This Keynote explores the entanglement of two conflicting public dreams. One is the narrative of unlimited expansion in futuristic, tech-inflected discourses; the other is an emergent, elegiac affect for the here and now. The talk looks at futuristic progress narratives, appearing in various iterations by “tech billionaires,” emerging against multiple, smaller moments of everyday public expression in the anxious backdrop of a quickly changing technological and environmental landscape. Ambivalent stories about the finitude of the planet and its resources emerge in secular and religious registers, often in recapitulations of older mythologies. Specifically, the keynote centers on a talk by Jeff Bezos that presents the aspirational relocation of humans to space colonies as a project “for the benefit of the Earth,” against a more inchoate, more fragmentary, cultural affect Professor Lepselter calls “the sense of an ending.”

9.00am Panel One: Infrastructural Value

1. Zi Yang Lim (Michigan)
   How a port in Peru becomes ‘mega’
   
   The Chinese-owned megaport in Chancay, Peru, does not have a single person in it. Or so T described, having learned from port authorities in a private meeting, as she waved her hand in a panorama across the port. The port's mechanical arms grab, stack, and unload containers stuffed with food, minerals, and technologies; bustling around like a line-chef, it does not need much sleep. How does the port come to life? Why do we not want to get too close? Based on preliminary fieldwork in the town Chancay and neighboring Huaral, I explore how narrations of the port in a YouTube video and 'in real life' co- and re-generate the life of the Chancay megaport. This paper focuses on the use of deictics in these narrations that offer some insight into how the port comes to be 'mega' in the first place.
   
   

2. Yifan Ping (Chicago)
   Crises: Scales, Chronotopes, and Moral Economy in Chinese Entrepreneurial Theatre
   
   This ethnographic analysis of conversational disruptions and incongruences in a Chinese business consultation program offers both an interscalar examination of economic crises situated across chronotopes and a critical socioeconomic interrogation of neoliberal market logic. The ethnographic attention centers on denotational and interactional ruptures within question–and-answer exchanges between the expert business consultant, Mr. Yong, who initiates management-orientated inquiries, and the struggling restaurateurs, who frequently fail to respond in intelligible and coherent ways. The unsuccessful exchanges represent not only breakdowns of propositional content and interactional coordination, but also are taken up by the audience for metapragmatic commentaries, which semiotically scale the business crisis in distinct time-spaces: imminent business liquidation, continuous personal financial struggles, and macroeconomic downturn. By looking into these interdiscursively constructed crisis-chronotopes and participants’ interscaler moves within which, I argue that the business consulting program portrays the business owners who face bankruptcy are at fault and deserve public mockery, unveiling a neoliberal capitalist necropolitics that forecloses class solidarity and naturalizes/aestheticize socioeconomic destruction. Treating communicational failures as vital/fatal signs of entrepreneurship, capitalist agent, and Chinese consumer market, this paper asks how we can destabilize an affective, moral theatre of neoliberal success/failure.
   
   

3. Xinyi Mackenzie Wu (Northwestern)
   The Language of Talent (in Hong Kong)
   
   

The competition for human talent, namely the “Talent War” that was first initiated by McKinsey & Company three decades ago to attract highly-skilled and top-performing employees, has become increasingly prevalent globally against the backdrop of the transition from the labor economy to the knowledge economy during globalization. However, there has long been a consensus among economists and HRs that “talent” is an empty signifier without a clear definition. Diverging from their attempts to rigidly categorize the “talent” individuals, I argue that talent is by no means an inherent quality, but a semiotic process of the institutional and situated discursive practices for naturalization across scales, embedded in the sociocultural configurations, thus with shifting indexical values. Why is “talent” a vitally important and desirable typification in the contemporary world, especially in migration? How and why has it gained its cultural vitality in the public sphere, gradually becoming a vital sign charged by ideological forces? What does the semiosis of “talent” achieve by highlighting some subjects’ values and worthiness while overshadowing others’? I aim to go beyond its semantic ambivalence to deconstruct this notion semiotically and interrogate the essentialized values attached to certain human bodies. I address linguistic anthropological concerns of how the meaning of talent is calibrated, performed, (re)evaluated, and contested under particular political-economic circumstances. Particularly, I contextualize the “talent” semiosis in migration and the neoliberal market through the Talent Migration Admission Schemes in Hong Kong, to further discuss how values of talent are consolidated and made commensurable in the global market.

