Congratulations to Micho Min-Torresdey on winning this year's UC Human Rights Fellowship!

Our call for Kitchen Session presenters is open year-round. Kitchen Sessions provide a friendly, low-stakes setting where grad students and faculty can share raw ethnographic materials and collectively brainstorm directions for analysis. Presenters from any department are welcome. No background in linguistic anthropology is required, just an interest in exploring what this kind of approach to your materials can yield. Click here for more details.

Remember, grad students can get academic credit for attending the Linguistic Anthropology Workshop: 1 unit per quarter for up to 4 quarters. The course number is ANTH 241.

For the 2025-2026 academic year, Linguistic Anthropology is offering the following courses:
- ANTH 4. Words and Worlds: Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology (DEI; Yeh, winter)
- ANTH 279. Special Topics in Language & Society: Borders (Yeh, spring)

Emeritus Lab member John Haviland came out recently with two new essays: "'Nojon beel xal, xk'oon lok'el ts'in at'ele' (Me voy satisfecho, así llego bien en el trabajo): multimodal polyphonies, phatic communion, and metaconversation in a Tseltal encounter" and "Mastery, modality, and Tsotsil Coexpressivity" in Languages.

Rihan Yeh has a new essay on "Ghost Deixis and the Public Secret in Tijuana, Mexico" out in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. This is a piece 100% conceived of and developed in the Lab--thanks to everyone who made it possible!

Drew Kerr has accumulated a nice set of author interviews, plus a book review:
- Interview with Shenila Khoja-Moolji on Sovereign Attachments: Masculinity, Muslimness, and Affective Politics in Pakistan
- Interview with Moyukh Chatterjee on Composing Violence: The Limits of Exposure and the Making of Minorities
- Interview with Dan White on Administering Affect: Pop-Culture Japan and the Politics of Anxiety
- Interview with Marina Peterson on Atmospheric Noise: The Indefinite Urbanism of Los Angeles
- Review of Tarini Bedi's Mumbai Taximen: Autobiographies and Automobilities in India

Damini Pant also has a couple book reviews out, with more on the way:
- Review of Seeing Like a Smuggler: Borders from Below, edited by Mahmoud Keshavarz and Shahram Khosravi
- Review of Tiruvalluvar's The Book of Desire, translated by Meena Kandasamy

Sessions this quarter will mostly be Fridays 11-12:40pm; some will be hybrid and some Zoom only.

Kitchen session with Moon Pankam, (UCSD)
Afterworlds: Haunting, Tourism, and Ecological Futures in Post-Tsunami Southern Thailand
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Playing around with Canva: a design program for transcript layout
This session follows on Keith Murphy’s visit last year and anticipates his workshop at the end of the quarter. Canva is available here.
Fri, Jan 9

Joint session with Boston College’s Replays Interaction Lab (Chip Zuckerman et al)
We'll spend some time getting to know each other and sharing what we’ve been thinking about lately before digging into Stivers and Rossi’s article “Finding codability: Ways to code and quantify interaction for Conversation Analysts” (2025).
Fri, Jan 23 (Zoom only)

Courtney Handman, Circulations: Modernist Imaginaries of Colonialism and Decolonization in Papua New Guinea (University of California Press, 2025)
We will join the Virtual Reading Group on Communication, Media and Performance for discussion with Handman of her new book. Please note these sessions involve reading a chapter or two ahead of time.
Fri, Jan 30, 9-10am (Zoom only)

Dissertation chapter workshop with Fatimah Kanth, UCSD
History, Fragmentation and Political Subjectivity in Transnational Kashmir
Discussant: Christiane Assefa, CSU-San Marcos (by Zoom)
Jointly organized with the Critical Anthropology Workshop
Fri, Feb 13

Keith Murphy, UC Irvine
Methods session on design/layout for transcripts
Following on his workshop last year, Murphy will lead us in trying out Canva, which allows for the combination of visual, aural and written data. For context, see his article Transcription Aesthetics.
Fri, Feb 27