(By Joshua Babcock, Maureen Kosse, and Wee Yang Soh, Lead Organizers, Talking Politics 2023)
What role do media play in shaping global political landscapes? How do media affect who gets included and who gets excluded? Why do some political issues receive attention while others do not?
Talking Politics 2020: The Origin Story
When this series started in 2020, the U.S. was ramping up for a presidential election that would decide whether Donald Trump would spend a second term in the White House. Regardless of political party affiliations or personal values, the stakes felt high. For many people, the stakes felt higher than usual, even if the possibility of his re-election posed different threats to different individuals and groups.
The stakes felt high outside the U.S., too. Members of the inaugural Talking Politics 2020 saw, heard, and experienced the many, divergent ways that the U.S. presidential election mattered outside the country. We heard face-to-face talk in Singapore, Denver, Chicago, or Beijing; we read endless discussions on television, radio, podcasts, and blogs; and saw countless posts on social media platforms. Everywhere we looked, it was clear that the world was watching, listening, looking—and responding.
Talking Politics 2023: The Reboot
Against this backdrop, Talking Politics 2023 has been reborn. Like in 2020, we pay attention to the politics of language and the uses of language in politics. All language is political, and all politics involve language. But this doesn’t necessarily mean what we think it means. You’ve probably heard of dog whistles, echo chambers, euphemisms, hair-splitting, and other linguistic chicanery.* All of these (and more) are important. But equally important are the things we aren’t aware of—and in many cases, are actively trained not to notice even when they’re right in front of us. These include things like word choice, gesture, pitch, intonation, and speed; but they’re also things like choice of language(s), dialect(s), and accent(s); as well as the inability to choose—to only have one language, dialect, and/or accent. All are consequential, but not all rise to the level of awareness in the same way.
In 2023, there isn’t “One Big Thing” in global politics, or one overwhelming center of gravity that distorts our linguistic, cultural, and political space-times by drawing all the attention, all the energy, all the organizing, all the commentary. In many ways, what it means to talk politics in 2023 is more complex than it was in 2020. At the same time, it’s not. By expanding our frame beyond the U.S. and beyond partisan politics in a narrow sense, the series engages with the global dynamics that were already present both in 2020 and long before.
In Talking Politics 2023, we’re excited to bring together experts from the academy and beyond to share their distinctive analytic perspectives on political communication in the world today. The events in our online series will focus not only on pressing “current affairs” and “politics” in a narrow sense—like elections, political parties, and institutions—but also on “the political” and “politics” in an expansive sense. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic; the Russia-Ukraine War; global contests over the meanings and practices of “left” and “right” in the political spectrum; the rise and fall of fascistic political regimes globally; continued attacks against LGBTQ+ people by individuals and institutions; ongoing challenges over the status of “mother tongues” and “indigenous languages” for the state, schools, and society; hyperlocal demonstrations and forms of political participation that take aim at the very meaning of democracy—all these and more will be part of the conversations that we will open up over the coming months.
Talking Politics 2023: The Series and Themes
Together, the series will ask: what is a voice? Who has a voice, whether individual or collective? Who does not—that is, who has been silenced? How? Why? With what effects? And how do we know, diagnose, analyze, and undo the silences that get enforced across geographical and social sites? Here, we follow scholars, analysts, and activists in the humanities, social sciences, and beyond who consider “silence” not as an objective state or the simple lack of something, but as a trace of something whose existence is marked by its very absence—something that has plenty of empirical evidence, but which we have been trained, incentivized, or conditioned not to see.
We will also collectively explore the questions: what is a medium, and what are media? We will look beyond “the media”—or media industries—to consider a broader scope of media, medium (referred to as “media” in the plural, like writing, images, memes, speech, etc.), and all forms of mediation, broadly. Mediation in a broad sense includes language as a key component—whether spoken, written, signed, recorded, posted online, etc.—but language is only ever one part of the broader puzzle, if still an important one. Conceptual categories, visual design, the structure of an event, the organization of an institution—all of these (and more) act as media and involve mediation, too.
Talking Politics 2023 is organized by a team of graduate students and early-career scholars in the University of Chicago’s Department of Anthropology and the University of Colorado Boulder’s Program in Culture, Language, and Social Practice (CLASP). This interdisciplinary series invites the public to experience and learn how language, culture, and media shape real-world political communication. The series is sponsored by the Center for the Study of Communication and Society at the University of Chicago, the Program in Culture, Language, and Social Practice (CLASP) at the University of Colorado Boulder, and the Society for Linguistic Anthropology.
Check out the schedule for the full list of presenters, topics, and formats. Each Talking Politics event will feature both findings and conclusions together with demonstrations of the types of data and methods of analysis that experts use in studying political communication. Attendees will also be able to engage with presenters and other series participants through live Q&A. Register to receive regular updates about the series, presenters, and related content.
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The Talking Politics 2023 Organizing Team
Sarah Adams (CU Boulder)
Kate Arnold-Murray (CU Boulder)
Molly Hamm-Rodríguez (CU Boulder)
Jacob Henry (CU Boulder)
Rebecca Lee (CU Boulder)
Roberto Young (UT Austin)
Yukun Zeng (UChicago)
Further Resources
Check out the official Talking Politics 2020 Press Release for more information about the inaugural series, organized in memory of Michael Silverstein (1945–2020).
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Notes
* “Chicanery” [noun] means trickery or deception, often willful, and often used for political, financial, or legal ends. Pro tip for the SATs, GREs, O-Levels, or other standardized tests that purport** to measure “academic/intellectual preparedness” and/or “verbal ability.”
** “Purport” [verb] means to claim that one is or has done something, usually falsely.
Obviously, you can Google the definitions yourself. We chose these words both because they’re silly/fun, and because they highlight how language can come to matter beyond what we usually think about as “politics.”
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