4. Daniel Qicheng Yao (Chicago)**
   The Past and Present Lives of Internet Addiction

This paper examines how “internet addiction” (网瘾) emerged in reform-era China as a psychosocial problem space linking youth culture, media discourse, parental anxiety, and disciplinary institutions. Rather than asking whether internet addiction exists as a clinical category, I analyze how it was semiotically and institutionally produced through state media and treatment regimes in the 2000s. Focusing on two televised media artifacts aired on China Central Television (CCTV)---a 2008 legal-educational drama celebrating psychologist Yang Yongxin’s treatment center and a 2009 investigative report condemning its use of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)---I trace how each text remediates the experience of gaming, addiction, and treatment for mass publics. Drawing on linguistic anthropological approaches to stance, participation framework, enregisterment, and remediation, I show that these media texts did not simply represent “internet addiction” but actively modeled how parents, journalists, experts, and youth should perceive and inhabit it. In the first case, gaming is rendered as a horrifying and morally corrosive world that parents are invited to witness from the child’s imagined perspective. In the second, the treatment center itself becomes the site of horror, exposing the coercive production of obedience through shock and scripted confession. Yet even this critique leaves intact the category of addiction as a legitimate object of intervention. Eventually, this paper argues that “internet addiction” became a prism through which reform-era China negotiated new forms of affective immersion, intergenerational conflict, and techniques of psychosocial governance.

** moved from panel three to panel one.

10.45 Panel Two: Non-Linguistic Ideologies 

1. Emily Kuret (Chicago)
   "Pure Democracy as it has Never Existed"

In 2025, "Parliament," a participatory art action produced by Duke-affiliated art historians, dancers, and choreographers returned to Athens for seven weeks. Originally conceived of and exhibited there at the height of anti-austerity demonstrations, "Parliament" asks participants to enter into an empty room and learn to interact anew -- no speaking, writing, dancing, or signing is allowed. The work has thus been hailed (by Art People and anthropologists alike) as a path breaking event of social choreography, heightening participant awareness of the political and social structures which shape their everyday, and indeed reorgainzing (or, "cleansing") their relations, so that novel solutions to social problems may finally emerge. 

This paper extends Zukerman and Enfield's (2023) discussion of the limits of thematization to "parliament" and its language ideology. Examining how curators thematize systemic social power through the event's participation framework and co-texts, I offer an analysis of how Art becomes understood as a cultural category of communication and vital channel for social intervention in the intertwined contexts of pan-regional arts advocacy, art practice, and project funding in Greece – and for whom. 

2. Eman Elshaikh (Chicago)
   The Parameter Space

“The Parameter Space” is a chapter of my dissertation Pathologies of Science. The broader dissertation follows an international community of speculative nuclear fusion researchers as they attempt to make their scientific and meta-scientific claims legible to mainstream scientific institutions, government policymakers, and investors. This chapter is a historical and ethnographic exploration of the concept of the “parameter space,” which is a quasi-geometric mathematical abstraction. I trace the layered meanings of this concept, a palimpsest that carries aspects of multiple scientific programs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as these meanings are reanimated by scientists attempting to make sense of a capricious, slippery nuclear phenomenon. I argue that the parameter space functions as a structure of possibility that domesticates how scientists speculate about this phenomenon. As they construct maps and models of the parameter space, they engage in what I term nomic speculation, a speculative practice that generates timeless physical laws. At the same time, they often re-spatialize this abstract concept, evoking images of gold and valuable real estate on the frontier of the parameter space, a terrain where multiple forms of speculation collide.

3. Thu Ha Pham (Chicago)

Performativity and the Aesthetics of Propaganda Posters in Post-Socialist Vietnam

In post-socialist Vietnam, tranh cổ động (propaganda posters) no longer function primarily as ideological instruction. Instead, they operate as performative, biopolitical and semiotic forms of mediation that govern through managed visibility. Embedded in the textures of everyday life, these posters aestheticize health, harmony, and productivity while constituting coercion, inequality, and conflict as discursively invisible. Drawing on linguistic anthropological approaches to entextualization, this paper analyzes how post-socialist visual-textual posters actively produce and (de/re)contextualize social facts, moral subjects, and lived realities/imaginaries by reforming state power as environmental normality rather than overt political regime. 

1.30pm Panel Three: Ethical Embodiment and Agency

1. Zachary Lazarus (Chicago)
   Managing Creativity and Compliance in American Art Therapy

This paper examines how artistic expression in therapeutic settings is mediated by institutional norms and values. Drawing on fieldwork with art therapists at a children’s residential treatment center, I propose that art therapy groups are highly structured interactional events which aim to elicit institutionally authorized forms of participation from both youth and mental health professionals. Contrary to American ideologies which see authentic creative expression as something that is (or should be) enacted freely, I suggest that practitioners at this research site largely prioritize compliance over free expression. I analyze multi-modal interactions between youth and mental health professionals to show how practitioners manage children’s engagement in art therapy through the coordinated use therapeutic registers which index alignment with locally recognizable institutional roles. Finally, I suggest that understanding art therapy’s role in institutional treatment settings requires situating therapeutic interactions within multi-sited institutional projects in and beyond the art therapy field.

2. Patricia Rodriguez-Niu (Notre Dame)
   Vital Calibration: Therapeutics, Mediation, and the Semiotics of Life among the Wauja
   
   This paper examines how “life” emerges as a semiotic achievement within the ecosemiotic practices of the Wauja people of the Upper Xingu (Brazil). Drawing on long-term collaborative ethnography, I argue that vitality is not an intrinsic property of beings but a process of calibration enacted through sensorial, ritual, and material mediation. In a world where all entities—plants, animals, substances, and landscapes—are understood as traces of agentive, inherently predatory beings, the stability of a livable environment depends on the ongoing modulation of relations across more-than-human domains. I engage a longstanding concern in Amazonian ethnology—especially within structuralist traditions—with the fabrication of persons, bodies, and the intertwined domains of “nature” and “supernature,” recasting these dynamics as semiotic processes. I show how the conditions of life across human and nonhuman domains are mediated through sensorial therapeutic practices that align bodies, substances, and perceptual fields, rendering “supernatural” intensities perceptually and socially commensurable as “nature.” This analysis draws on Wauja distinctions between ritually stabilized “ordinary” bodies and excessive, perspectivally invasive, and potentially lethal environmental signs. Attending to grammatical and poetic dimensions of language, I trace how speech functions as an effectual medium, in which processes of indexical iconicity become operative and prayer emerges as a therapeutic practice of semiotic alignment. By foregrounding vitality as coextensive with sign formation and circulation, this paper contributes to debates on (re)vitalization by reframing life as an emergent, ethically charged process of semiotic regulation.

3. Karandeep Mehra (Michigan)
   Vital Laughter

A persistent strand of work in philosophy and the social sciences has attributed and continues to attribute a distinct sense of vitality to laughter. This paper will evaluate certain central presuppositions present in these works through the analysis of three types of laughter – the speech-laugh of a comedian faced with a silent audience as a form of managing audience affiliation, the voluntary laughter of a laughter yoga specialist as a means of eliciting a cathartic laughter from the participants in their therapy session, and the ritualized laughter produced by the audience of a vulgar poetry festival held in Banaras during the festival Holi as an embrace of pollution. By drawing on fieldwork conducted from 2023-2025 and recordings made during that time, this paper will present three different ways in which laughter was “vital” for my interlocutors. These instances of vitality are neither entirely understandable through a conventional biopolitical reading, nor is it related to the ‘vitality theory’ that pertains to status of a language and its speech community, nor to the opposition between mechanical and vital found in the forementioned work on laughter. The laughter in these instances, I will suggest, can be understood as a pragmatic process of empathy in interaction, that is as an intersubjective process of experiencing an other’s experience (human and divine) (Throop, 2012).

3.15       Panel four: Animating Creativity

1. Reed McConnell (Chicago)
   Generative Ai and Creativity in a California Desert Commune

2. Xinyue Liu (Notre Dame)
   In Attaining the Unattainable: Agency and Creativity in AI-generated Liminal Space 

The rise of Generative AI (GenAI) begets a novel modality of human-machine interaction featuring enhanced feedback, reduced human control and intensified machine agency. Artists and technicians increasingly work with GenAI following the pipeline of "human-intended prompt"-"machine-generated content"-"human-finalized outcome". Noticeably, to patch the inevitable gaps in-between the expected result and the AI-generated content involves not only humans' creative agency, but also inspirations drawn from machine-generated contents. The process of attaining "the unattainable" (Bellour 1975& 2010) hence reflects the immaterialized machine agency conjured in a cognitive space. Instead of treating the gaps as technical glitches, this paper examines them as the productive site of creativity. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork inside an AI-powered indie gaming studio, this paper initiates a semiotic reading of the AI-involved creative process. By focusing on the interactive storytelling game "1001 Nights", this paper examines how artists, designers, and players collectively animate a conversational AI character during narrative gameplay. Through conversation analysis of turn-taking interaction between human players and a LLM-powered character, I explore how storytelling unfolds through iterative negotiations of machine-generated utterances. These interactions reveal distributed authorship in which players reinterpret and redirect algorithmically generated contents to advance narrative goals. Building on Victor Turner’s "liminality" (1969), I conceptualize the gap between human intention and machine output as an AI-generated liminal space characterized by ambiguity and creative possibility. Within this space, machine-generated signs are interpreted, recontextualized, and animated by human actors, while algorithmic systems acquire a semblance of agency in the unfolding narrative process. This paper argues that the animation paradigm (Silvio 2010; Manning & Gershon 2013) more aptly theorizes the diffuse agency in AI-generated liminal space.

