Liv Moeslund Ahlgren

Dan Everett on the ethics of linguistic fieldwork

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dan everett

 

One evening, Linea Flansmose Mikkelsen and Liv Moeslund Ahlgren met up in Lingoland at Aarhus University and set up a zoom-connection across the Atlantic Ocean to talk to Dan Everett. He is an American linguist, best known for his work on the Pirahã language, and is currently a professor at Bentley University. This is the second part of the interview, where we talk about the ethics of fieldwork, building relationships and the importance of seeing yourself as a student.

In the first part of the interview, we discussed Dan Everett’s career, motivations and his dream project.

You started your career as a missionary and ended up as a scientist. Can you tell us about some of the ethical … ↪

Dan Everett on the excitement of being a linguist

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dan everett

 

One evening, Linea Flansmose Mikkelsen and Liv Moeslund Ahlgren met up in Lingoland at Aarhus University and set up a zoom-connection across the Atlantic Ocean to talk to Dan Everett. He is an American linguist, best known for his work on the Pirahã language, and is currently a professor at Bentley University. This is the first part of the interview, where we talk about Dan Everett’s career, motivations and his dream project.

In the second part of the interview, we discuss the ethical aspects of doing fieldwork.

Can you tell a bit about yourself and how you got into linguistics?

Yeah, so I got into linguistics in order to be a bible translator. I met a young woman … ↪

Deborah Cameron on the impact of feminist linguistic research

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Deborah Cameron has studied language and gender for around 40 years. She has written numerous books on this topic, including The Myth of Mars and Venus (2007) and Language and Sexuality (2003). She is currently a Rupert Murdoch professor of Language and Communication at Worchester College, Oxford University. Apart from her academic work, she also engages in public communication about linguistic research and feminism.

Lingoblog.dk sent me out as their reporter to ask Deborah about her work, her thoughts about political science, and the impact of linguistic, feminist research. Hopefully her reflections can inspire our readers and provide new perspectives on how and why we do research.


Can you tell me something about how and why you engage in popularised … ↪

On some colonial power structures in the field of linguistics

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A central discipline within linguistics is language description, which in many cases is carried out by white, Western researchers doing fieldwork on languages that are not spoken in the West. It is no secret that this tradition has its roots partly in European colonization and partly in Christian missionary work. Many language descriptions have thus been motivated by the wish to describe and map out the cultures and areas that the Europeans colonized, and furthermore, language descriptions have acted as foundations for translations of the Bible in connection with Christian missionary work. Much of modern linguistics is built on the works of this tradition, but despite this, it has not has not confronted its colonial past as a scientific discipline. … ↪

When language becomes violence

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Anmærkning 2020 06 01 163929

Can language cause harm? Can a speech act be an act of violence? These are important questions – especially in times when citing the right to freedom of expression is used as a way to legitimize hate speech. This is a tactic employed by people like the Danish right-wing politician Rasmus Paludan (henceforth RP), who uses ‘freedom of speech’ as a shield to say very negative things about Muslims (among others). It is always interesting to expand your linguistic horizons, so in this blog post I will attempt to examine hate speech and linguistic violence with insights from affect theory and philosophy.

Harmful speech

To understand how language can be violence, let us begin by considering professor and philosopher Judith … ↪