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In their studies of culture and society, many if not most scholars from the social sciences and humanities aspire to a critical approach. Recently, this practice of academic critique has become an object of study in its own right. Contributing to this "critique of critique," I propose ideas for a linguistic anthropology of critique. I suggest mobilizing the concept of text trajectory from the toolbox of critical ethnographies of language and deploying it to investigate the trajectories of those critical texts that social and cultural sciences produce. It then becomes clear that critique is not merely a certain genre of text, but is, rather, a specific manner in which texts become embedded in affective dynamics in trajectories of recontextualizations-in-performance. To capture this complex process, I introduce the concept of affective text trajectory. Based on ethnographic fieldwork on the role of language and affect at International Criminal Court proceedings in northern Uganda, this article describes the affective text trajectory of one of the author's blog posts. The author suggests that in order to assess the critical potential of a text, one should investigate how it becomes embedded in affective dynamics throughout its trajectory. • Linguistic anthropology should make academic critique an object of study. • Critique is not a textual genre, but an affectively embedded discourse practice. • A text's critical potential materializes in affective text trajectories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Este artigo objetiva explorar o entrecruzamento de mobilidade de textos e relatos de mobilidade de corpos, analisando marcas de diferença raciais, nacionais e de gênero na trajetória textual de uma postagem sobre “médicas cubanas” em mídia digital durante os primeiros dias de implementação do Programa Mais Médicos no Brasil, em 2013. Essa trajetória nos permite, por um lado, explorar o potencial explicativo das metáforas de escala e trânsito. Por outro lado, incluímos o debate feminista sobre intersecções e uma releitura feminista linguístico-antropológica dos processos de subjetivação. A análise aponta que as variações de escala se dão tanto no espaço quanto no tempo histórico do racismo brasileiro e que a circulação desses relatos de corpos e dos textos sobre eles aciona tanto sentidos sedimentados, “mulher negra como empregada doméstica”, quanto sentidos imprevisíveis, “mulher negra como médicas”, sobre o corpo da “mulher negra”. Nossas conclusões são: 1) a noção de escala ajuda a pensar os indiciamentos espaciais dentro das configurações históricas coloniais (racismo brasileiro, variação escalar regional nordeste/sudeste, nacional/transnacional); 2) a conexão entre corpos e textos não se limita a religar textos linguísticos, mas redes visuais de corpos e corpos vivos; 3) essas religações promovem ligações de dimensões aparentemente separadas, um multi-indiciamento que suplementa as interações, um deslizamento entre dimensões não estáveis de produções de sentidos. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

This article focuses on the regulation of student writing by exploring a specific form of such writing, the maturity test. In Finnish universities, the maturity test is a compulsory part of a bachelor's degree in which students demonstrate their familiarity with the topic of their bachelor's thesis, as well as their mother tongue skills. Maturity tests are written, revised and assessed in a multiphase process in which students receive both written and oral feedback on their texts before submitting the final version for acceptance. The focus of this paper is on feedback conversations between the student and the reviser. The questions explored are: (1) what aspects of the texts and their acceptability are brought up in the conversations and by whom, and (2) what kinds of normative systems do the participants orient to? The findings suggest that there are several kinds of these systems, and that the participants orient to polycentric systems of norms, which are tied to a various centring institutions. The data include regulatory documents, maturity tests, and feedback conversations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a case study on collaborative research writing in computer science, with particular focus on the researchers’ use of digital writing and social media tools. The research paper is still a prominent genre in the field, but technological advances such as the development of real-time collaborative writing tools and social media have created new opportunities for collaboration as well as the sharing of research results. This paper takes a closer look at how digital tools, particularly collaborative writing tools and Twitter, are utilised in the process of producing a research paper for publication, and how the authors and their colleagues view the role of such tools in the text production process. The data include a text history of a research paper, as well as research interviews with the main authors and their colleagues. The data have been approached from a local practices perspective, considering the paper as part of the writing practices of the multicultural research group where the authors worked. The interviews provide further perspectives on the researchers’ use of digital tools. The findings shed light on collaborative research writing practices, particularly how collaborative writing tools, which enable new practices such as synchronous writing, may not be utilised by the researchers in the ways intended by the developers. The findings also highlight the significance of social media tools, particularly Twitter, in post-publication activities, with important implications for researcher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How self-evident is a colonial rationality today? This paper begins by tracing a ‘text trajectory’ about nineteenth century imperialism and colonialism through several educational spaces: curricular guidelines, textbook, teachers’ reflections on history education, material discursive classroom interactions and pupils’ communication about the topic. In a first step, we observe how entrenched and common sensical a great-power discourse about imperialism and colonialism is in current educational practices. We suggest that pupils ‘hyperstate’ a discursive position on colonialism which appears shocking when stated explicitly, but which is already subtly entextualised in curricular and media discourse. However, in a second step, the analysis orients to the molecular lines and foldings, the unexpected intra-connections and unplanned ‘lines of flight’. In this way, the apparent stability of the colonial rationality begins to wobble (just slightly). The memory practices enacted by pupils, curricula, teachers, authors and the material affordances of textbooks repeat entrenched colonial hierarchies and racisms, ‘and also’ exceed any overly simple understanding of how colonial rationality plays out in contemporary discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Following Blommaert (2005), this paper examines what he calls a 'forgotten' context within Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Conversation Analysis (CA) - that of text trajectories. For Blommaert, a limitation of both CDA and CA is their focus on 'the unique, one-time' instance of a given text and, by extension, the (limited) context associated with such an instance of text. Such a focus, according to Blommaert, ignores a salient feature of communication in contemporary societies - the fact that texts and discourses move around, are repeatedly recontextualized in new interpretive spaces, and in the process undergo significant transformations in meaning. The text trajectory investigated in this paper begins in a legal institution, more specifically, with a 2004 American rape trial, Maouloud Baby v. the State of Maryland. This legal case garnered much media attention and, as a result of such exposure, references to the case have appeared in both mainstream and social media outlets. Hence, as a 'text' that has displayed considerable movement across different contexts within the legal system and, subsequently, beyond the legal system to mainstream and popular forms of media, the Maouloud Baby trial constitutes fertile ground for the exploration of a text's trajectory. Indeed, in keeping with Blommaert's claims, I show how this trial's 'text' undergoes significant transformations in meaning as it is recontextualized in different kinds of interpretive spaces (both within the legal system and outside of it) and how these transformations in meaning reproduce larger patterns of gendered inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]