3. Wenliang Han (Michigan)
   An Online Learning Community for Chinese Verbal Art

My research examines how Putonghua (“Common Speech,” a Mandarin lingua franca) is taught to dialect-speaking older adults in contemporary China. In this paper, I focus specifically on older learners who study “recitation” (langsong) online through their smartphones. The Chinese speech art genre, “(poetry) recitation,” involves reading poetry aloud in Putonghua. An important aspect of it is working on enunciation and improving one’s spoken Putonghua. In order to achieve standard Putonghua, dialect speakers, as the older learners are, are especially expected to reduce their (regional) dialect-influenced “accents” (kouyin). Besides taking classes and practicing pronunciation online on a daily basis, these learners are also becoming audio content creators as retirees on digital platforms, and forming a community around this production of content. I draw on my digital ethnographic research at an online recitation school, especially my interactions with a key interlocutor, “Xue’ni,” to illustrate this process. Building on scholarship in language socialization, verbal art, and Chinese social media, I argue that recitation practice socializes the older participants into a way of speaking and at the same time into a distinctive post-retirement group identity. Through a form of “digital sociality,” these older learners construct an alternative community that helps offset the isolation experienced during pandemic lockdowns, when the risks associated with in-person participation can be high. In these online spaces, they are also revitalizing forms of public life long absent from their generation.

4. Dejan Duric (Michigan)
   Animation, Digital Media, and the Vital Work of Gossip

When an Instagram engagement announcement appears on a smartphone screen during an ordinary hangout, what kind of life does it take on? This paper examines how a static digital artifact becomes vitally present through face-to-face interaction, drawing on synchronized video, audio, and smartphone screen recordings of three young women at an international boarding school in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. As they scroll through the post, deliberate over commenting "just hearts" or congratulations, and circle whether eighteen is "too young," they animate a curated image and caption into something morally weighted, affectively charged, and socially consequential. Drawing on theories of animation (Silvio 2010; Manning and Gershon 2013) and a screen-in-talk analytical approach that treats smartphones as integral to participation frameworks rather than peripheral to them, I argue that the semiotic vitality of digital media does not inhere in platforms or content but is accomplished through the interactional labor of those who encounter them. Gossip here is the animating practice: it is through evaluative, morally consequential talk that the post acquires presence, projects the absent subject as a figure to be reckoned with, and reorganizes the participants' orientations toward competing life trajectories. The paper reframes digital mediation not as a conduit for pre-existing signs but as a site where vitality is interactionally produced, contested, and felt.

9.00am Panel Five: Negotiating Place

1. Hindolee Datta (Chicago)
   Semiotic Shift in a Sauria Paharia Village in India
   
   How do members of a marginalized community negotiate accelerated change when the semiotic materials of social life are reconfigured within an extractive landscape? This paper offers an ethnographic account of the Sauria Paharias, a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group (PVTG) in Jharkhand, positioned precariously within a regional hierarchy structured against Santhal (Adivasi) and dominant outsider (Diku) communities. Drawing on Peircean semiotics and the concept of diagrammatic iconicity (Silverstein 2003; Gal and Irvine 1995, 2019), I examine how the village of Satia operates as a site where social difference is both presupposed and reproduced through spatial arrangements. I argue that the region’s road networks and the internal organization of the household function as icons of a broader political economy of extraction: mapping power onto proximity to the highway and reproducing the center-periphery relation through the gendered fixity of women’s labour and the mobility of migrated men. The analysis centers on two schools—a government middle school and the Jesuit-run JJMS—and recent infrastructural shifts which serve as local reorderings in the face of state neglect. I trace how linguistic practices and competing orthographies (Malto, Santali, Hindi) become primary axes of social recognition, indexically situating speakers within overlapping regimes of aspiration and mobility. What emerges is a semiotically motivated understanding of how micro-level infrastructural shifts reveal both the failure of the state and the local alternative negotiations used to contend with systemic vulnerability.

2. Helena Ratte (Chicago)
   Project Logic and Language as Empowerment Indicators in Bosnian Women's Associations
   
   In this paper, I will describe how staff of professionalized Sarajevo-based NGOs attempt to habituate members of rural women’s associations in Bosnia-Herzegovina to styles of narration that they maintain are contextually appropriate for conversations with project stakeholders. In a relational arrangement that situates women’s association members as implementors who already know how to talk to certain actors (local religious authorities, municipal bureaucrats, elderly housewives, reticent husbands), NGO professionals claim to be there to facilitate their communication with others, including representatives of state and international donors. I will analyze NGO professionals’ exasperation at verbal and written accountings of activities carried out (“we bought a table and renovated the room”) and the alternative explanations they suggest (“we created a local gathering point for exchange and learning”). I argue that beyond instrumental reasons offered for re-framing (“this is how you need to explain it to get the grant!”), NGO professionals desired to impress association members with intellectual appreciation for the abstract logic of the project; they wanted them to have an overview of the whole in which they played a small part, and to be able to demonstrate that knowledge in language. Here, NGO workers’ didactic impulses dovetailed with feminist common-sense that (rural) women habitually undervalue their own work and must be made aware of its full impact. In a handy demonstration of project synergy, association members’ acquired knowledge of the workings of “the project” could ultimately be framed in NGO reports as indicators of rural women’s individual and collective empowerment. 

