Guest Lectures

Date & Time

When: 4 March 2025, 16:15-17:45h

Where: Unitobler, F-112

Zoom: https://unibe-ch.zoom.us/j/7931254771

Scholarship on neoliberalism has shown how employability discourses compel students to invest in English. What remains underexplored is the role of affect in these processes, and how it works to anchor these discourses deep within people’s subjectivities. Drawing on ethnographic data from an English-teaching NGO in Delhi, I explore the affective economy of English in India in order to demonstrate how and why English becomes desirable, for whom, and with what consequences. In doing so, I map the webs of complex logics and actors that not only discursively (re)produce English as a thing to be desired, but also draw boundaries around who can and should desire it.

Bio

Katy Highet is lecturer in English Language & TESOL at the University of the West of Scotland, where she is currently engaged in a Carnegie Trust funded project entitled ‘Alternative spaces of ESOL: an exploratory ethnography of English Language Teaching and activism in Glasgow’.  She was previously an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at UCL Institute of Education. As a Critical Sociolinguist, her work focuses on language, political economy, inequality and activism in both India and the UK. Her work has been published in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, the Journal of Sociolinguistics, the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, and Language and Communication.

When & Where

Date: 15th of April 2025, time tba

Place: Room 220, Mittelstrasse 43

This guest lecture is part of the BeLing Colloquium 2025.

Abstract

This talk explores multimodal metapragmatics, extending traditional metapragmatic analysis beyond language to broader communicative ideologies. Beginning with a conceptual overview of metapragmatics—spanning reflexive, reportive, and nomic functions (Silverstein 2021)—I examine how these frameworks apply not only to language but also to other semiotic systems such as gesture, writing, and media choice. The second half of the talk presents a case study on the metapragmatic discourse surrounding Elon Musk’s Nazi salute during the celebration of Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration. By analyzing a corpus of 2,000 German social media comments, I demonstrate how different actors engage in metapragmatic framing to construct, debate, and strategically reinterpret the meaning of Musk’s gesture. The findings reveal how far-right discourse employs “metapragmatic gaslighting” (Donzelli 2023)—shifting contextual frames to render even historically highly enregistered gestures like the Nazi salute ambiguous and contestable. This analysis sheds light on contemporary far-right discursive strategies and highlights the importance of a multimodal approach to metapragmatic inquiry.

Donzelli, Aurora (2023): On Metapragmatic Gaslighting: Truth and Trump’s Epistemic Tactics in a Plague Year. Signs & Society 11 (2): 173–200. 

Silverstein, Michael (2021): The dialectics of indexical semiosis: scaling up and out from the “actual” to the “virtual”. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 272: 13–45.

Date & Time

When: 13 May 2025, 16:15-18:00h.

Where: Fabrikstrasse 6, Room 102.

Zoom:

Afterwards, an apéro will be held.

In this presentation, I analyze Il Memoriale della Shoah, the memorial of the victims of the Shoah in Milan, which was inaugurated in 2013 and was turned into a night shelter for destitute migrants in 2015. To understand the rhetoric and politics of the Memorial, I bring together the notions of affective practices (Wetherell 2012), découpages du temps (lit. slices of time) (Foucault 1986) and multidirectional memory (Rothberg 2009). This analytic approach allows me to examine the nonlinear shape of remembering, the dialectic relationships between the spatialization of time and the temporalization of space, the ways in which emotions are brought into being semiotically in context, and the ethical questions that these feelings raise. Through detailed multimodal and affective analysis of the affordances of the built environment and its soundscape, the curation of the Memorial, the contextualization of three guided tours (two online and one in situ) and politicized commentary on the Memorial’s decision to shelter refugees, this presentation illustrates the multi-layered character of the relationship between space and time – one in which the past, the present and the future partly overlap and mobilize political action.

Bio

Tommaso M. Milani is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Applied Linguistics and Jewish Studies at Penn State; he is also affiliated to the African Studies Program and the Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Before joining Penn State, he held positions at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa and the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He is currently working on a project about the politics of collective remembering, focusing in particular on the commemoration of the victims of the Shoah in Italy and Sweden. He also collaborates with the Swedish Yiddishist Sarah Schulman (Dos Nisele Förlag,Stockholm) on a project about Yiddish in Sweden.