Jamie A. Thomas
  • About
  • Portfolio
    • Digital Storytelling
    • Ethnography + Language
  • Teaching
    • AfroLatinx Podcast
    • [ZOMBIES REIMAGINED]
  • Blog
  • Connect With Me

#languagestory blog

Video & perspectives on communication, intercultural learning & the impact of anthropological research.

Media Stereotypes: The Power of Speaking Your Mind

9/24/2018

0 Comments

 
A student describes how media stereotypes impact his study abroad experience.Amman, JORDAN: I talked with a U.S.-based student who described how media stereotypes have impacted his study abroad experience.
By age 6, young girls are already impacted by gendered stereotypes of intellectual ability (and media representations of scientists and engineers, for example). This is according to a 2017 study published in Science.  

In fact, there is no doubt that media stereotypes and representations have wide-ranging influence, but how should we respond to these when they impact our everyday interactions as adults? 

Media Smarts, Canada's Centre for Digital and Media Literacy, reports that stereotypes in video games, films, and other avenues of popular culture influence the real-life treatment of protected groups across North America, including:
  • First Nations, Aboriginal, and Indigenous people,
  • persons with disabilities, and
  • people of varying sexual orientation and gender identification.

Moreover, in her oft-cited book English With an Accent, sociolinguist Rosina Lippi-Green, among others, has shown how media stereotypes--even those in Disney films--reflective of ideologies of language contribute to depictions of racial, ethnic, and gender groups in particular ways. These are depictions that have long been a tool of language discrimination in the U.S., as linguists John McWhorter, John Rickford, and others have explained, in separate analyses of courtroom proceedings in the wake of the 2012 Trayvon Martin shooting.

So, if media stereotypes and language ideologies impact young children, popular culture, and the everyday conduct of courtrooms, how do they impact contexts of education abroad? How might it be empowering to speak truth to disarm stereotypes?


Read More
0 Comments

The Often Forgotten Intersectionality of Race, Gender, and Language

2/7/2018

0 Comments

 
by Jamie A. Thomas

Why is Language Missing From the Conversation?

I'm picking up the blog this month with a post that highlights how the way our bodies are read--in coordination with the languages we speak--can make for very different intersections with race and gender. How many of us think about language learning when we consider the combined impacts of racialization and gendering? How many study abroad coordinators are aware of intersectional challenges for their students of color?

Why do we forget to consider language as another dimension of our social experience? Because we take it for granted. Language is such a regularly embedded and embodied aspect of our everyday experience, we sometimes are unaware of how it can contextually shift in its use to construct ideals of woman, nation, or Arabic-speaker, for example.

The video posted below on "Study Abroad in Jordan" is my latest installment of the #LanguageStory video series, and follows two college students, Laye and Erica, in their sojourn to Amman, Jordan. I met each of them during my time as an ethnographer embedded in Jordan, and their friendship is all the more powerful considering their many differences: Laye is a first-generation Muslim immigrant to the U.S., and Erica is a White American woman with aspirations for a career in Dubai. 

Watch the Video.

It's Real: Race and Gender Have Impacts on Second Language Learning.

It's a bit paradoxical, but the notion of language is quite often missing from discussion of how socially (and culturally) constructed categories of identity can impact our experiences. In many ways, words said and unsaid can contribute to discrimination, exclusion, and a narrowing of possibilities.  What I mean here, is that even though racialization and gendering are largely accomplished through discourse and communication, we fail to pay attention to language as a medium of exclusion, or as yet another dimension of reading a person as Other.  

​Both Erica and Laye enjoy their life abroad in Amman, Jordan, and view it as an extraordinary opportunity. Their friendship has fostered a unique brand of colloquial Arabic between them. However, as it turns out, their study abroad experiences diverge in ways that relate to how their bodies are gendered and raced by others in Amman. Across each of their experiences, language remains another dimension through which they experience difference. 

For Erica, being seen as a woman narrows her opportunities to converse with men. In her homestay situation, this also leads to marriage as the central topic of conversation. This has the effect of narrowing her potential

Read More
0 Comments

Speaking Halal in Philadelphia

12/23/2017

1 Comment

 
by Kyle Martin and Arielle Pinto
​
​Kyle is a senior at Strath Haven High School looking forward to choosing a college major in the coming year.  Arielle is a junior at Haverford College, where she is a Philosophy major. Listen to their #LanguageStory here, which includes a contribution from Swarthmore College junior Erick Gutierrez.

