Oral Presentation Session

Reviewed by: Society for Linguistic Anthropology

Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists, Students

Primary Theme: Identity and Equity

Secondary Theme: Labor

(5-0220) The Politics of Language in NGOs: Communicative and Ideological Practices

This panel examines the communicative processes through which actors in NGOs generate, adapt, or resist forms of ideology, authority, and personhood.
The anthropological study of NGOs has emphasized the great deal of ideological work involved in sustaining the state/civil society binary (Grewal and Bernal 2014; Sharma 2008; Bornstein and Sharma 2016; Ferguson and Gupta 2002). While much work has shown how NGOs’ broader discursive projects of “development,” “conservation,” or “empowerment” often result in various forms of political economic dispossession (Elyachar 2005; Radcliffe 2015; Tsing 2005), many questions remain concerning how such ideological projects are maintained through the complex communicative work that takes place in the everyday interactions between NGO workers and their “target” populations (Pigg 2001; Lewis and Mosse 2006). In the Global South, such “technologies of talk” (Gal, Kowalski, and Moore 2015) often must be cultivated within spaces of dense multilingualism and linguistic diversity.
This panel explores forms of discourse and communicative practices within NGOs across India, the United States, and Africa, whose work concerns topics ranging from environmental conservation, gender, intersectionality, labor and wage disputes. Close attention to the linguistic dynamics present within NGOs offers a window into how both NGO workers and their “beneficiaries” reconstitute the practices of development, conservation, and activism. Across these diverse projects, this panel investigates how NGO practices may be shaped by the language ideologies and linguistic repertoires of their staff and/or the people they aim to serve.

Organizer(s)

• Hannah Carlan

  PhD Candidate
  University of California, Los Angeles - Department of Anthropology

Chair(s)

• Hannah Carlan

  PhD Candidate
  University of California, Los Angeles - Department of Anthropology

Presenter(s)

• Hannah Carlan

  PhD Candidate
  University of California, Los Angeles - Department of Anthropology

Organizer(s)

• Rosalie Edmonds

  Doctoral Candidate
  University of California, Los Angeles

Chair(s)

• Rosalie Edmonds

  Doctoral Candidate
  University of California, Los Angeles

Presenter(s)

• Rosalie Edmonds

  Doctoral Candidate
  University of California, Los Angeles

• V Varun Chaudhry

  Northwestern University

• Maansi Parpiani

  PhD Fellow
  University of Copenhagen

• Jessica Pouchet

  Postdoctoral Fellow
  Northwestern University

• Thor Sawin

  Associate Professor
  Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey

Discussant(s)

• Stacy Pigg

  Professor of Anthropology
  Simon Fraser University

Presentations:

• 8:00 AM - 8:15 AM

  Women Farmers and the Languages of Sustainable Agriculture in Himachal Pradesh, India
  Hannah Carlan – University of California, Los Angeles - Department of Anthropology
• 8:15 AM - 8:30 AM

  ‘Problems of Communication’: Institutional English and Decision-Making in Wildlife Conservation
  Rosalie Beth Edmonds – University of California, Los Angeles
• 8:30 AM - 8:45 AM

  Mobilizing Marginality: Institutionalizing “Intersectionality” in US-based LGBTQ Organizations
  V Varun Chaudhry – Northwestern University
• 8:45 AM - 9:00 AM

  Who Calls a Labour Helpline? NGO Discourses and Labour Market Stratification in Mumbai
  Maansi Parpiani – University of Copenhagen
• 9:00 AM - 9:15 AM

  It’s a State of Mind: Language, Uptake, and the Making of “Green Entrepreneurs” in Tanzania
  Jessica Pouchet – Northwestern University
• 9:15 AM - 9:30 AM

  When Parallel Monolingualisms Yield to Multilingualism: NGO ideologies in Central Asian indigenous/minority communities
  Thor A. Sawin – Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey
• 9:30 AM - 9:45 AM

  Discussion
  Stacy L. Pigg – Simon Fraser University