Amanda Stockton: Between Ledger and Life: A Comparative Study of the Grammar of Ownership and the Construction of Personhood in Tennessee’s Rural and Plantation Records languageandsocieties.wordpress.com?p=848
Jacob Stocking: Between Two Linguistic Worlds: Exploring language, culture and cognition in speculative fiction literature languageandsocieties.wordpress.com?p=851
Molly Sheets: Producing Screams: Technology, Technique, and Extreme Vocals languageandsocieties.wordpress.com?p=854
Arry Sabir: What Giving Means: Language and Fundraising in Metro Detroit Nonprofits languageandsocieties.wordpress.com?p=853
Christina Patten: Chinga La Migra: Resistance Language, Authority, and Communal Solidarity in Southwest Detroit languageandsocieties.wordpress.com?p=857
Carson Manfred: Communicating Firearms: Language and Description in the Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents languageandsocieties.wordpress.com?p=859
Mark A Macary: Aspects of the Rosary as Prayer languageandsocieties.wordpress.com?p=861
Victoria Kvasnikov: Discourse Analysis on the Clovis-Solutrean Hypothesis languageandsocieties.wordpress.com?p=863
Daniel J. Janks: The World in Two Square Miles: Linguistic Landscape of Hamtramck, Michigan languageandsocieties.wordpress.com?p=865
Aishlyn Hernandez: The Paradox of Puerto Rican Spanish: Stigma in Speech and Prestige in Music languageandsocieties.wordpress.com?p=867
Gracie Hand: Language Ideologies on Gender, Non-conforming Pronouns and the Integration of the Gender “Neutral” Pronoun Hen in Swedish languageandsocieties.wordpress.com?p=869
Milo Glover: Faces of the Totem Pole: How 20th Century Avocational Archaeologists Understood Native Americans languageandsocieties.wordpress.com?p=871
Kaitlyn Glavee: Externalized Ethics: A linguistic assessment of agency in anthropology codes of ethics languageandsocieties.wordpress.com?p=873
Izabella Doornbos: “Omnia mutantur, nihil interit”: Ovid’s Metamorphoses and its Morphing Translations languageandsocieties.wordpress.com?p=875
Chloe Crane: The Word That Chose Me: A Linguistic Analysis of Contemporary Christian Divination languageandsocieties.wordpress.com?p=877
Cohen Burgess: A Qualitative Reading of Sanitation Knowledge: Language and Visual Form in the WHO Sanitation Safety Planning Manual languageandsocieties.wordpress.com?p=879
Mozelle Bowers: Children in Bioarchaeology: sub-adult, non-adult, or simply child? languageandsocieties.wordpress.com?p=881
Cassie Anderson: “What else could it have been but a frog?”: Narrative functions of contradiction in The Apothecary Diaries languageandsocieties.wordpress.com?p=883
I wanted to share the individual abstracts I posted over at the Language and Societies website, summarizing the work of my fantastic students in my grad #linganth / #sociolx seminar this semester. Check them out, and feel free to comment! (1/x) languageandsocieties.wordpress.com/2026/04/16/l...
The students in my Language and Societies grad course this semester have done it again! My Wayne State folks can stand proud alongside anyone in any grad program anywhere, in terms of the sophistication of their work. Check it out, and comments are welcome! #linganth #sociolinguistics
The students in my Language and Societies grad course this semester have done it again! My Wayne State folks can stand proud alongside anyone in any grad program anywhere, in terms of the sophistication of their work. Check it out, and comments are welcome! #linganth #sociolinguistics
The NSF 2027 budget has noted that they will close out the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Science Program (SBE). This is not a good thing. nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/FY-202...
Oof, have not been posting here much. Alas. For context, I just sent my 100th email of the week. It's only Wednesday.
I was interviewed about AI & here’s what I said:
I believe in the idea of a writer’s voice—a unique voice that’s particular to you, that only you can write with. & I really work hard to develop that with my students. AI will never have your voice—it cannot touch that voice.
⭐️👏✊Please add your name to the letter below and join PEN America — and the hundreds who have already signed — in sending a strong message in defense of academic freedom to the Texas A&M Board of Regents.
pen.org/dont-censor-...
Happy 6th anniversary to us!! 🎉🎉
Thanks for spending time with us, old friends and new! As we celebrate this milestone, we've launched a short audience survey to get your thoughts on the show (and its future).
We would be most grateful for your participation!
Link: forms.gle/AnJSopuX8Cho...
“Technology” has a long and problematized relationship with progress, efficiency, and efficacy. Sleek trains rushing through the countryside, the blinding reach of the electrical grid, or the instantaneous messages of networked communication are its shiny avatars. Contraptions, by contrast, are technical devices that barely work. They seem too complex, too circuitous, too labor intensive. They are frequently ad hoc—as unrepeatable and unreliable as Rube Goldberg’s fantastical machines. They push the received wisdom about technology’s defining features to the limit. Like the aesthetic “gimmick” theorized by Sianne Ngai, the contraption is a category charged with normative judgment. Contraptions may work, but they don’t work right. While the contraption is commonly associated with vernacular or retrograde alternatives to high technology, many “high tech” devices reveal a contraption-like character on close inspection: AI chatbots, internet protocols, and helicopters come to seem both over- and under-engineered the more attention is paid to them. This session invites STS scholars to think with the figure of the contraption: What alternatives to popular ideas about technology do these complicated and unruly objects offer? What is it about the present moment that pushes the contraption back into public thought? How does the normativity of contraption judgments manifest in everyday life? How do people come to perceive and evaluate technical complexity in social life? Work in this area may draw on theories of gimmicks, hacks, kludges, workarounds, tricks, bricolage, and other complex or informal technical activities.
STS folks, I'm organizing an open panel on CONTRAPTIONS for 4S this year, following up on a lovely panel at last year's AAA meetings. You should submit something if you got it! www.4sonline.org/accepted_ope...
📣📣📣
Applications for the 2026 Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) are now open!!
Are you interested in intelligence, mind, and cognition in all its forms? Early-career scholars from any discipline—and storytellers in any medium—are encouraged to apply!
More info: disi.org
Congrats to @ncaaup.bsky.social & all who fought against this surveillance policy that would've allowed admin to hijack microphones in the classroom for secret recordings.
This move would've chilled classroom discussion & suppressed students' willingness to ask questions & take intellectual risks.