3. Jose Enrique Solano del Castillo (Michigan)
   Turning Environmental Damage into Business Partnerships in three (not-so-easy) Steps
   
   This presentation examines how Indigenous communities and mining executives in Espinar, Peru, negotiate and produce contractual obligations amid ongoing environmental degradation. Focusing on the Tintaya–Antapaccay project—launched as a state-owned venture in the 1980s and acquired by Glencore in 2013—I analyze private, formal meetings held after an alleged toxic leak into the Ccoccareta River in 2023. I show how the incident becomes a negotiable object: at once an environmental grievance that remains unproven and unnamed, and a route to economic incorporation through corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs. I argue that this productive ambiguity—invoked as harm, yet kept strategically unresolved and reframed through economic benefits—enables an uneasy alignment that sustains unequal but workable negotiations. By keeping damage nebulous rather than scientifically settled, both parties can gesture toward responsibility without assigning clear agency, and promise future work without assuming legal liability. In this process, indigenous actors mobilize loss and dispossession to demand long-term, profitable service contracts, while the company contains environmental accountability and manages expectations through documentation, procedures, and the deferral of economic promises. 

4. Daniel Muras (Chicago)

Towards a  Material Semiotics of Urban Occupation in Cape Town, South Africa

The Ahmed Kathrada House, located across the street from Cape Town’s luxurious waterfront, has been continuously occupied by approximately 500 previously homeless persons for nearly a decade now. Leadership of the occupation makes clear that it is inclusive of everyone, while also experimenting with various security systems and often denying accommodation to family members of occupiers for reasons beyond mere capacity limits. From these contradictions encountered during ethnographic fieldwork in the building, it becomes clear that, although the building serves a stable home for hundreds of people, providing housing is less important to occupiers than what the embodied practice of homemaking outside the influence of the state signifies. As such, this paper argues that these homemaking practices are meant to counter the necropolitical associations of informal settlements and hijacked buildings in South Africa with crime and suffering. Instead, the very materiality of the building and the vitality of the people inside of it, is meant to signify readiness for citizenship and the political rights which are conferred alongside such recognition. However, the location of this building in a neighborhood primarily frequented by tourists raises questions about who the recipient of these signs is and the nature of citizenship in an increasingly globalized world, in which the publics responsible for recognition on the scale of the nation are increasingly international. The paper will conclude by reflecting on the impact of occupation and its materiality on these broader questions of signification within translocal spaces and the nature of political rights and citizenship in a global city.

1.00pm Panel Six: Violence and/of Recognition

1. Yu Fan (Chicago)
   Interaction Ritual and Enregisterment of Chongqing Dialect on Xiaohongshu
   
   How does a dialect become recognizable as “heritage” in everyday digital interaction? This study examines how Chongqing Dialect is circulated and socially framed as a form of cultural heritage on a China-based but internationally circulated social media platform, Xiaohongshu, focusing on multiple audiences, including dialect speakers, broader Chinese participants, and international users. Drawing on multimodal discourse analysis and conversation analysis, the study explores how “heritage” emerges through interaction rather than existing as a fixed category and analyzes sequential interaction patterns and semiotic resources, such as text, images, video, emojis, and the like, through which dialect expressions are introduced, recognized, expanded, and evaluated. The research mobilizes the concepts of indexicality and enregisterment to link micro-level interaction to macro-level cultural meanings. In this framework, heritage is treated as a metapragmatic frame invoked by participants to signal social belonging, cultural knowledge, and regional distinctiveness. The study argues that dialect and heritage are co-dependent registers that undergo dual enregisterment: dialect becomes recognizable as a marker of cultural identity and collective memory, while heritage is made meaningful through its articulation in dialectal forms. By foregrounding the fluidity of interaction ritual and the role of multimodal discourse, this study demonstrates how everyday digital practices contribute to the social recognition of dialect as culturally significant. In doing so, it shows how social media participation extends the visibility and significance of Chongqing Dialect beyond local use, contributing to its emergence as a culturally meaningful and socially recognized resource. 

2. Roberto Young (Chicago)
   Social Action Projects of Standardizing Mayan Language Alphabets in 20th Century Guatemala
   
   The founding of the Academy of Mayan Languages in Guatemala (ALMG) was a major accomplishment in 1990. ALMG emerged as part of a broader social movement of Maya cultural revindication at a time of genocidal military repression against Maya life. Mayan languages figured as instruments of cultural revindication whose shared genealogical descendance differentiated them as separate languages from Castilian with independent grammars and variations. ALMG is an autonomous state entity that receives funding appropriated by the unicameral Guatemala Congress but implements such budget with independent Maya leadership. Internal ALMG structure embodies language ideologies of the pan-Maya cultural revindication movement. ALMG is constituted by 22 separate Linguistic Communities which together form ALMG’s Superior Council. Each Linguistic Community composes its own leadership hierarchy. The formation of a Linguistic Community is formalized by a standardized alphabet that encompasses the linguistic varieties of each Mayan language. In anticipation of ALMG, debates about orthographic conventions and standardized varieties in the late 20th century implicated ideologies about scaling work that involved relating township varieties to Linguistic Community standardized varieties and, in turn, to pan-Maya collective identities. Thus, this paper asks: how is scaling (re)made during alphabet debates and standardization ideologies and what are the political consequences of scaling work? Nested relationships within ALMG’s structural organization implicate scalar relationships between township varieties and standardized varieties with political effects influencing language circulation, signification, and revitalization. 

3. Yzza Sedrati (CUNY)
   Regenerating Value While Mourning in Migration
   
   My dissertation research explores death and social reproduction among West and Central African migrants living in Morocco. As Engelke writes, the study of death is a study of “how life persists” and a study of “the brute stuff of death”, like the bodies and the material practices that surround death (2019). Following this insight, I approach this project by considering how life is reproduced through necrosociality, a term I use to refer to the ensemble of experiences, practices, and imaginaries of migrants in response to someone’s death. This paper analyzes a memorial service held in honor of a Cameroonian member of the migrant-led mutual aid organization where I conducted fieldwork in Rabat, and who had passed away suddenly, due to an illness. More particularly, I describe the eulogies, prayers, and the social talk among the attendees at the service, focusing primarily onto the stances that they enacted and the juxtaposition of political and theological discursive genres in their speeches. I show that the stances and the political and theological genres articulated by the participants over the course of the event reflexively materialized a migrant collective subjectivity and imaginaries (Dick 2018, Yeh 2018) and produced a critical and affective stance towards border regimes, injustice, and migrant belonging (Ticktin 2016). Through this ethnographic study, I argue that the acts of necrosociality of the memorial service revitalize moral and social values (Bloch and Parry 1982) and I explore how necrosociality and necropolitics produce representational economies which operate in tension (Keane 2003).

4. Khant Wai Yan (Northwestern)

Voice, Noise, Kinship, and Diasporic Authority in Rohingya Chicago

Genocidal violence disrupts the semiotic infrastructure through which social authority is organized and transmitted. When Rohingya communities fled Myanmar's Rakhine State, a lot of traditional authorities that organized the community did not survive displacement. In Chicago's Rogers Park and West Ridge neighborhoods, this rupture has forced a renegotiation of legitimacy from the ground up. Vitality here becomes an ongoing political achievement, fought over in the most quotidian arenas, including youth football practices, where the terms of Rohingya-American futurity get actively contested. This paper is a microanalysis of the language practices of a diasporic authority figure who enregisters the persona of an elder-cultural broker by mobilizing a tripartite position as (a) a Rohingya community elder; (b) an immigrant who has self-proclaimed American institutional fluency; and (c) a soccer coach with direct disciplinary power over second-generation Rohingya youth. Drawing on a semi-structured interview with Emraan, the Rohingya elder and soccer coach, the analysis traces how he deploys chronotopically charged speech to animate a diasporic persona by stitching together a ruptured past, a contingent present, and an aspirational future. His semiotic labor is simultaneously an act of revitalization and a bid for legitimacy, unmade post-genocide. By treating authority itself as a sign requiring revitalization, this paper argues that the elder-cultural broker reanimates withering social roles under new indexical conditions, where time spent on American soil and power over future generations become the currency of communal authority, granting the right to guide Rohingya-American futures. 

3.00pm Panel Seven: Stigma, Status, Stereotype 

5. Heng Wang (Chicago)
   Sociolingusitic Bias and Public Perception of District Attorney Fani Williams' Testimony
   
   Sociolinguistic research has long shown that linguistic variation carries socio-indexical meaning and can influence listeners’ perceptions of speakers’ competence, credibility, and authority. Digital metacommentary reveals that Southern American English and African American Vernacular English features, in particular, are commonly associated with negative stereotypes. This paper examines how such ideological associations circulate in public evaluations of legal authorities. Specifically, I analyzed the testimony of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis before the Georgia State Senate Special Committee. Willis is treated here as a Black Southern speaker whose public speech appears to style-shift; in the four-minute segment analyzed, her self-presentational narrative displays several SAE-associated features. Phonetic features including /aɪ/ monophthongization, Southern Vowel Shift and Vowel Break, and alveolar realization of (ING) index a Southern style with possible AAVE-related influence within an otherwise institutional register. The analysis pairs this speech sample with 150 YouTube comments responding to the testimony. I then conduct qualitative discourse analysis and sentiment coding of comments to identify recurring metalinguistic framings of Willis’ speech and credibility. Results show that negative evaluations dominate (52.7%), with commenters frequently invoking tropes of low intelligence, unprofessionalism, and untrustworthiness. Many comments explicitly stylize or mock Willis’ speech, while others question her qualifications despite her articulated legal expertise. These findings suggest that sociolinguistic biases toward SAE features may extensively shape public evaluations of credibility in legal contexts, even when the speaker holds professional authority (King et al.). At the same time, the politically charged setting and Willis’ racialized and gendered positioning complicate attribution of bias to language alone. This study highlights how sociolinguistic ideologies circulate through digital metacommentary, demonstrating how accent-based indexical meanings shape public perceptions of credibility in high-stakes legal discourse.
   
