Alim, H. Samy. "Occupy Language." The Opinionator (December 21, 2011)
Bazerman, Charles. "Talk of Anti-Semitism is Filled with Doublespeak and Doublethink." The Daily Doublespeak (February 14, 2019)
Crandall, Chris, Erin Kearns and Muniba Saleem. "The Weight of Our Words." Hidden Brain (April 13, 2018) ["... we look at the language we use around race and religion, and what it says about the culture we live in."]
Crawford-Roberts, Ann, et al. "George Floyd's Autopsy and the Structural Gaslighting of America." Scientific American (June 6, 2020) ["The weaponization of medical language emboldened white supremacy with the authority of the white coat. How will we stop it from happening again?"]
Eco, Umberto. "Senses of Semantics." Harvard University Press Blog (January 24, 2014)
Eisenstein, Charles. "The Ubiquitous Matrix of Lies" Reality Sandwhich (June 24, 2009)
Ellerby, Kara and Sumita Mukherjee. "How Empire Uses ‘Feminist’ Branding to Sell War and Occupation." Citations Needed #65 (February 6, 2019) ["Since the dawn of the American Empire, thin moral pretexts in our politics and press have been used to justify our wars and conquest. The invasion of Cuba and Philippines in 1898 was declared to be a fight for freedom from Spanish oppression. Vietnam was about stopping Communist tyranny. The pioneer myth of Manifest Destiny and “westward expansion” was built about “taming” and “civilizing’ the land from violent savages. But one current that flows through all of these imperial incursions has been the idea that the United States – as well as its allies the Great Britain and Israel – are out to protect women. Today's endless occupations in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan are, in large part, justified in perpetuity because the United States is a self-declared, unique protector of modernity and women’s rights. All the same, the Pentagon is increasingly promoted, in press releases and media puffy pieces, as a place where women can exercise their agency: the ultimate apex of meritocracy and a vanguard of equality. But what if this approach misses the point of equality altogether? What if this is simply a craven branding exercise, putting a liberal face on what is a fundamentally oppressive system of violence? On this episode, we explore various ways women’s rights and empowerment has been used to sell colonial objectives and how one can differentiate between actual progress and the superficial language of inclusion used cynically in service of mechanized violence."]
Fields, Karen E. and Barbara J. Fields. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in America. Verso, 2012. ["Most people assume that racism grows from a perception of human difference: the fact of race gives rise to the practice of racism. Sociologist Karen E. Fields and historian Barbara J. Fields argue otherwise: the practice of racism produces the illusion of race, through what they call “racecraft.” And this phenomenon is intimately entwined with other forms of inequality in American life. So pervasive are the devices of racecraft in American history, economic doctrine, politics, and everyday thinking that the presence of racecraft itself goes unnoticed. That the promised post-racial age has not dawned, the authors argue, reflects the failure of Americans to develop a legitimate language for thinking about and discussing inequality. That failure should worry everyone who cares about democratic institutions."]
Giroux, Henry A. "Racism and the Aesthetic of Hyperreal Violence: Pulp Fiction and Other Visual Tragedies." Social Identities 1:2 (1995): 333-354.
Johnson, Walter, et al. "To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice." Boston Review (February 20, 2018)
Lakoff, George. "How to Use the Language of “Systemic Causation” To Talk About Climate Change." Uprising Radio (November 1, 2012)
Language: A Feminist Guide ["This is a feminist blog about language (in fact, mostly the English language), written by a feminist who’s also a linguist. In this space I’ll try to address some frequently asked questions, debunk some common myths, and ponder some of the linguistic dilemmas confronting feminists in the 21st century."]
Leary, John Patrick. "'Meritocracy' Doesn't Mean What You Think It Means." On the Media (March 15, 2019) ["This week, fifty people were charged by federal prosecutors in a college admissions scandal. As the public dug into the details of how wealthy parents made payments to help their students get into elite (and not so elite) universities around the country, some of the discussion centered around "the myth of meritocracy" in the United States. The trouble is, the myth of "meritocracy" goes much deeper than this story. The word was actually coined as satire in 1958 by the British sociologist Michael Young, who was criticizing the role that the UK's elite education system had in shaping the hierarchy of British society. This week, Bob speaks with John Patrick Leary about the satirical origins of the word and what it has come to mean in the US. He says there are actually two myths: "the myth that there is such a thing, and the myth that the United States is committed to that imaginary thing." Leary is a professor of English at Wayne State University and author of Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism."]
Manne, Kate, et al. "The Logic of Misogyny." Boston Review (July 11, 2016)
McAlevey, Jane. "It's Time to Retire the Term 'Middle-Class.'" Citations Needed #91 (October 23, 2019) ["The term “middle class” is used so much by pundits and politicians, it could easily be the Free Space in any political rhetoric Bingo card. After all, who’s opposed to strengthening, widening, and protecting the “middle class”? Like “democracy,” “freedom,” and “human rights”, “middle class” is an unimpeachable, unassailable label that evokes warm feelings and a sense of collective morality.
