call related to linguistc 7

Call For Papers SALSA XIX: Language in the Public Domain

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Start:

January 14, 2011

Venue:

University of Texas at Austin

Address:

Austin, TX, United States

Call For Papers
SALSA XIX: Language in the Public Domain
April 15-17, 2011, The University of Texas at Austin
http://studentorgs.utexas.edu/salsa/
The Symposium About Language and Society-Austin is pleased to announce its 19th Annual meeting, to be held April 15-17 at the University of Texas at Austin. The theme of this year’s conference is “Language in the Public Domain;” SALSA is now accepting proposals for papers that explore the public dimensions of language. Language is a distinctly human characteristic and central to all human social organization. It is the medium through which we shape our identities, relate to other people, and construct our social realities. Our focus in this conference is on language as it is used in media, politics, performance, and other public spaces, and how language can affect and be affected by these processes and domains of usage.
This entirely student run conference, now in its 19th continuous year, is a joint effort of the Department of Anthropology, the Department of Linguistics, and the Department of Communication Studies. This year, our keynote speakers include Michael Silverstein (U. of Chicago), Elaine Chun, (U. of South Carolina), Steven Clayman (UCLA), and Lars Hinrichs (UT Austin).
Papers may be submitted on our website:
http://studentorgs.utexas.edu/salsa/
The deadline for submissions is January 14, 2011.
http://linguisticanthropology.org/blog/2010/12/09/call-for-papers-salsa-xix-language-in-the-public-domain/

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SLA Call for Invited Sessions

From the SLA Program Chair, Kira Hall:

(please feel free to forward this to potentially interested parties )

Dear Linguistic Anthropologists,

It’s that time of year again: The Society for Linguistic Anthropology (SLA) invites your submissions for the American Anthropological Association’s 2010 Annual Meeting, to be held in New Orleans, on November 17-21. As this year’s SLA Section Program Editor, I am writing to encourage you to submit invited sessions, volunteered sessions, and volunteered papers and posters so that we can have an exciting meeting in New Orleans this November. The theme of the 2010 Meeting is “Circulation.” I hope that you will consider orienting your panels to the conference theme (see below), although you do not have to do so.

There are two deadlines for submission: an internal SLA deadline for Invited Sessions (Friday, March 5), and the AAA deadline for volunteered sessions and volunteered papers/posters (5pm, Eastern Time, Thursday, April 1). While you must submit your materials to the AAA website for both of these submission processes before these respective deadlines at www.aaanet.org , Invited Session submissions must also be sent by the March 5th deadline directly to the Program Chair (kira.hall@colorado.edu ). Your email to me should include a copy of your session abstract as well as individual paper abstracts from each of your proposed participants. I will then send these out to the SLA Program (6-member) Committee for review. (Note: Invited Session submissions to the AAA website by March 5 can still be somewhat preliminary; you can make changes on your submission up until the general deadline on April 1.)

The word limit for a session abstract is 500 words and for a paper abstract 250 words. More detailed information on panel or paper submission can be found on the AAA meetings website (www.aaanet.org/meetings/Call-for-Papers.cfm ) under “Call for Papers PDF.”

This year, the Society for Linguistic Anthropology is encouraging panel organizers to make use of the official SLA website for the building of sessions: www.linguisticanthropology.org . We encourage SLA members as well as nonmembers to visit the site and post descriptions of panels-in-progress. This is potentially a great way to find other scholars working in your area of interest. The email linganth list is also a great place to advertise panel ideas; for information on how to subscribe, visit http://www.linguisticanthropology.org/resources/mailing-lists/.

INVITED SESSIONS

For those of you unfamiliar with the conference structure, Invited Sessions are, in the words of the AAA, “innovative, synthesizing sessions intended to reflect the state-of-the-art in the major subfields and the thematic concerns of those fields.” The SLA Program Committee is responsible for selecting sessions for invited status; we are especially interested in panels that feature cutting edge research and theory, topics that cross subdisciplines, and/or topics related to this year’s meeting theme. If you are organizing a panel and would like it to be considered for invited status, please notify me of your interest via email (kira.hall@colorado.edu ) as soon as possible, but by March 5th at the very latest (when the full panel submission is due). Again, you must submit your materials both to the AAA website and to me (preferably in pdf format) by the March 5th deadline. (When you submit your panel to the website, you will not yet know whether or not it has been chosen for invited status, so simply submit it as a volunteered session. We can always change the session status later, should your panel be selected as invited.)

