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Sept | Oct | Nov
"Bin Laden's Tapes: The Orders and Disorders of al-Qa`ida's Audio Jihad."Flagg MillerAssociate Professor, Religious Studies, University of California-Davis and Research Fellow, Woodrow Wilson International Center, Washington, DC Monday, November 23, 2009 @ 4:30pm Location: Anthropology Building, Room 206 In the winter of 2002, over fifteen-hundred audiotapes from Osama Bin Laden's former house in Qandahar, Afghanistan were acquired by Cable News Networks. This paper examines the contributions that these tapes offer to our understanding of al-Qa`ida. With attention in particular to Slavoj Zizek's concept of materialist theology, I examine the kinds of interpretive steps made by speakers in the tape collection to channel legal discourses toward a more disparate and accessible range of ethical frameworks than has commonly been available to Muslim activists. This event is co-sponsored by The Department of Anthropology, The Department of Religion and The Claus M. Halle Institute for Global Learning. This lecture is co-sponsored by the Program in Linguistics The Department of English 2009-10 Kemp Malone Lecturer Kirsten Silva Gruesz Professor of Literature University of California-Santa Cruz "Cotton Mather's Spanish Lessons."Monday, November 16, 2009 @ 4:15pmLocation: Winship Ballroom There will be a reception following this event. "Linguistics, Schizophrenia, and Computers: Measuring Linguistic Indicators of Mental Illness."Michael CovingtonSenior Research Scientist Associate Director, Institute for Artificial Intelligence University of Georgia Tuesday, November 3, 2009 @ 4:00 p.m. Psychology Building, Room 290 Schizophrenia is a chronic, disabling mental illness that affects about 1% of the population. Its most prominent sign is often impaired communication, but the impairment is usually quite different from any form of aphasia. This presentation is a survey of the field and a summary of results from my research program. Classically, people with schizophrenia "hear voices." i.e., cannot control their mental monologue. This is not externally observable. What is observable by the clinician usually comprises: (1) monotonous intonation; (2) over-association, i.e., distraction by unintended associations of one's own words; (3) a breakdown in discourse structure; and (4) somewhat less commonly, lexical impairments, especially "stilted speech" (use of rare synonyms for common words) and neologisms, transparent or obscure. Syntax and morphology are ruthlessly normal even in severe cases. Syntactic complexity is a little lower than normal, but this may well be due to difficulty framing complex content, not a syntactic impairment per se. Given that schizophrenia impairs language, can we detect it from computer analysis of the patient's speech or writing? That question is the main thrust of the Georgia research program, done in collaboration with GlaxoSmithKline (until 2005) and the University of Maastricht. In the Nun Study, Snowdon et al. (JAMA 1996) successfully predicted Alzheimer's Disease from writing samples taken 50 years before the onset of symptoms; however, their method required hand-coding of the idea density (propositional density) of the texts. We implemented a computer program, CPIDR, which rates idea density automatically, and, using it, found that in schizophrenia, idea density is not reduced. We also found that the drug ketamine, which inhibits a neurotransmitter thought to be deficient in schizophrenia, does reduce idea density; that is, it produces a different kind of language impairment. In schizophrenia, discourse structure falls apart; the patient wanders off his main point and never gets back to it. On this question, we do not have any finished results, but studies are in progress now. One hypothesis we are pursuing is that schizophreniform thought disorder can be detected by asking the patient to name all the objects in a picture, and checking whether all the prominent objects are in fact mentioned. This is known as the Salient Items Test and is known to work in severe cases; the question is whether it can pick up milder cases of the same impairment. Other tests of discourse coherence are possible. Elvevaag and others at NIMH have used latent semantic analysis to compare the vocabulary of successive segments of a long discourse. We are experimenting with simpler vocabulary-based techniques to do the same thing. The overall goal is to characterize mental illness through objectively measurable impairments. Insofar as this can be done, there are many benefits: the possibility of spotting mild or prodromal cases and intervening early; preservation of the dignity of the patient by separating mental illness from personality or personal opinions or tastes; and objective assessment of treatment and recovery at all stages. This event is co-sponsored by The Department of Mathematics and Computer Science and The Department of Psychology. Sept | Oct | Nov Wondering about Graduate Study???Have you been thinking about going to graduate school in Linguistics or related fields after finishing up at Emory? If so, you might want to talk more about this with faculty and other students.Profs. Tuten, Tamasi, Pak, and Wolff have organized an informal faculty panel to discuss this very top! Thursday, Oct 29 from 4:00 - 5:00 p.m. Modern Languages Building, Room 201 Key points of discussion will be, but not limited to:
"Discursive and Interdiscursive Constructions of Race and Ethnicity in Advertising"Shalini ShankarAssistant Professor, Anthropology Northwestern University Wednesday, October 28, 2009 @ 4:30 p.m. Location Anthropology Building, Room 206 While mass-mediated meanings of race and ethnicity circulate widely in the United States, less is known about the microlevel processes by which advertisers imagine and produce them. This paper examines how race and ethnicity are negotiated and constructed in the process of advertising production. I address two dimensions of this process: first, how general market advertisers who create ads for mainstream media sources envision and manage demands for greater diversity; and second, how advertisers in a niche market aimed at Asian Americans also talk about and negotiate race and ethnicity. I offer a semiotic approach to understanding ethnic and racial construction, illustrating how spoken discourse plays a central role in this process. Advertisers construct expertise based on their cultural heritage and linguistic skills and utilize notions of diaspora, belonging, and citizenship to imagine themselves and their audiences. While niche and general market advertisers apply distinctly different approaches to racial and ethnic representation, both can be understood as part of neoliberal shifts in public discourse that downplay racial difference and commoditize ethnicity. With both, I am interested in how advertisers construct their own subjectivity vis-à-vis the populations they wish to reach, and how these constructions can be understood in the context of neoliberal discourses of race, ethnicity, media, and the self. This event is co-sponsored by The Department of Anthropology, The Department of Film Studies and The Race and Difference Initiative.Preparing for a Career
Then this session is just for you!
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