Linguistic Disruptions

Room Number: TRS 1-075

Join the Meeting: https://ryerson.zoom.us/j/94067252813?pwd=RG9JdGlSVlNFWlkzN0RlWXgrWTQ2QT09

Chair: Eva Ulrike Pirker (Heinrich Heine U Dusseldorf)

Speakers:

Rawan Althunyan (Durham U), “Disrupting Hegemonic Cultural Conventions: Language and Representation in Abodeham The Belt and Almoahaimeed’s Munira’s Bottle and Where Pigeons Don’t Fly”’

Maloba Wekesa (U Nairobi), “Vernacular Media Fragmenting Nationalism and Government Fight Back”

Paper Summaries:

Rawan Althunyan (Durham U), “Disrupting Hegemonic Cultural Conventions: Language and Representation in Abodeham The Belt and Almoahaimeed’s Munira’s Bottle and Where Pigeons Don’t Fly”’

My paper grapples with representations of boundaries and transgression and how language and silence shape these representations. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s perspective of language as a sociohistorical phenomenon and French feminists’ debates of ‘écriture féminine’, I will explore to which extent language can rupture cultural norms in the works of two male Saudi authors.

Maloba Wekesa (U Nairobi), “Vernacular Media Fragmenting Nationalism and Government Fight Back”

A discussion of power dynamics that exist between the Kenyan Government’s effort to promote national cohesion amid the threat of fragmentation by vernacular media houses which promote tribal pride content. The discussion is led through the lenses of critical discourse analysis viewing language as a tool of power aggregation.