Research Seminar Series 2024
Time: 4-5 pm, Friday 11 June
Location: 12SW 558 or via Zoom: https://macquarie.zoom.us/j/88546604589?pwd=cFVqbmdCb2hvT04yRTliN1B6VVJtUT09 Password: 798325
Connecting discursive and material elements in the heating Arctic: A critical assemblage analysis
Sari Pietikäinen (University of Jyväskylä)
The accelerating climate change is four times faster in the Arctic than elsewhere in the world. In practice, this means that the landscape is changing in front of our eyes, and as a researcher, you are compelled to account for the connections between sociolinguistic, ecological, economic, and socio-political processes. In this talk, I discuss one possibility to examine these connections, provided by assemblage thinking (Deleuze and Guattari 1984). Aligned with the posthumanist approach, assemblage directs our attention to the interaction of material, discursive, and affective dimensions of an event, situation, or process, and their emergent, often ephemeral connections. Drawing on my ethnographic research on the Cold Rush, i.e., the intensified commodification of Arctic commons, I discuss the ways these connections together change and challenge values assigned to Arctic natural resources and produce emergent relationships and qualities that are neither fixed nor stable, yet politically, ecologically, and economically significant.
BioSari is a sociolinguist and discourse scholar whose research focuses on the power of discourse in revaluing natural resources, in knowledge production, and in the politics of language and identity. Using multiple approaches, including assemblage ontology, nexus analysis, critical discourse analysis, and ethnography, she has tracked shifts in language ideologies and identity categories in peripheries of nation-states in Western Europe, and examined the interaction between material, discursive and affective dimensions related to Cold Rush, an intensified transformation of the Arctic commons into commodities.
Sari has published widely on these topics, including Cold Rush: Critical Assemblage Analysis of a Heating Arctic (forthcoming, Palgrave Macmillan), Assemblage of art, discourse and ice hockey: Designing knowledge about work (2022, Journal of Sociolinguistics), Powered by assemblage: language for multiplicity (2021, International Journal of the Sociology of Language), Uusi kurssi kohti diskurssia (2019, with Anne Mäntynen), Critical Sociolinguistic Research Methods (2018, with Monica Heller and Joan Pujolar), Sociolinguistics from Periphery (2016, with Helen Kelly-Holmes, Alexandre Jaffe, and Nikolas Coupland). Sari works as a professor of Discourse Studies at the University of Jyväskylä and is co-Editor-in Chief for the Journal of Sociolinguistics