristics difficult, or impossible, to grasp. I further argue that Hunter’s understanding does not reflect a biological notion of race but rather one socio-politically and culturally rooted in the particular experience of Black Americans within the racial hierarchies of U.S. society. (page 99)
The culturally-rooted practices to which I refer function semiotically as indexes of Blackness for those who hear them, commenting metapragmatically (cf. Silverstein 1993) on Black musical history through the act of performance. I reframe these practices as “musical qualia of Blackness,” sonic embodiments or manifestations of the quality Blackness, shared and transformed between and amongst Black American musicians across time and space.
Page 99 is a point of transition in my argument made via Black feminist scholar bell hooks’s thinking on “strategic essentialism” in her oft-cited Teaching to Transgress (1994). She argues that adopting an essentialist position may function as “a strategic response to domination and to colonization,” (hooks 1994, 83), offering an important lesson for the study of music. For Black musicians whose histories and culture are so frequently stolen, appropriated, or “silenced” (Trouillot 1995), music has been a critical site for the development, maintenance, and transmission of this historical and cultural knowledge. Such processes of knowledge production and sharing are accomplished via a kind of musical interdiscursivity (cf. Silverstein 2005), connecting Black musicians in the present to performances and performers from Black musical history. In that way, I pose a challenge to anti-essentialist considerations of Black music, by augmenting hooks’s argument, insisting that Black musical identities are historically-grounded and carefully “curated,” to borrow form Daphne Brooks (2021), within Black communities. Page 99 is a useful window into the thought process behind my desire to understand to offer an alternative to essentialist understandings of Blackness, taking seriously the histories, experiences, and choices made by Black musicians across time and space.
Jonathan A. Gómez. 2022. “The Way We Play”: Black American History, Humanity, and Musical Identity. Harvard University, PhD diss.
The subject of my dissertation, the anonymous image-board forum called 4chan, is a space that, while many who know of it often have a very strong, negative reaction to (and usually for good reason). My project showed me overwhelmingly that 4chan is a space that defies categorization, which I have taken to heart within my dissertation and the research that followed.
Simply, my dissertation examined what many would consider to be some of the worst parts of this website (yes, there is a hierarchy!). That is, I looked at what is widely recognized as a politically incorrect subforum, known colloquially as /pol/, and how users on this particular board talk about politics.
On page 99 of my dissertation, one particular statement sticks out to me:
“Given the continued description of the board throughout this project, one may wrongly infer that talk on this website is always one hundred percent wild; that discourse on this website is always incredibly visible, violent, and chaotic, with all capital letters and exclamation points deriding all manner of politics and practices. While these types of display are still obviously present in this space, there is generally just as much dialogue that appears in a more tempered or even-keeled manner.”
While I cannot speak to the quality of work this page represents for my overall work (I’d like to think I did a solid job), this statement speaks to some of the way that I was drawn to studying 4chan in the first place. This is a digital space that, for many anthropologists and others not within the field, is considered lawless, chaotic, and almost impermeable for scholarship. 4chan, and /pol/ more specifically, exists as a digital boogeyman, a place by which many have heard of, but few well-meaning folk ever explore, or in some cases, is seen as the entrance to the dark web. My work has sought to complicate this notion and legitimate exploration of this space as a linguistic anthropologist. Not as a way to condone the actions and discourses that occur within /pol/, but rather to offer an examination of digitally located, far-right political discourses, such as the alt-right (which will no doubt resurge this upcoming US presidential election cycle) that does not outright dismiss, but instead highlights the important of studying these spaces, and the impacts that it has on other social media platforms, and beyond.
Dillon Ludemann. 2022. ” And Their Name was Legion: Discourse and Politics on 4chan’s /pol/ Board.” SUNY Binghamton Phd.
CaMP Anthropology 