Congratulations to English Department Professor Angela Reyes on her $19,999 award from the Wenner-Gren Foundation to hold the workshop:
"The Question of Nature in Linguistic Anthropology: Language Within and Beyond the Human."
The workshop will bring 11 scholars from the US, Canada, UK, Netherlands, and Philippines to Oberlin College in Spring 2026 to interrogate the ideological construction of nature through a linguistic anthropological approach.
Professor Reyes has been advising Hunter students, including those in the Linguistics and Rhetoric concentration of the English major, as they re-establish the Linguistics Club. If you are interested in learning more about the club and joining their email list, please send a message to: linguisticshunter@gmail.com.
The question of “nature” has been of broad, enduring interest in anthropology. Attention to nature has only intensified as anthropology increasingly expands outside of the human, be it forests (Kohn 2013), mushrooms (Tsing 2015), animals (Keane 2024), or chatbots (Handman 2023). However, linguistic anthropology has yet to consolidate:
- past and future genealogies of linguistic anthropological approaches to nature; and
- the semiotic constitution of nature through external and internal oppositions.
Interrogating the ideological construction of nature through a linguistic anthropological approach, this workshop aims to address these two topics as it clarifies how nature is configured as an object toward which value, action, or politics is formulated in matters of global urgency. Bringing together scholars grappling with these issues, we seek to build a linguistic anthropology of nature through focused discussion of case studies ranging from dogs, AI, and mold, to race, sexuality, and class. During two days of in-person meetings at Oberlin College, participants will workshop pre-circulated papers and engage in hands-on field trips with local faculty partners outside of anthropology in order to solidify a perspective informed by interdisciplinarity.
After the workshop, participants will revise their papers for a pathbreaking volume on the linguistic anthropology of nature.