Important note: The SLA unfortunately has very few allotted spaces for Invited Sessions: we can choose either 3 single panels or 1 double panel plus 1 single panel. We therefore encourage you to consider the possibility of having another AAA section co-sponsor your panel with the SLA, so that we can put more Invited Sessions on the conference program. If there are other sections that you feel your panel might interest, please specify this on your application to me and I will consult with the Program Section Editor in those sections to see if there is a possibility for collaboration. For a list of other AAA sections, consult www.aaanet.org/sections/ . (You can also contact other Section Program Editors directly on your own, to see if co-sponsorship might be a possibility.)

If your panel is selected for invited status, I will send you an email to this effect in late March, with a password to use on-line. You will need this password to answer question 2 on the proposal form, so as to complete your on-line submission by the deadline on April 1.

CONFERENCE THEME:

Please refer to the AAA website for more details on the theme, at www.aaanet.org/meetings/Call-for-Papers.cfm . The AAA elaborates on the theme as follows:

“New Orleans has inspired the theme of the 2010 AAA Annual Meeting: “Circulation.” This theme is meant to encourage us to think about what happens when movement is the organizing trope of our questions, methodologies, analyses and accounts. We can think in terms of circulation across time as well as space, through different organizing principles, and in a variety of shapes and forms.
The idea of circulation invites us to consider what triggers, facilitates, constrains, disrupts or stops flows; what is at stake in these processes, and for whom; and what their consequences might be for humans and for the environment. It opens up questions about what exactly circu lates: signs, objects or bodies. Do different things circulate in different ways? Do they change or remain constant? What new phenomena, arrangements and inequalities does circula tion produce? How are resources and ways of understanding them identified, made sense of, produced and distributed in the process? How and why do rates and types of circulation vary across time and space? What crystallizes and what continues to flow and reshape?
“Circulation” also invites us to think across boundaries, whether those are boundaries orga nizing phenomena we seek to describe and explain, boundaries within and across disciplines, or boundaries among anthropologists or other social groups. It asks us to turn our attention to zones of encounter, conjunctions and liminal passages. It also requires us to ask whether “circulation” is a helpful trope for the production of anthropological knowledge. What light does it shed on the (increasingly widely circulating) concept of “culture”—argu ably the central organizing construct of anthro pology—and on anthropology itself?
We are interested in bringing together papers reflecting the perspectives of all subfields and forms of anthropological practice, or across them, investigating this theme with data, method and theory oriented to all temporal and spatial horizons.”

ADDITIONAL DETAILS:

The AAA has again asked Program Chairs to encourage their memberships to consider allotting more time for discussion and experimenting with non-traditional formats. You can certainly fall back on the tried-and-true standard sorts of formats if you wish, but the SLA Program Committee is eager to consider variation. This year, the AAA is also encouraging submissions and presentations in languages other than English, a development that is obviously of great interest to us as linguistic anthropologists. If you are thinking of submitting a bilingual or multilingual panel, I encourage you to contact me in advance, as I will need to set up appropriate reviewers for assessing the submission.

Finally: Registration waiver. In an effort to facilitate the participation of and increase members’ access to international and community-based scholars at the AAA annual meetings, one registration waiver will be made available to each of the 38 sections of the AAA Section Assembly, of which SLA is a member. Unused or unallocated waivers will go back into a pool and a lottery held to redistribute them. Qualifying scholars need not be current AAA members and cannot hold employment in university-based anthropology departments nor work as practicing anthropologists in any of the discipline’s four main subfields (archaeology, sociocultural, biological, linguistic). Registration and membership fees will be waived for the qualifying scholar nominated by sections to receive this waiver. Individual qualifying scholars are responsible for all other conference-associated costs.The AAA deadline for the waiver nomination is March 1, so session organizers must contact Kira Hall before that date with nominations. Along with information on the proposed session, please provide the name of the qualifying scholar nominated to receive the section’s waiver, and a short description of the nature of the scholar’s proposed meeting participation as well as her or his credentials and qualifications (i.e., non-anthropologist, community-based scholar, international scholar, etc).

http://linguisticanthropology.org/blog/2010/02/10/sla-call-for-invited-sessions/

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A call for an end to Pseudo-Darwinian hype

Austin Hughes does not mince his words in describing a "major hindrance to progress" in understanding the evolutionary past. He claims that a major factor has been "confusion regarding the role of positive (Darwinian) selection". This addresses some fundamental issues in evolutionary biology because, for many, any evidence of adaptation is automatically interpreted as natural selection favouring adaptive mutations. But yes, just in case you think Hughes might qualify his charge elsewhere, read on and find that he makes it even more explicit!

