Jan Blommaert (Memorial)
Department of Culture Studies
Tilburg University
The Netherlands
Jan Blommaert is Professor of Language, Culture and Globalization, and Director of the Babylon Center at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. He is of the world’s most prominent Sociolinguists and Linguistic Anthropologists, and has contributed substantially to sociolinguistic globalization theory, focusing on historical as well as contemporary patterns of language and literacy, and on lasting and new forms of inequality emerging from globalization processes.
Alexandra Georgakopoulou
King’s College London
London, England
Alex Georgakopoulou is Professor of Discourse Analysis & Sociolinguistics, King’s College London. She has developed small stories research, a paradigm for examining the role of everyday life stories in the (re)formation of social relations and identity politics. She has (co)authored several books that include Analyzing Narrative(with Anna De Fina, 2012, Cambridge University Press) & ‘Quantified Storytelling: A narrative analysis of metrics and algorithms’ (With Stefan Iversen and Carsten Stage, Palgrave, forthcoming). Her latest study of small stories has been carried out within the ERC project ‘Life-writing of the moment: The sharing and updating self on social media’ (www.ego-media.org).
Mobilizing Small Stories on Social Media
In the keynote, Professor Georgakopoulou will critically interrogate the designing spree of stories as specific features on social media platforms. She will present these directives and discuss their implications for how young people globally, the so-called Generation Z, are socialized into narrating their lives and making sense of themselves.
Dimitris Dalakoglou
Social Anthropology Department
Vrije University
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Dimitris Dalakoglou is Professor at Vrije University Amsterdam, where he holds the Chair of Social Anthropology. Since 2004 he is developing an anthropology of material infrastructures which most recently culminated to his current project infra-demos that studies democracy and infrastructures in Greece. He is director of the Lab on Mobility, Infrastructures, Sustainability and Commons (MISC Lab).
The Language of Commons at the Age of Infrastructural Gap
The West since the crisis of 2008 is facing an unrepresented infrastructural gap, this will become even more explicit and deep during the next crises and emergencies. Already since 2008 We are looking for answers to the domain of commons and social solidarity, thus resources that belong a priori in the realm of commons such as language acquisition and use. In this paper I wish to explore some ideas about commons and language based on ethnogrpahic research in Greece within the context of my project infra-demos.
