Dr. Zentz specializes in the study of language use in contexts of online communication, political activism and news media, and the relation of such language use to relation to nationalism, politics, and identity work.
"Empathy is really the primary word that comes to mind. Anthropology has afforded me the opportunity to travel to many places, from halfway across the world to my own backyard, and it has called on me to seek to understand others, and to understand myself in relation to others."
Dr. Lauren Zentz
Publications
UPPER HEADLINE
Narrating Stance, Morality, and Political Identity
Building a Movement on Facebook
Book Description
This book offers unique insights into the use of Facebook after the 2016 US presidential election, interrogating how users in private groups draw on individual experiences in movement building and identity construction while also critically reflecting on ethnographic practices around social media.
The volume draws on the author’s own involvement in a specific Facebook group focused around activism and community organizing in Texas following the 2016 US presidential election. Chapters draw on the frameworks of "small stories" and "stance" to unpack the ways in which group members use parts of their individual stories to signal beliefs to others, present themselves in relation to the group, and signal virtues of moral authority on various pressing political issues. Building on these analyses, Zentz goes on to address ways in which the scales of politics are being navigated and modified at the grassroots level in our highly networked world. This book contributes to ongoing conversations about the realities of internet use within linguistic anthropology and new media studies, and how researchers might seek to account for social media use and access to this data as these technologies develop further.
This book is key reading for students and scholars in linguistic anthropology, media studies, and activism and social movement studies.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 Biographies, Stance, and Moral Politics: Analyzing stories in an era of destabilized politics and communication
Chapter 2 Challenging Ethnography: The ethics and relationships of online research
Chapter 3 "Our newfound optimism in democracy": Small stories of moral inspiration, epistemic authority, and affective appeal
Chapter 4 "You are a beautiful, talented, brilliant, powerful musk ox": Alignment, collaboration, and bonding in the formation of a group identity online
Chapter 5 "25 doors please": Keeping boots on the ground and fingers on the phone in a networked nation
Chapter 6 Biographies, Stance, and Moral Politics: Saving the nation in the social media age
Statehood, Scale, and Hierarchy
History, Language, and Identity in Indonesia
Against the background of language and nation formation in Indonesia, this book demonstrates how language planning is inseparable from the broader actions of the state, and how postcolonial nationalism and globalization have had profound implications for language use and state actions to control it. Using language planners’ texts, national and regional policy statements and the discussions of university English majors, it explores the borders of what can be defined as Indonesian, Javanese and English languages, and how this is informed by ideologies of language and nationalism in contemporary Indonesia. The tensions played out in the book between the ideologically perceived languages around which policies are built and the realities of linguistic performance and the resources of the individual are echoed across the globe, making this book crucial reading for anyone interested in the interplay of language planning and language use.
Zentz’s rigorous scholarship presents a powerful, fine-grained, richly detailed, ethnographically insightful, and theoretically compelling study of language practices and policies situated in the complex web of social, historical, and political dynamics of local, national and global forces in contemporary Indonesia.
Perry Gilmore
The University of Arizona, USA
Lauren Zentz uses sophisticated theory and methods to offer highly accessible, yet incredibly nuanced insights into the relationships between language and globalization. The book offers a brilliant account of university students’ ideologies about Indonesian, Javanese, and English, and how these ideologies are mediated by other language ideologies from diverse, constantly changing, and hierarchically organized scales. Zentz has written an instant classic that will secure a space on reading lists for a long time to come.
Zane Goebel
La Trobe University, Australia
Just brilliant. Zentz’s analysis is admirably nuanced, fresh and challenging. Her insight compels us to radically reconsider the familiar notions of social identity, institutionalised power, and the politics of languaging in a world dominated by English.
Ariel Heryanto
Monash University, Australia
In this powerfully written book, Lauren Zentz presents both a sociolinguistic ethnography and a sociolinguistic ethnohistory of shifting language positionalities in Indonesia. Against a backdrop of postcoloniality and globalization, she shows how ideology and access work to scale and re-scale linguistic ecologies and communicative repertoires, as languages are “created” and hierarchized in the context of nation-building. Eminently readable, this engaging account charts important new ground in critical applied linguistics and the ethnography of language policy.