"To biologists schooled in Neo-Darwinian thought processes, it is virtually axiomatic that any adaptive change must have been fixed as a result of natural selection. But it is important to remember that reality can be more complicated than simplistic textbook scenarios."

"If you have variation, differential reproduction, and heredity, you will have evolution by natural selection as an outcome. It is as simple as that." (Source here)
The problem is not one that can be easily corrected, because it is endemic. According to Hughes: "Thousands of papers are published every year claiming evidence of adaptive evolution on the basis of computational analyses alone, with no evidence whatsoever regarding the phenotypic effects of allegedly adaptive mutations." The researchers have adopted a mindset which blinds them to alternative approaches to handling the data. The problem relates to codon-based methods of testing for positive selection. We do not need here to go over the theory behind these methods, nor follow how Hughes arrives at the view that there has been an "unwarranted generalization" from one case to all cases. However, we can note this conclusion:

"Yet, despite their shaky foundations, numerous publications have used these methods as the basis for claims of positive selection at the molecular level."

The trigger for the alarm bells sounding is a paper by Yokoyama et al (blogged here). Hughes sees this paper as a model of its kind, establishing the genetic basis for variation and devising tests for positive selection which allow conventional thinking to be scrutinized.

"It is to be hoped that the work of Yokoyama et al. will help put an end to these distressing tendencies. By incorporating experimental evidence regarding the phenotypic effects of reconstructed evolutionary changes, this study sets a new standard for studies of adaptive evolution at the molecular level."

The take-home message is that (bad) theory has dominated empirical analysis for too long in evolutionary biology. It is time to put things in order. We need less reliance on the deductive framework provided by neo-Darwinism, and more attention to empiricism and induction. (For a previous blog related to this, go here). Hughes calls for a new standard in research:

"In recent years the literature of evolutionary biology has been glutted with extravagant claims of positive selection on the basis of computational analyses alone, including both codon-based methods and other questionable methods such as the McDonald-Kreitman test. This vast outpouring of pseudo-Darwinian hype has been genuinely harmful to the credibility of evolutionary biology as a science."

With these thoughts in mind, it may be worth revisiting topics (here, here and here) that have been discussed previously: drawing attention to the way theory dominates the interpretations placed on data, and how researchers are curiously blind to alternative approaches to handling the same data. This is Kuhnian "normal" science. It preserves the paradigm - but at what cost?
The origin of adaptive phenotypes
Hughes, Austin L.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(36), 13193-13194, September 9, 2008 | doi: 10.1073/pnas.0807440105.
First Paragraph: Sequences of DNA provide documentary evidence of the evolutionary past undreamed of by pioneers such as Darwin and Wallace, but their potential as sources of evolutionary information is still far from being realized. A major hindrance to progress has been confusion regarding the role of positive (Darwinian) selection, i.e., natural selection favoring adaptive mutations. In particular, problems have arisen from the widespread use of certain poorly conceived statistical methods to test for positive selection. Thousands of papers are published every year claiming evidence of adaptive evolution on the basis of computational analyses alone, with no evidence whatsoever regarding the phenotypic effects of allegedly adaptive mutations. But it would be a mistake to dismiss Yokoyama et al.'s study, in this issue of PNAS, of the evolution of visual pigments in vertebrates as more of the same. For, unlike all too many recent papers in the field, this study is solidly grounded in biology.
See also:
Coppedge, D.F. How Not to Prove Positive Selection (Creation-Evolution Headlines, Sept 5, 2008).
http://www.arn.org/blogs/index.php/literature/2008/09/11/a_call_for_an_end_to_pseudo_darwinian_hy

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Call for Papers: East Asian Literature after 1900 at MLA 2011

Posted by: Beadle on Saturday, February 27th, 2010

Proposals are being sought for three panels on East Asian literature planned for presentation at the January 6-9, 2011, meeting of the Modern Language Association in Los Angeles. Note the short deadlines.

