Discontinued Working Groups
Economic Media
The Economic Media Group looks at the interplay among economics, media, and information technology. While much of the current excitement about cryptocurrencies is making finance more democratic by "decentralizing finance," this usually means redistributing the profits of centralized institutions (e.g., banks) to the public. However, these proposals presuppose the maximization of monetary value, which often clashes with other qualitative values such as environmental well-being. How can we create holding environments that nurture alternative qualitative values before they are caught up in monetary quantization? The economic media group investigates the social implications of the new information and media technologies through a reframing of issues around affect, volatility, risk, resonance, and uncertainty.
Members:
Jonathan Beller, Professor of Humanities and Media Studies and Critical and Visual Studies, Pratt Institute
Dick Bryan, Professor Emeritus of Political Economy, University of Sydney
Benjamin Lee, Executive Vice-President of Center for Transcultural Studies, Professor of Anthropology and Philosophy, The New School for Social Research
Erin Manning, Professor of Studio Arts and Cinema, Concordia University
Brian Massumi, Professor of Communication Emeritus, Université de Montréal
Robert Meister, Professor of Social and Political Thought, Department of the History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz
Semiotics
The Semiotics Working Group was founded in the fall of 2020 and meets monthly. Most of the participants have been students or colleagues of Michael Silverstein, the late professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago.
Over a half century at the University of Chicago (1971–2020), Michael produced a body of work that fundamentally changed the place of linguistics in the human sciences, with foundational contributions to the understanding of language structure, sociolinguistics, and semiotics, as well as the history of linguistics and anthropology. In the 1980s and 1990s, Michael was also intermittently a fellow at the CTS and, with Greg Urban, co-directed the Center’s Language Group. Through the publication of several volumes on linguistic anthropology and psycholinguistics—including the groundbreaking The Natural Histories of Discourse(1996)—the language group has had a major influence on the development of semiotics and linguistic anthropology.
Cognizant of Michael Silverstein’s enduring legacy, the current Semiotics Group builds on the work of the Center’s fabled Language Group of the 1980s and 1990s. However, it has a new mission and agenda. With a diverse background ranging from Terra's work on non-propositional semiosis to Costas and Paul's analyses of indexicality and interpretants, and Greg's analysis of circulation, the group is exploring the possibility of a "continuous-time semiotics." Sound is a continuous-time phenomenon. Linguistics functions by segmenting sound into understandable units and organizing those units into grammar. This process—discretization via grammar—is captured in structural linguistics by the famous Saussurean distinction between paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes and in computational linguistics by the Chomsky hierarchy of grammars. But many of the poetic and creative features of language use cannot be easily segmented. Continuous-time phenomena like rhythm, harmony, and cadence confound linguistic frameworks based on discretization. The promise of analyzing these semiotic phenomena through a continuous-time framework is to understand how the “symbolic” and the “propositional” emerge as discretizations of semiotic processes.
Members:
Andrew Carruthers, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
Terra Edwards, Assistant Professor of Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago
Paja Faudree, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Brown University
Steven Feld, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology Emeritus, University of New Mexico; Senior Scholar, School for Advanced Research
William Hanks, Professor of Anthropology, University of California at Berkeley
Miyako Inoue, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Stanford University
Paul Kockelman, Professor of Anthropology, Yale University
Benjamin Lee, Executive Vice-President, Center for Transcultural Studies; Professor of Anthropology and Philosophy, The New School for Social Research
Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas, Assistant Professor of Spanish, Emory University
Kamala Russell, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Chicago
Kathleen Stewart, Professor of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin
Greg Urban, Arthur Hobson Quinn Professor of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania