One of my favorite TED Talks is that of Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie . The TL;DR version of her talk is: if you tell the story of a group or individual as only one version, and tell it repeatedly, we risk creating misunderstandings. Therefore, when we listen to stories, Adichie asks us to critically think about the issues of power (or the Igbo word to describe this concept nkali) and to ask ourselves to think about: 1. how it’s told 2. who is telling it 3. when it’s told 4. how many stories are told The purpose of her talk was to address stereotypes, but the concepts that she describes are very much applicable considerations for any citizen sociolinguist or researcher. Be it wonderment or arrest, we must be cognizant about how the conversations we have could contribute to already established narratives. Arkham and Buchanan (2015) warn about the challenge of anticipating implications, but it shouldn’t pose as a bar...
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"Baby, It's Cold Outside": A Citizen Sociolinguistics Perspective on Historicizing and Adapting Deviance
In my work both as a student and scholar of literature and film, I have been repeatedly confronted with a concern of history and ethics: How do we responsibly study and address difficult issues embedded in cultural artifacts, especially those that still wield sociocultural influence today? In light of this week’s topics, I would like to use a present-day (and, for me, personal) example to illustrate this. I’ve always been a fan of the pop song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” (1944). My family owned different renditions of the song (almost always as part of a Christmas album), so I associate it with the holiday season. I’ve also watched the film that made the song popular, Neptune’s Daughter (1949), and I’ve always been delighted to see it adapted and performed. The song is essentially a dialogue between two people, one of whom is trying to convince the other to stay longer, citing the cold weather. Here are just a few of many versions: A YouTube video to the song as performed i...
**parental advisory: explicit content** ;P The Marcusean philosophy of individual subjectivity and the power of (deviant?) art to shift it (“Philosophize This” #113) is very compelling to me. I appreciate how Marcuse’s notion of the “shifting of class consciousness” recognizes the paradox of human beings and systems existing perpetually within imperfect systems, and that Marcuse’s suggested way to turn this theory into praxis is through deviant art – deviant in the sense of something “that diverts or causes to turn aside,” (Oxford English Dictionary). In the context of shifting class consciousness, pieces of art would be measured by the number of individual subjectivities they can cause to turn aside from their entrenched worldviews; and the ultimate reward of this process would be a liberated society, no longer bound to an endlessly looping structure of some dominating class presiding over some other subservient group(s). I believe that this Marcusean dialectic p...
On Sunday, June 26th, 2016, Tylenol shared a family photo of @2TravelDads and their sons. Here’s what the tweet looked like: Despite the fact that thousands of people across the internet showed their support and love for LGBT families all over, they also received tons of messages and tweets calling them pedophiles and threatening to work to have their kids taken away. Does the internet trolling this family has experienced count as bullying? In my opinion, it does, even though it differs from the bullying depicted by Boyd (2014). This type of bullying suffered by @2TravelDads does not only exist in the world of teenagers so it won’t outgrow, and also each of us can become the target. This type of bullying can happen whenever you voice your opinion on a controversial topic, particularly a political issue online. Now, the question is: What should we do when facing trollings/mean comments online? Ideally, we and the people who hold different opinions can hav...
In 1993, when the German punk band Die Ärzte published the song “Stummer Schrei nach Liebe” 1 (Silent cry for love), East and West Germany had just recently reunited politically but social and cultural fissure were deep and raw. At that time, the song was written in response to xenophobic attacks in Hoyerswerda, one of many cities in the Eastern part of the country with a growing Neo-Nazi scene. More recently, in 2015, amid growing anti-immigrant sentiments in reaction to the arrival of than 1.000.000 refugees that year, the song was resurrected: A homespun rendition by the senior choir, The Goldies , went viral on Youtube, a social media campaign, #Aktionarschloch, was founded to bring the song back into and to the top of the music charts, and flashmobs organized across German cities to sing the song in public squares. Just last week, the song was referenced once again. This time, its lyrics were recycled in a post by the Heute Show 2 , a German version of The Daily Show . T...