Students and faculty working on our major research project, MI Diaries, were at the MSU Science Festival again this year. We talked with community members of all ages at the STEAM Expo Day on April 5, 2025.
Read more about it at the MI Diaries website.
We congratulate to the MSU German Studies program on their recent hire of Rose Fisher to a tenure track position starting August 2025. Rose Fisher is completing a PhD in Germanic Linguistics and Language Science at Pennsylvania State University under the direction of Michael T. Putnam. The focus of Rose’s doctoral work is morphophonological variation and change in Pennsylvania Dutch. As an L1 speaker of this minoritized German variety and a former member (until age 11) of an Old Order Amish community, Rose brings important sociocultural insights to her data collection and analysis. In addition to her work on inflectional morphology, she has published a general paper on Amish linguistic identity and was interviewed by the BBC about the Pennsylvania Dutch linguistic and cultural origins of Groundhog Day. She also has experience with dialect geography, having been a Visiting Junior Researcher at the Forschungszentrum Deutscher Sprachatlas (Research Center of the German Language Atlas) at the University of Marburg, Germany. The Sociolinguistics Lab looks forward to forging connections to Rose and her work in the years ahead!
Maeve Eberhardt (University of Vermont) is giving a talk as part of the MSU Linguistics colloquium at 3pm on Friday, October 11, 2024. (Fun fact: Maeve was lab member Emily Duggan‘s professor when Emily was an undergraduate student!). Linguistics colloquium talks are organized by MSU Linguistics graduate students. For Zoom details, please contact Jess Shepherd, sheph157@msu.edu.
From rights to justice for all: The discourse of abortion in old and new media
The overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court in 2022 (Dobbs v. Jackson) has had a profound impact on the ability to access abortion care across the United States. With the removal of legal protections at the federal level, nearly two dozen individual states swiftly passed legislation that banned abortion within their borders. In this talk, I probe the discourses circulating around and shaping the meaning of abortion in traditional and new media.
I first present the results of a study examining abortion in newspaper coverage directly following the Dobbs decision (Eberhardt, 2023). Using corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis, I show that while the mainstream press maintains a staunch position in favor of Roe, this is rooted in an abstract notion of rights, and obscures structural inequities of gender, race, and class. Furthermore, individuals enacting that right to abortion are deliberately legitimized within a neoliberal set of logics, and constructed as justified in making a ‘responsible’ calculated choice.
I use these findings as a point of entry into the discourse of #abortionrights on the social media platform Instagram (Eberhardt, under review). Multimodal critical discourse analysis reveals a distinctly different picture within this online space when responding to abortion legislation. Creators use a wide range of semiotic resources to craft engaging, informative, and affectively poignant responses. While #abortionrights on Instagram can reproduce a dominant narrative of white feminism in a similar way to traditional news media, it simultaneously enables the circulation of transgressive messaging, bringing intersectional feminism into sharp focus. Posts are laced with demands for broad acknowledgement that rights do not equal access, that abortion is not something that needs to be legitimized, and that the capacity to act is inequitably distributed across the populace in ways that compound existing structural oppressions. I argue that this is the promise of social media: creators are able to reach a wide audience through invocation of dominant framing (here, a rights-based understanding of abortion), only then to upend that narrative via the democratized space of online platforms. In this way, social media, despite its drawbacks, has the potential to contribute to a larger activist agenda that moves us towards social justice and change.
On October 9th, Dr. Sarah Bunin Benor (Vice Provost and Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (LA) and Adjunct Professor in the University of Southern California Linguistics Department) will present a talk titled Beyond bagels and burekas: American Jewish language and identity. The talk will be from 5:30-7:00pm in B-342 Wells Hall. Dr. Benor is hosted by the Michigan State University Jewish Studies program, and her visit is co-sponsored by us, the MSU Sociolinguistics Lab. An abstract of Dr. Benor’s talk is below.
Sociolinguistics Lab co-director Suzanne Evans Wagner was featured in Michigan State University’s main news publication, MSU Today, at the end of May.
The story, “Understanding the language of change through linguistics” is an introductory overview of what sociolinguistics is, how Dr. Wagner came to join the field, and a little bit about some of the work we’ve done in the lab on sound change in Michigan. The short video captures only a tiny part of the bigger picture, but the main takeaway is that sociolinguists seek to understand how speakers use language to reflect and construct their identities, and that these actions contribute to language change over time.
The story is also on the College of Arts and Letters website, but this time with some great photos of members of the Sociolinguistics Lab! Below, you can see Dr. Irina Zaykovskaya with Suzanne.
