Becky L. Schulthies
American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow 2010
Department of Anthropology
Brown University
becky_schulthies@brown.edu
PhD, Linguistic Anthropology (University of Arizona) 2009
Interests:
My interest as a scholar revolves around the intersection of media and language ideologies in the Middle East, in particular the impact of satellite television on family interpretive strategies and domestic cultural production in Morocco and Lebanon. I focus on the everyday domestic contexts, linguistic mechanisms, and discursive frameworks activated by urban Moroccan and Lebanese families in media engagements. Through domestic ethnography of pan-Arab and national entertainment, religious and news programming reception, I explore functional literacies tied to intervisual cues and the management of intergenerational authority; language ideologies and the negotiation of gender roles through morality socialization; and how media reception has influenced domestic cultural production. My research contributes in new ways to debates on Arabic language change by examining the range of ideologies and identities associated with language features and the contexts in which particular dialects are activated. In addition, it adds to the ethnography of media reception by exploring the cultures of circulation at the nexus of local, national, regional and global cultural flows.
Current research interests include how Moroccan television producers are adapting, through enregisterment processes, older performance language genres (such as storytelling) to modernizing projects, and the interdiscursive gaps recognized and revalorized by Moroccan viewers.
Teaching:
Linguistic Anthropology, Media Anthropology, Mass Media in the Middle East, Language and Gender, Peoples of the Middle East, Anthropological Methods, North African Ethnography and History, Cultural Anthropology.