Panels seeking participants and their organizers are:

• Narrating Tortured Lives in East Asia. In recent centuries, narrating lives in East Asian contexts have often been manifested, on the one hand, as “private” forms of literature such as essays, diaries and letters, and, on the other, as biographies of exceptional individuals whose tumultuous life stories lead us to question, problematize, and complicate East Asian cultures’ agenda for progress and enlightenment. And as such, these texts are motivated by and connected to issues of power and possible changes in the existing status quo, whether social, cultural, sexual, or political. This panel hopes to shed a new light on these issues by exploring the theme of “torture,” widely defined, and challenges to oppression through historical changes found in the narration of extraordinary lives in East Asian literature. Comparative East Asian perspectives are welcomed.
• Contact: E-mail 250-word abstract by March 4, 2010, to Kelly Jeong (kelly.jeong@ucr.edu).

• Constituting War Trauma in East Asian Literature and Film. How has war trauma been represented in East Asian literary and cinematic works? How does the identity (survivor-narrator, contemporary “outside’ observer, combatant, civilian, male, female, second generation artist, etc.) of the author/director affect the imaginative representation, constitution and cognition of extreme war-related events? Comparative perspectives welcome.
• Contact: E-mail 250-word abstract by March 1, 2010, to David C. Stahl (dstahl@binghamton.edu).

• Cultural Flows through Popular Media. This panel will explore the rich interactions across regions in East Asia in the twentieth century. This panel is particularly interested in the way theses movements and flows have been represented artistically. Papers will explore the interactions of artists and ideas, focus on the place where languages meet, examine how texts overlap, analyze how and where images cross. We invite papers that track the movement of people, images, and language.
• Contact: E-mail 250-word abstract by March 4, 2010 to Douglas N. Slaymaker (dslaym.mla@spamex.com).

Questions about MLA panels on East Asian languages and literatures after 1900 can be directed to Ming-Bao Yue (mingbao@hawaii.edu).

http://ks111.moore.hawaii.edu/wp/?p=819

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Call for Papers: East Asian Literature After 1900

Posted by: Beadle on Monday, January 25th, 2010

Proposals are solicited for presentation at a panel on East Asian Languages and Literatures after 1900 at the Modern Language Association meeting in Los Angeles in January 2011. The session title is “Narrating Tortured Lives in East Asia.” Papers on personal narratives of gender, class, or social oppression, fictional or historical, are invited.

The panel prospectus: “In recent centuries, narrating lives in East Asian contexts have often been manifested, on the one hand, as ‘private’ forms of literature such as essays, diaries and letters, and, on the other, as biographies of exceptional individuals whose tumultous life stories lead us to question, problematize and complicate East Asian cultures’ agenda for progress and enlightenment. And as such, these texts are motivated by and connected to issues of power and possible changes in the existing status quo, whether social, cultural, sexual or political. This panel hopes to shed a new light on these issues by exploring the theme of ‘torture,’ widely defined, and challenges to oppression through historical changes found in the narration of extraordinary lives in East Asian literature. Comparative East Asian perspectives are welcomed.”

Those interested should submit a 250-word abstract no later than March 4, 2010, to the organizer, Kelly Jeong (kelly.jeong@ucr.edu).

http://ks111.moore.hawaii.edu/wp/?p=731

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Call to evaluate diasporic Nepali literature

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(Rastriya Samachar Samiti) Nepali literati and journalists living abroad have demanded to evaluate the diasporic Nepali literature.

“We need encouragement and inspiration.: they demanded. General Secretary of the International Nepali Literary Society, Britain. Bishwo Deep Tigela and another littérateur working in Malaysia Devendra Surkeli stressed that the Nepali critics and associations related to Nepali literature should study the diasporic literature.

There are four weekly newspapers and nine online magazines in Nepali language in the UK.

Similarly, there are some 120 Nepali associations in the UK, whihc frequently organize poetry symposium, interactions and publish books too.

General Secretary Tilega has come up with numerous Nepali publications. He also runs nepaliliterature.com and nepalisamachar.com websites.

Source: Himalayan Times

http://nrn.nepalko.info/2010/01/call-to-evaluate-diasporic-nepali-literature/