Discourse as virtue ethics: Muslim women in the American Southwest

Abstract

This article examines naturally occurring speech among participants in a young women's halaqa, or study circle, at a mosque in the southwest United States to detail how "tactics of linguistic objectification" provide anchor points for ethical negotiations of difference. By focusing on linguistic micro-practices, including codeswitching and mock "foreign" accents, this paper brings a linguistic anthropological approach to bear upon this inquiry into discourse as a mode of phronesis. It is argued that, during informal conversation, core members of this group of largely second-generation immigrant women highlighted features of non-native English speech to monitor, examine, and mediate their own and their families' hypervisibility as U.S. Muslims. As policy and public opinion paint a picture of Muslims as an existential threat to the west, these women's language use, narratives and laughter act as ingroup responses to social scrutiny that makes acknowledgement and normalization of Muslim difference obligatory. This article is published as part of a collection on discourse studies.

Truth after post-truth: for a Strong Programme in Discourse Studies

“…While these clashes, it seems, have pushed both discourse and conversation analysts back into their respective specialised niches, with a structuralist account of Truth for discourse researchers and a pragmatist account of a plurality of truths for conversation analysts, such an opposition is neither necessary nor productive (cf. Taha, 2017). Yet upon closer inspection, Schegloff's argument was meant to be a methodological, not an ontological one.…”