Like a Politics of Love: Social Justice Activism and Affective Engagements at UC Berkeley

TY - ABST

T1 - Like a Politics of Love: Social Justice Activism and Affective Engagements at UC Berkeley

AU - Anbert, Lærke Cecilie

AU - Clemensen, Nana

PY - 2023/8

Y1 - 2023/8

N2 - At UC Berkeley, like elsewhere in the world, students are concerned with social (in)justice at their university. This is evident in discussions focusing on choice of curricula and how to teach about the settler colonial (past) of USA and of UC Berkeley. Some students are working to influence these discussions through ongoing demands to lecturers, administration and fellow students to focus more on inclusion and creating feelings of belonging for all students on campus. This work is strongly inspired by poststructuralist theory insisting that language creates reality, thereby placing special demands on the social and linguistic behavior of all parties involved. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in 2021-22, this presentation examines how love and forgiveness was hailed as a dogma among students at UC Berkeley, as a political strategy to create feelings of belonging. We focus particular on how this politics of love effects language activism among students at UC Berkeley and the vulnerabilities, paradoxes and insights this focus on language entails. We show how the students work with socially just and acceptable language use as a fundamentally changeable practice that is continuously negotiated.Drawing on literature on affect, we home in on the students' cultivation of collective forms of expression and ask what role love plays in creating a more socially just university (cf. Ahmed 2007, Lorde 1984, Pryse 2000). Further, based on linguistic anthropological approaches – including feminist linguistics and queer linguistics (Cf. Butler 1997, Cameron 1998) – and studies of language activism, performativity and social communities (Avineri et al. 2019, Årman 2021), we explore the students' linguistic practices and negotiations in interaction with the social, political, institutional and structural conditions that surround them.

AB - At UC Berkeley, like elsewhere in the world, students are concerned with social (in)justice at their university. This is evident in discussions focusing on choice of curricula and how to teach about the settler colonial (past) of USA and of UC Berkeley. Some students are working to influence these discussions through ongoing demands to lecturers, administration and fellow students to focus more on inclusion and creating feelings of belonging for all students on campus. This work is strongly inspired by poststructuralist theory insisting that language creates reality, thereby placing special demands on the social and linguistic behavior of all parties involved. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in 2021-22, this presentation examines how love and forgiveness was hailed as a dogma among students at UC Berkeley, as a political strategy to create feelings of belonging. We focus particular on how this politics of love effects language activism among students at UC Berkeley and the vulnerabilities, paradoxes and insights this focus on language entails. We show how the students work with socially just and acceptable language use as a fundamentally changeable practice that is continuously negotiated.Drawing on literature on affect, we home in on the students' cultivation of collective forms of expression and ask what role love plays in creating a more socially just university (cf. Ahmed 2007, Lorde 1984, Pryse 2000). Further, based on linguistic anthropological approaches – including feminist linguistics and queer linguistics (Cf. Butler 1997, Cameron 1998) – and studies of language activism, performativity and social communities (Avineri et al. 2019, Årman 2021), we explore the students' linguistic practices and negotiations in interaction with the social, political, institutional and structural conditions that surround them.

M3 - Konferenceabstrakt til konference

T2 - MEGA Seminar 2023

Y2 - 21 August 2023 through 23 August 2023

ER -