In recent years, scholars have embraced a turn toward affect to understand social and political life. These scholars have not always agreed on how to posit the relationship between affect and language. Rather than seeking to define affect or decide where language and semiosis come in, this one-day symposium encourages scholars of language, semiotics, culture, and society to examine how affect operates across participants’ research. The symposium sets out to bring different perspectives into dialogue by asking what affect does in participants’ research.  

Topics may include, but are not limited to: How do affects, understood as social forces (Spinoza 1677), shape the conditions under which language comes to organise what counts as meaningful, valuable, or worth defending? In other words, why do we care, promote and fight for languages? How are semiotic and sentimental resources deployed to give rise to political movement or debate? What role do signs play in creating “affective publics” (Papacharissi 2014)? How do artistic endeavors compel us to consider Jakobson’s emotive and poetic functions of language (1960) as inextricable? 

This symposium works to create dialogue between linguistic anthropologists, sociolinguists, and related scholars from Paris and the London area.  To register, please follow this link.

Click on the titles to read the abstracts.