Lecture on the Socialization of Linguistic Difference and Metalinguistic Awareness, UCLA (2020, online)
In 2020 during Covid-19, I gave a guest lecture online to a class on language socialization at UCLA taught by Erica Cartmill. Using examples from my own ethnographic research with the Aché from eastern Paraguay, I discuss what it means for two languages to be actually perceived as two different languages. The video below illustrates codeswitching, language mixing, and metalinguistic awareness, and gives an overview over phenomenological theory including concepts such as intentionality, constitution, and phenomenological modification.
Keynote on Linguistic Natures, Critical Language Research Workshop, Newcastle University (2019)
In 2019, Guilherme Heurich and I were invited to give a keynote at the Critical Language Research Workshop at the University of Newcastle, organized by Rosaleen Howard, to discuss our work on “linguistic natures.” Based on our long-term engagement with indigenous communities in Lowland South America, and in an effort to bring together insights from linguistic anthropology and the ontological turn, we have developed the concept of “linguistic natures” to open an avenue for the investigation of ontological difference in language. Most linguistic and anthropological work on discourse practices in indigenous communities, uncritically imports understandings of “what language is” derived from the Euro-American intellectual tradition. But those understandings often go against the grain of how indigenous communities conceptualize discursive phenomena that are usually translated as “language.” Thus, “language” may not be the same thing for different people, in different contexts, and for different communicative practices. (For more about linguistic natures see our 2018 special issue “Language in the Amerindian Imagination” in the journal Language & Communication, accessible here.) My keynote starts at 51:40 in the video.
UCLA Dissertation Launchpad (2015)
In 2015 I was selected for the UCLA Dissertation Launchpad, a program designed to train UCLA PhD candidates to communicate our research to a wider non-specialist audience. We met weekly for 10-weeks to design an 8-minute presentation under the guidance of professional presentation coach Barbara Seymour Giordano, and UCLA professors Juliet Williams and Jim Stigler. Watch the result below: