In its cultural politics and critical epistemology, our colloquium is aligned with the decolonizing (cf Tuhiwai Smith, 2012) “Southern” spirit of the 22nd Sociolinguistics Symposium. The colloquium opens up a space for thinking about a range of contemporary “boundary objects” (cf Rutherford, 2016) in the study of language: affect, materiality, embodiment, sensuality, aesthetics, posthumanism, and the generally more-than-representational worlds that lie beside words (cf Sedgwick, 2003). While sociolinguistics has long struggled with getting the relationship between the linguistic and the social right, other questions have meanwhile emerged about our conventional object/s of study: What about the body? What roles do things play? What place for affect? What of non-human life? In this way, Affecting Sociolinguistics takes up other recent shifts emphasizing the body and affect over the solely cognitive, and the consequences of materiality over the obsessively human. In seeking to “affect” sociolinguistics, we are concerned to show not only that there are things of importance beyond the currently delimited field, but that this other stuff productively challenges us into a reorganization – or, at least, a deep rethinking – of what really matters in sociolinguistics. It may also help confirm why language and sociolinguistics matter. As the colloquium organizers have argued, any such reorganization or rethinking necessarily requires a willingness to experiment or play with decentering both words and people (Thurlow, 2016; Appleby & Pennycook, 2017). Importantly, these kinds of provocations are ones in which all our colloquium participants have themselves been engaging in different ways; Affecting Sociolinguistics is a chance for us to come together for the first time to push collectively at the boundaries of words (and people).
Appleby, R. & Pennycook, A. (2017): Swimming with sharks, ecological feminism and posthuman language politics. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, DOI: 10.1080/15427587.2017.1279545
Rutherford, D. (2016). Affect theory and the empirical. Annual Review of Anthropology, 45: 285–300.
Sedgwick, E. K. (2003). Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Thurlow, C. (2016). Queering critical discourse studies or/and performing post-class ideologies. Critical Discourse Studies, 13(5): 485–514.
Tuhiwai Smith, L. (2012). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books.