But the term itself, always slippery and changing based on context, has evolved from a vague aspiration marked by safety, a nice home, and a white picket fence into something more sinister, racially-coded, and deliberately obscuring. The middle class isn’t about concrete, material positive rights of good housing and economic security––it’s a capitalist carrot hovering over our heads telling us such things are possible if we Only Work Harder. More than anything, it's a way for politicians to gesture towards populism without the messiness of mentioning––much less centering––the poor and poverty. This week we are joined by Jane McAlevey, a union organizer, scholar and Senior Policy Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley’s Labor Center."]
Moody, Chris. "How Republicans are being taught to talk about Occupy Wall Street." Yahoo News (December 1, 2011)
The N Word (USA: Todd Nelson, 2004: 86 mins)
Parks, Tim. "In Praise of the Language Police." New York Review of Books (January 23, 2013)
Popova, Maria. "Famous Advice on Writing: The Collected Wisdom of Great Writers." Brain Pickings (May 3, 2013)
Rafael, Vincente. "Translation in Wartime." Arcade (2008)
Roberts, Paul Craig. "Our Time of Universal Deceit Needs an Orwell." Foreign Policy Journal (March 14, 2011)
Robinson, Andrew. "Bakhtin: Dialogism, Polyphony and Heteroglossia." CeaseFire (July 29, 2011) ["In the latest addition to his A-Z of Theory series, political theorist Andrew Robinson introduces, in a two-part essay, the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, one of the most important theorists of discourse in the twentieth century."]
"Sapiosexuality." Dialogic (January 10, 2012)
Sen, Rinku. "Drop the I-Word: In Victory for Advocates, Associated Press Stops Using Phrase 'Illegal Immigrant.'" Democracy Now (April 4, 2013)
Shovic, Charlene. "Contradicting Facebook: A Discourse Analysis." Vimeo (2011)
Siddiqi, Hishaam. "How to Talk about ISIS Without Islamophobia." Teen Vogue (July 18, 2016)
Vargas, Jose Antonio. "'Illegal' vs 'Undocumented.'" On the Media (September 28, 2012)
Weinberg, George. "In Defense of 'Homophobia.'" On the Media (December 7, 2012)
"We Need to Talk About Rape." Language: A Feminist Guide (October 25, 2019)
West, Lindy. "Fuck Your Delicate Sensibilities, I'm Going to Swear as Much as I Want." Jezebel (May 15, 2013)
West, Stephen. "Antonio Gramsci on Cultural Hegemony." Philosophize This! #131 (May 23, 2019) ["Gramsci begins his explanation by evoking and repurposing a word that had been thrown around all throughout human history but it was a word that he thought in recent years was starting to take on an entirely new meaning. The thing that was responsible for allowing a particular social class to ascend to power and then maintain a privileged status…was what he called Cultural Hegemony. This concept of hegemony is going to become massively important to the political conversation of the 20th and 21st centuries and by the end of this arc of the show we’re going to have looked at it from a lot of different perspectives. Maybe we should start from the origins of the word…the word hegemony originates in ancient Greece…the root of the word comes from the greek word meaning “to lead”, some translators say it’s closer to “to rule over”…but either way during antiquity there were things called hegemons…now in the context of ancient Greece a hegemon was typically a state that had a significant military advantage over another state…the arrangement being that if the weaker state didn’t comply with certain demands from the hegemon they would be annexed or dominated militarily or burned to the ground, take your pick. The term hegemony implied the threat of physical dominance over a population of people…this was the case all throughout human history. But Gramsci is going to say that in our modern world the definition of the word hegemony needs to evolve with the political reality we are living in. We are no longer living in a world where most political control is exercised by military dominance over a population of people. Since the advent of mass media people in positions of power have realized that a much more effective way of controlling populations is by manipulating the cultural parameters that citizens have to navigate. The general idea is this: to be a human being living a life in our modern world…you always HAVE to be living that life immersed within a particular culture. But what IS a culture other than an elaborate collection of norms, rules, structures, mores, taboos, rituals, values, symbolic gestures…these things are not exactly abstract concepts…they are acute. They are visible. This is the cultural custom of a handshake to pay deference to someone else. This is not talking with your mouth full. This is the sum total of every ritual we engage in on a daily basis that all come together to create a cohesive society. But what Gramsci is going to ask is: who exactly created all of these norms and taboos that we abide by?"]
---. "Derrida and Words." Philosophize This (June 25, 2018)
---. "Structuralism and Context." Philosophize This (January 28, 2018) ["On this episode, we talk about the origins of Structuralism. Included is a discussion on the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, (born Nov. 26, 1857, Geneva, Switz.—died Feb. 22, 1913, Vufflens-le-Château), Swiss linguist whose ideas on structure in language laid the foundation for much of the approach to and progress of the linguistic sciences in the 20th century."]
Williams, Margot. "At Guantanamo Bay, Torture Apologists Take Refuge in Empty Code Words and Euphemisms." The Intercept (January 29, 2020)
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