Meaning: Language and Socio-cultural Processes Seminar Series

Organization

• Corinne Kirchner and Harrison White, Organizers
• Iva Petkova, Program Coordinator

Overview

Languages contextualize behavior, whose socio-cultural patterns establish through discourse. The indexical and reflexive character of languages supplies evidence of underlying socio-cultural processes. This Workshop aims at operationalizing and specifying those and other core theoretical ideas.

The Workshop is designed to capitalize on the interdisciplinary potential among linguistics, social sciences and humanities in the study of meaning. We hope to develop more coherent understandings of institutions, coordination and of rhythms in system dynamics. The disciplines generally have moved toward understanding languages (more precisely, sub-languages) and social forms as socially-constructed; the next step points toward better understanding of the processes of social construction, for which meaning is central.

The Workshop takes an open stance to theoretical orientations and to the scale and domains of attendees' interest areas for applications. Spatial contexts can vary from, say, committee meetings to world system. Time contexts stretch from milliseconds to historical periods. Analyses may focus on meaning processes in markets, in the economic realm; or in the political realm, evidenced in hierarchy and state; or in the artistic realm, literary or other. In any of those, we can explore how distinct and disjunct realms of meaning establish themselves around emergent valuations - orders of worth. Innovative application of linguistics, among other strategies, can aid our understanding.