Listen: Arabic in Center City.

Arabic is the fastest growing language in the United States. According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, “the number of people ages 5 and older who speak Arabic at home has grown by 29% between 2010 and 2014 to 1.1 million speakers, making it the seventh most commonly spoken non-English language in the U.S”[1]. Indeed, the presence of the Arabic language is palpable in the streets of Philadelphia, particularly in Center City, where Halal food trucks adorned with some Arabic signage are widely dispersed.
Picture
What began as an attempt to research the semiotic landscape created by these trucks turned into an investigation of the use of the Arabic language in Philadelphia, following an interview with Mr. Amine Helali (an operator of one such truck). From here, we spoke with Professor Benjamin Smith, an Arabic professor at Swarthmore College. We asked them questions about the languages they use in different contexts, and they told us about what they gathered from their own experiences. From both of these interviews, it seemed to us that English has a considerable importance in this community.

Amine Helali is an Algerian food truck vendor who works on the Avenue of the Arts, a largely cosmopolitan, dynamic and artistic neighborhood in Center City. After reading about the French street artist JR’s mural of Ibrahim Shah, a Pakistani food truck vendor,  whose image formerly stood on one of the facades of the Graham Building in Center City[2], one of us got inspiration, and decided to further investigate the people working in this business. Amine told us about his multilingual background in Arabic, French, Spanish and English. In his work, he uses all of those languages, but for different purposes...


Read More
1 Comment

Russia in Your Meme

12/22/2017

0 Comments

 
by Erick Gutierrez

Erick is a junior linguistics major at Swarthmore College.
0 Comments

Haverbros, Mawrters, Scripsies, and SPUdents

12/22/2017

0 Comments

 
by Juhyae Kim and Anya Slepyan
​
Juhyae is a junior linguistics major and education minor at Swarthmore College. Anya is a freshman and potential major in Russian, also at Swarthmore College. Watch their video essay below.

College Campuses as Speech Communities.

Watch the Video.

In our #LanguageStory project, we set out to explore the semiotic landscapes of various college campuses to see how certain speech communities and identities developed within them. We first had the idea for the project during fall break, when Anya visited a friend at a different college. Anya and her friend were discussing the school police at their various colleges and realized that though they served the same function, the emic terminology or nomenclature differed from school to school. What Anya called “pub safe” (abbreviated from Public Safety), her friend referred to as “camp sec” (Campus Security).
While this difference may seem insignificant, it made her think about the variations in language across college campuses, and how the unique slang and language varieties helped build campus identities. As a freshman, Anya was especially aware of the fact that she had entered Swarthmore knowing none of the appropriate and community-specific language, but had quickly picked the slang and jargon necessary to navigate the specific semiotic landscape of our college campus. This made her curious to explore the different school-specific language used on various colleges, and to explore how language use may differ at schools of different sizes, types, and geographic locations. At the conclusion of our research together, we found that the existence of campus-specific vocabulary results in unique speech communities on each campus, which is an essential factor that forms campus identity...

Read More
0 Comments
<<Previous

    Main Author

    Jamie A. Thomas is a sociocultural linguist and digital media producer. Her forthcoming book Zombies Speak Swahili is all about the undead, videogames, and why language and communication matter. She teaches at Santa Monica College.

    Archives

    September 2018
    February 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    March 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    August 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014

    Categories

    All
    Afterlife
    Art
    Beginnings
    Bilingualism
    Body
    Borderlands
    Cinema
    Collaboration
    Colloquial Speech
    Communication
    Communicative Competence
    Context
    Creation
    Cuba
    Cultural Exchange
    Digital Humanities
    Diversity
    Election 2016
    Emoji
    Engaged Research
    Gender
    Gentrification
    Hashtag
    Ideology
    Idioms
    In-N-Out
    Intercultural Learning
    Interpersonal Communication
    Intersectionality
    Linguistic Inequality
    Local
    Mexico
    Modality
    Museums
    Participation
    Philadelphia
    Project Goals
    Public Ethnography
    Public Memory
    Race
    Saturday Night Live
    Semiotics
    Sexuality
    Sign Language
    Speech Community
    Stereotypes
    Storytelling
    Study Abroad
    Video
    Women
    Zombies

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly