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- Convenor:
-
Tony Capstick
(University of Reading)
Send message to Convenor
- Discussant:
-
Alex Arnall
(University of Reading)
- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Anthropocene thinking
- Location:
- Palmer 1.02
- Sessions:
- Thursday 29 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The role of human language remains underexplored vis a vis Anthropocene thinking. This panel will discuss the expansion of the emerging field of Ecolinguistics by exploring how human language operates not only in social contexts but also in wider ecological settings.
Long Abstract:
Since its declaration twenty years ago, the idea of the Anthropocene has given renewed emphasis to long-standing debates in Human Geography and related disciplines concerning the positioning of human society relative to the natural world. Enthusiasm for this revival, however, has not been universally shared. Scholars, for example, have expressed concern that the Anthropocene, as an essentialising, global idea, tends to undermine questions of politics, ethics, history, culture and literature in relation to environmental issues. The role of human language, in particular, remains underexplored vis a vis Anthropocene thinking. In recent years, Ecolinguistics has emerged as a way of trying to address this shortcoming, exploring how human language operates not only in social contexts but also in wider ecological settings. However, Ecolinguistics, as a particular subfield of Applied Linguistics, would benefit from the expansion of its analytical toolkit by incorporating key Anthropocene concepts from Human Geography such as ‘multinatures’, ‘socionature’ and ‘more-than-human’. This expansion would enable those working on Ecolinguistics to have a firmer footing when using concepts relating to the nonhuman, physical world while those working on environmental change will be in a stronger position to analyse language and discourse.
This panel will bring together scholars from across different disciplines to discuss such an expansion. They will respond to the question 'what approaches from the study of nature, climate change, language and discourse can be brought together to expand the field of Ecolinguistics thereby bridging some of the disciplinary boundaries that exist between Applied Linguistics and Human Geography?'
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 29 June, 2023, -Tony Capstick (University of Reading)
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on the role of multilingualism in the communications between refugees and displaced people in the Global South and their interactions with the NGOs that support them
Paper long abstract:
The central theme running through this panel is the role of language in communication and how we can better understand the stories we live by, particularly when rethinking connection and agency in low-resource settings. This paper focuses on the role of multilingualism in the communications between refugees and displaced people in the Global South and their interactions with the NGOs that support them. Much has been written about the prevalence and politicization of public discourses on migration. Less prevalent are analyses of the role of language in the mediation of written language, and therefore written culture, by refugees, as part of their everyday practices. With this in mind, this paper takes a discourse-ethnographic approach to the analysis of discourses of displacement by focusing on the mediation that refugees engage in with each other, across their transnational networks, as well as in humanitarian settings, and sheds light on the means by which refugees and humanitarian actors negotiate the unequal power dynamics of humanitarian interactions. Findings suggest that the institutional complexities of humanitarian efforts are reduced when mediators translate discourses in their literacy practices, thereby providing refugees and displaced people with the socio-culturally mediated capacity to act, negotiate and resist.
Alex Arnall (University of Reading)
Paper short abstract:
In the context of the Anthropocene, this presentation explores key imaginative framings of climate change concerning futurity, everyday practice and the operation of climate science. It illustrates these framings using the case of Fairbourne, a coastal community in North Wales whose residents have b
Paper long abstract:
It is often said that, in the Anthropocene, we are in urgent need of finding new ways to imagine human-nature relations. The aim of my presentation is to explore what this argument means in relation to climate change and sea level rise. Specifically, I examine three key imaginative framings of climate change: 1) the futurity of climate change; 2) embedding climate change in everyday practice; and 3) practices of climate science. I illustrate these framings using the case of Fairbourne, a coastal village in North Wales that is threatened by sea level rise and where the population has been dubbed the ‘UK’s first climate change refugees’. Although scientists and policymakers anticipate that Fairbourne will be uninhabitable within the next few decades due to coastal erosion and flooding, the village’s residents contest the imagined destruction of their village. Instead, they represent and perform Fairbourne as a thriving community with a viable long-term future. Overall, my presentation highlights the key role of imagination in anticipating and imagining climate change futures and emphasises that that such futures are never settled but always in the making and always contested.
Angela Crack (University of Portsmouth) Michael Chasukwa (University of Malawi)
Paper short abstract:
This paper describes how we co-produced a Chichewa-English two-way translation glossary of development terminology with communities in Malawi through participatory workshops. It will reflect on the potential of the tool as a meaning-making activity for community activism for environmental justice.
Paper long abstract:
The fields of international development and academia have been Anglocentric for several decades, which has produced hegemonic norms, concepts and understandings that are inextricably related to an Anglo worldview. Ecolinguistics has helped to make the case for embracing linguistic diversity to address key ecological issues, but it rarely considers the practical questions of how researchers and practitioners could build bridges between different language groups to develop solidarities and a platform for change, which is particularly crucial for hard-to-translate terms. This paper discusses the early development of an innovative research tool to help achieve this goal. It describes how we co-produced a Chichewa-English two-way translation glossary of development terminology with communities in Malawi through participatory workshops. It will explain how the participants used the translation exercises to critically engage with key development terms, and it will reflect on the potential of the tool as a meaning-making activity for community activism for environmental justice.
Lee Barron (Northumbria University)
Paper short abstract:
The paper draws on examples of extreme heavy metal bands that articulate messages of environmental degradation, climate change and the potential future impact of the Anthropocene ear. Such music represent distinctive voices that add to the cultural language exploring human-led environmental change.
Paper long abstract:
The paper argues that popular culture in the form extreme heavy metal music can make a significant addition to the language of expression addressing the concept, effects, and future risks of the Anthropocene era, the period (following the Holocene) McKenzie Wark argues 'represents a new phase in the history of the Earth, when natural forces and human forces became intertwined, so that the fate of one determines the fate of the other' (2016: xii). While popular culture, in the form of 'cli-fi' or 'Anthropocene fiction' (Traud, 2018) and cinema has addressed cataclysmic environmental disasters that can function as a channel for climate change warnings (Salmose, 2018), the genre of heavy metal has produced bands that are explicitly and powerfully articulating the impact of climate change, such as Downfall of Gaia, the avowedly Green Metal band Botanist, described as 'apocalyptic environmentalism' (Lucas, 2019), and the US deathgrind band Cattle Decapitation, the latter of which, on recordings such as Death Atlas, and The Anthropocene Extinction, powerfully articulate the impact of an age in which humans are 'becoming, to some extent, geology' (Latour, 2017:113). Heavy metal has long been read as a musical genre that has explored 'alienation, menace, destruction, and nihilism' (Arnett, 1995: 43), but bands such as Botanist and Cattle Decapitation align (in differing ways) to an extreme expression of the form that consistently explores and envisions nature-eroding and self-destructive environmental impacts that reflect the stark message that 'humans are not passive observers of Earth's functioning' (Lewis and Maslin, 2015: 178).