   

6. Adele Chen (Chicago)
   Self-Mocking Racial Comedy and the Politics of Stereotypes
   
   My paper analyzes the multimodal semiosis and sociopolitical commentary of racial stereotyping comedy in videos of YouTuber Steven He, a Chinese immigrant in the US. While racialized styles are commonly enacted in comedic performances, stereotypes remain a problematic construct that ideologically imposes homogenization, marginalization, and stigmatization. Nevertheless, when initiated by the stereotyped group, racial comedy possesses the power to revitalize racist discourse and enable minorities to reclaim control over their identity narratives; hence, it is conventional in form and subversive in nature. In digital spaces, as agents’ meaning negotiation is reified by the “visible linguistic traces” of content and comments, identification struggles of immigrants are visualized in “the ebb and flow of signs” (Chun, 2013). By investigating framing techniques and cultural scripts of Steven’s sketches and analyzing audience uptake, this study explores the bidirectional meaning-making mechanism in online comedy that relies on both production and reception to co-generate implications about racial ideologies in US society. Aligned with the comedian’s ironic voicing of strict parenting styles in Asian families, the audience creatively interprets the stereotypical representation with quotation, adaptation, and evaluation, recontextualizing the scripts into memes and circulating them across temporal, spatial, and ideological contexts, such as Steven’s catchphrase “emotional damage”. The analysis suggests that self-mocking humor challenges racial profiling with the repertoire of hegemonic discourse, teasing the clichés out of illicitness to vent them in a controlled comic setting. In such discursive practice, the hegemonic relationship between stereotyping and identity is dialectically reconfigured as an anti-hegemonic one.
   
   

7. Andy Cao (Notre Dame)
   Vocational Youth and Semiotics Differentiation
   
   Vocational school students in contemporary China are widely stigmatized as morally deficient and socially “low-quality” youth. This stigma endures not simply as an externally imposed judgment, but as a circulating semiotic process through which social differentiation becomes intelligible and morally persuasive across contexts. Approaching stigma as a relational sign process sustained through revoicing, recontextualization, and uptake, this paper asks how vocational stigma comes to signify and stabilize relations of power across social scales. My ethnographic focus is Clover Youth, a nonprofit organization in Guangdong that brings vocational students into sustained interaction with volunteers and organizers educated within elite transnational social science networks. Within China’s highly stratified educational landscape, these encounters bring together youth populations ordinarily separated by educational tracking. Clover Youth thus provides a site for examining how vocational stigma is interpreted, mediated, and contested through practices of care, mentorship, and collective reflection. Drawing on linguistic anthropological approaches to indexicality, enregisterment, and Erving Goffman’s concept of the “wise,” I analyze how participants engage vocational stigma through competing interpretive frameworks that attribute responsibility to individual character, psychological development, institutional arrangements, or structural inequality. These encounters reorganize the semiotic field of differentiation by introducing distinctions that both unsettle and reproduce stigma. I suggest that when social differentiation persists while its legitimacy becomes uncertain, stigma functions as a flexible semiotic resource through which participants negotiate social value and recognition, revealing how the differentiation of youth is continuously reconstituted through its articulation with state power.
   
   

8. Noeila Santana (Michigan)
   Voices of the Seres and Misterios
   
   This paper examines how seres (beings) and misterios (mysterious beings) become visible, audible, and socially consequential within Dominican religious and everyday life. Drawing on several cuentos (narratives or stories) collected over 23 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Dominican Republic, I use el misterio (the supernatural, the occult, the divine, and the ancestral) as an analytic lens for understanding “vitality” as a processual activity rather than as a fixed state. Attending to el misterio also helps us understand how more-than-human agents are involved in the circulation of signs. Building on Martha Davis’ (1987) work on Dominican folk Catholicism, Christina Sánchez‑Carretero’s (2005) framing of the seres and misterios as “communication agents,” and Kristina Wirtz’s scholarship on Cuban Santeria (2004, 2005, 2014, 2025), I consider how and when the voices of seres are mobilized within discourses of authenticity, belonging, and morality. Using transcripts of these interactions, I ask, how and when is vitality negotiated within discourse about and with the seres? And, given my participants’ emphasis on “appropriate” Dominican ways of talking, being, acting, and knowing, I ask, what role, if any, do the seres have within boundary-making and exclusionary practices such as ethno-racialization within the Dominican Republic? 

