(SCOPUS/ISI) SOAS GLOCAL African Assembly on Linguistic Anthropology 2024

Date: 04-Dec-2024 - 07-Dec-2024
Location:  University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa
Contact Person: Nhan Huynh
Meeting Email: [email protected]
Web Site: https://glocal.soas.ac.uk/afala2024/

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics; Discourse Analysis; General Linguistics; Language Documentation; Sociolinguistics

Call Deadline: 01-Aug-2024

Official Website:https://glocal.soas.ac.uk/afala2024/cfp/ 

Main Hosts
the University of South Africa, and the GLOCAL, SOAS, University of London

Purpose and Structure
Over 400 scholars globally will present papers and engage in progressive discussion on the Linguistic Anthropology, Language and Society, and Sociolinguistics (and related fields) of Africa. The SOAS GLOCAL is a fully Non-Profit unit.

Chronotope
The University of South Africa, Pretoria, December 4-7, 2024.

Theme
The GLOCAL AFALA 2024 theme, Code and Commodification, as the New Decolonization, "Ikhodi kanye Nokuthengisa njenge decolonization Entsha," describes a process deeply connected to the commodification of language and cultural identities throughout African regions, as fertile climates for Linguistic Anthropological attention. The GLOCAL AFALA 2024 invites work that addresses the decolonization of African contexts through the complex appropriation of language and cultural code. The conference committee invites abstracts and proposals addressing the contribution of cultural and linguistic mixing to the decolonization of Africa, and the pinpointing of truths on identity, ethnicity, and nation, in a culturally complex Africa.

Conference Format

• General Papers (400+)
• Interviews (30+)
• Poster Presentations (150+)
• Methodology / Analysis Workshops (Endangered Languages Network, Globally Prominent Scholars)
• Talks
• Keynotes
• Anthropological Excursion
• Cultural Performances
• Anthropological Exhibitions
• Linguistics Exhibitions
• Displays

Publications
Ample assistance is provided to revise papers.
Proceedings book (SCOPUS / ISI (AHCI / SSCI / CPCI) indexed), contingent upon passing review criteria

Anthropological Excursion
Full-day excursion on December 7, 2024, the final day

Follow us

• Academia:https://soas.academia.edu/GLOCALSOAS 
• Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/thesoasglocal 

Call for Papers
URL for abstract submissions:https://glocal.soas.ac.uk/afala2024/submit 

Theme
Code and Commodification, as the New Decolonization
Ikhodi kanye Nempahla, njenge-Decolonization Entsha

The African context is complex, with a cultural diversity that far exceeds its geographical expanse. These diverse cultural scapes throughout the African continent and African diaspora globally overlap, yet so do African languages, dialects, sociolects, and genres. The infinitely diverse semiotics of these languages complexify that which is already complex.

Central to this complexity of African languages, language varieties, and ethnoscapes, is the ubiquitous mixing of language and cultural codes, which form the materiality of African identities. Sociocultural code-mixing can be contested, yet language code-mixing is widely seen as mandatory, to embody progressive, liberal, and anti-conformist African ideologies. Speakers language code mixing ubiquitously across African contexts, creating a commodity with which to legitimize emergent identities, in acts of decolonization, subverting essentialist representation of an old and new African cultural heritage and language practices, while drawing on millennia of transition and transformation.

Through the complexity of language code mixing, the speaker seeks to commodify cultural affordances, and in the process, to decolonize both region and mindset, as an interrogation of colonialist ideologies, and as a critical act of cultural and linguistic liberation. Such a liberation continuously re-emerges in the uniqueness of every African linguistic code, as a situated performance through which to reinvent each language variety as a fluid language scape. The mixing of language and cultural code is now a normative practice across African contexts, as vital to African politics of identity, and yet, it is complexified by new mobilities, technologies, migration, modalities, rewritten historiographies, colonized cum decolonized ideologies, scholarship, and so forth.

This complexity of African cultural and linguistic practice makes for a fertile ethnography. Through the tools of linguistic cultural anthropology, then, we can reframe such an ethnography of the commodification of code and cultural context, to ground understandings of the decolonization of Africa.

The GLOCAL AFALA 2024 theme,
Code and Commodification, as the new Decolonization
Ikhodi kanye Nempahla, njenge-Decolonization entsha

describes a process deeply connected to the commodification of language and cultural identities throughout African regions, as fertile climates for Linguistic Anthropological attention. Here, the GLOCAL AFALA 2024 invites work that addresses the decolonization of African contexts through the complex appropriation of language and cultural code. To this, the conference selection committee invites abstracts and proposals addressing the contribution of cultural and linguistic mixing to the current decolonization of Africa, that is, the pinpointing of truths on identity, ethnicity, and nation, and a culturally complex Africa.

While proposals and submissions must adhere to the theme Code and Commodification, as the new Decolonization, submissions can diversify the conversation through the complexity of the conference strands.

The University of South Africa, hosting the GLOCAL AFALA 2024 in Pretoria, South Africa, is one of an interchanging series of annual hosts, and in this way, the GLOCAL global network expands to involve institutions worldwide.

We thus welcome you to the AFALA 2024, the Annual African Assembly on Linguistic Anthropology in South Africa, and to the AFALA as a whole.

Professor Nompumelelo Zodwa Radebe

Chair
African Assembly on Linguistic Anthropology, the GLOCAL AFALA 2024

Chair
Department of Anthropology and Archaeology
University of South Africa