4.45  pm     Panel Eight: Living the Past

1. Annie Birkeland (Michigan)
   Celebrating Papiamentu and KabuVerdi
   
   In 2025, as the West African island nation of Cabo Verde celebrated 50 years of independence from their former colonial power, many lamented that they could not be truly free until the language of the people, Cape Verdean Creole (or KabuVerdianu) was officialized in addition to Portuguese. In effect, the 2025 edition of the World Mother Tongue Day conference became a critical site for language activists to bolster support for KabuVerdianu officialization to finally be realized. However, the coalition building was not only situated among the archipelago's nine inhabited islands but also spread out through the vast diaspora that is estimated to be up to four times larger than the local island population. In a hybrid event broadcast on Zoom, I explore the layers of digital entextualizations as a recorded performance of a musical duet served as both a tool of musical diplomacy and an emergent sign of KabuVerdianu revitalization beyond borders. Sung in KabuVerdianu from Cabo Verde and Papiamentu from Curacao, recorded in the Netherlands and presented in Cabo Verde, I explore the affective geographies that reconfigure colonial legacies and nation-state boundaries. In particular, I trace creole epistemologies that intertwine language, music, and kinship to the natural world. Ultimately, I examine the role of female solidarity and feminist praxis in advancing creole language rights. 

2. Andrew Kerr (UCSD)
   The Endurance of Shayari after Neoliberalism and Hindutva

“Urdu has died.” I often heard variations of this phrase during my fieldwork in north India. The comments (in Urdu) from sympathetic, mother tongue, or heritage Urdu speakers carried the weight of loss. The comments from Islamophobic or otherwise complicit individuals were teleological, revealing a desire for the language’s death in naming it. As a language that has become negatively enregistered as Muslim in India, it is cast at once foreign and of the past: dislodged from the here-and-now both spatially and temporally. But how does the discourse of death of the Urdu language square with the growing and lively celebration of Urdu poetry (shayari)? Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork, this paper seeks to complicate the discourse of Urdu’s death through attention to the circulation of shayari. I argue that as shayari moves — materially, semiotically, and affectively — it subtly shifts Urdu into a specific index that is legible and (more) legitimate in India. In this conditionality, Urdu through shayari, emanates in the desires and tensions that are lodged between slow death (Berlant 2007) and slow life (Choi 2025) with a particular valence of vitality. Analyzing vitality, in what I frame as a semiotics of endurance, this paper questions what forms of temporality and affectivity shayari affords in this contemporary context in India for the Urdu language, as well as for Urdu language users. 

3. Maximillian X. Conrad (Texas)
   Demographic Change and the Vitality of Orthodox Christian Liturgical Language
   
   In the summer of 2025, Metropolitan Tikhon of the Orthodox Church of America addressed the 21st All-American Council, urging particular attention to the role of language amidst changing demographics of Orthodox Christianity in the United States: “Our rapid transition to English has meant rapid obscuring of our heritage… the rapid loss of Church Slavonic and our sense of connection to East Slavic Orthodoxy has weakened our connection to the great cloud of witnesses who went before us…” Metropolitan Tikhon’s call for preservation of liturgical language echoes similar concerns among speakers of endangered languages – but rather than a disappearance via stagnation or diminution of speakers, the loss of Church Slavonic may instead come about paradoxically amidst a moment of significant growth and interest in Eastern Orthodoxy from Americans of non-Orthodox backgrounds. Tikhon, himself a convert to Orthodoxy, also warns of a spiritual loss – a severed connection to the martyrs of the twentieth century and, more broadly, the communion of saints throughout the history of the Orthodox Church. In turns towards posthumanism in language, greater attention has been directed towards spectral and spiritual vocality. An appeal to a “great cloud of witnesses” invites communication between and situates not only the living and the dead, but future generations. This paper examines the legacy of Church Slavonic and its diminishing role within Eastern Orthodox churches in the United States amidst demographic shifts by situating it within a broader literature of language loss and prospects for revitalization. 

4. Daniel Hansen (Chicago)
   Vital Antiquity
   
   Standing stone monuments—especially those associated with a pre-modern past—often occupy a privileged position in the interpretation of historic landscapes in Europe. Their uptake hinges on two ideological positions that condition the ways in which stone(s) can signify. On the one hand, stone (as a material) is taken to be essentially immutable: it is solid, hard, and endures through time and across semiotic events. On the other hand, those intimately familiar with stone monuments—archaeologists and laypeople alike—will often speak of them in ways that suggest vitality: stones are members of communities, they develop and change with time, and they witness and testify to history. In this paper, I argue that these ideological positions, collectively labeled “vital antiquity,” are complementary, relying on materiality’s presumed exteriority to semiosis (Nakassis 2013) to cast (certain) stone(s) as facilitating an immediate, non-representational means of engagement with a distant past. Drawing on my dissertation fieldwork, I trace modes of present-day engagement with the early medieval Pictish “symbol stones” of northeastern Scotland: I highlight replica-making, heritage/conservation work, and archaeological investigation, examining how ideologies of vital antiquity frame scientific, aesthetic, and ethical orientations to the stones. I then turn to the late medieval stećak tombstones of Bosnia and Herzegovina, examining their centrality to 20th-century aesthetic/political projects of nation-building and their incorporation into 21st-century heritage frameworks. Across both examples, special attention is paid to the ways in which potential divergences from prevailing ideologies—instances of discontinuity, fracture, and trans/immateriality—are instead incorporated into stone’s vitality.