Gabriella Modan
Biographic Data
| ID | 112983 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gabriella Modan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gabriella |
| FAMILY NAME | Modan |
| SIGNATURE | MODAN G |
| AFFILIATIONS | The Ohio State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3184-3353 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 162 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Semiotics of a Covid landscape: Tactical urbanism in a pandemic
This paper brings together urban planning and linguistic perspectives to examine the semiotic landscape of a Washington, DC ‘streatery’ in the context of the intersecting public health- and place-based economic crises unleashed by the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing from Garay-Huamán and Irazábal-Zurita’s (2021) work on neoliberal Social Structures of Accumulation (SSA), we examine how different layers of Adams Morgan’s emergent Covid landscape are ro…
Signs at work: New labor relations and structures of feeling in Washington, D.C.’s Covid landscape
We use a geographically informed notion of landscape and Williams’ (1977) framework structure of feeling to examine ‘closed’, masking, and social distancing signs on businesses in the Washington, DC central-city neighborhood of Adams Morgan. We argue that the semantic content and discursive structure of the Covid signs, together with the in-the-moment feeling of walking down empty streets while a little-understood virus had just started raging, p…
Precarious Rhetorics
OUR COLLEC TION has come together in the midst of the rise of the global Right.It will likely be received and circulate in a global context wherein this ascendency has been consolidated through an entrenched hard-right populism, marked by xenophobia and racialized social orderings, and characterized by nativist, heteronormative, hypermasculine, and heteropatriarchal leadership styles and structures.Such structures are apparent in the authoritaria…
What to Do in DC-Day or Night
Writing the Relationship: Ethnographer-Informant Interactions in the New Media Era
With the ever-increasing accessibility of new communications media, there has been growing discussion among ethnographers about how new media data such as e-mails, SMS/texts, blogs, news article comment sections, or community group websites have impacted the practice of ethnography. Generally, questions center around the characteristics of the data itself. Less often discussed is the effect of new communications media on relationships between eth…
Positioning the interviewer: Strategic uses of embedded orientation in interview narratives
The structure and function of a sociolinguistic interview sets up a context that affords informants the opportunity to achieve their own goals. We examine how an informant manipulates the reception format of the speech event, using embedded orientation to characterize information as alternately given or new, and the interviewer consequently as an insider or outsider. Whereas previous analyses have examined how embedded orientation highlights or s…
Commodified language in Chinatown: A contextualized approach to linguistic landscape1
In Washington DC's newly gentrified Chinatown, recent commercial establishments, primarily non-Chinese owned chains, use Chinese-language signs as design features targeted towards people who neither read nor have ethnic ties to Chinese. Using this neighborhood as a case study, we advocate a contextualized, historicized and spatialized perspective on linguistic landscape which highlights that landscapes are not simply physical spaces but are inste…
Mango Fufu Kimchi Yucca: The Depoliticization of “Diversity” in Washington, D.C. Discourse
The rise of the commodified city has encouraged new attention to the symbolic systems that structure our understandings of difference and inequality in urban areas. This paper analyzes one of those systems, namely discourse. I examine how the term diversity has developed multiple meanings over the past 10 years in Mt. Pleasant, a gentrifying neighborhood in Washington, DC, and I trace these developments and their connections with changes in the l…
Turf Wars: Discourse, Diversity, and the Politics of Place
Contesting Public Space and Citizenship: Implications for Neighborhood Business Improvement Districts
While research on business improvement districts (BIDs) has considered the constraints BIDs can place on the negotiation of public space and citizenship, little work has focused on the process of establishing neighborhood BIDs (NBIDs), and few scholars have examined perceptions of public space held by actual neighborhood constituents. This article analyzes a participatory mapping project and messages on a neighborhood e-mail list to compare the v…
Public toilets for a diverse neighborhood: Spatial purification practices in community development discourse
This paper explores the dialectic of place and community identity in Mount Pleasant, a multi-ethnic and multi-class U.S. neighborhood where definitions of place are hotly contested among its residents. In a grant proposal for public toilets, Mount Pleasant writers use linguistic strategies such as presupposition, deixis, and contrast, coupled with discursive themes of filth and geography, to construct a core of the Mount Pleasant community. The w…
White, Whole Wheat, Rye: Jews and Ethnic Categorization in Washington, D.C
White is used to signify, often implicitly, a number of qualitatively different phenomena, thereby masking both different and similar positionalities between and within ethnic groups. In Jewish Washingtonians' talk of Whiteness, the different weights which speakers assign to ethnic culture, marginality, and skin color lead to shifting and contradictory ascriptions of Jews to the category White. These ascriptions complicate the binary discourse of…
Commodified language in Chinatown: A contextualized approach to linguistic landscape1
In Washington DC's newly gentrified Chinatown, recent commercial establishments, primarily non-Chinese owned chains, use Chinese-language signs as design features targeted towards people who neither read nor have ethnic ties to Chinese. Using this neighborhood as a case study, we advocate a contextualized, historicized and spatialized perspective on linguistic landscape which highlights that landscapes are not simply physical spaces but are inste…
Contesting Public Space and Citizenship: Implications for Neighborhood Business Improvement Districts
While research on business improvement districts (BIDs) has considered the constraints BIDs can place on the negotiation of public space and citizenship, little work has focused on the process of establishing neighborhood BIDs (NBIDs), and few scholars have examined perceptions of public space held by actual neighborhood constituents. This article analyzes a participatory mapping project and messages on a neighborhood e-mail list to compare the v…
Public toilets for a diverse neighborhood: Spatial purification practices in community development discourse
This paper explores the dialectic of place and community identity in Mount Pleasant, a multi-ethnic and multi-class U.S. neighborhood where definitions of place are hotly contested among its residents. In a grant proposal for public toilets, Mount Pleasant writers use linguistic strategies such as presupposition, deixis, and contrast, coupled with discursive themes of filth and geography, to construct a core of the Mount Pleasant community. The w…
Positioning the interviewer: Strategic uses of embedded orientation in interview narratives
The structure and function of a sociolinguistic interview sets up a context that affords informants the opportunity to achieve their own goals. We examine how an informant manipulates the reception format of the speech event, using embedded orientation to characterize information as alternately given or new, and the interviewer consequently as an insider or outsider. Whereas previous analyses have examined how embedded orientation highlights or s…
Mango Fufu Kimchi Yucca: The Depoliticization of “Diversity” in Washington, D.C. Discourse
The rise of the commodified city has encouraged new attention to the symbolic systems that structure our understandings of difference and inequality in urban areas. This paper analyzes one of those systems, namely discourse. I examine how the term diversity has developed multiple meanings over the past 10 years in Mt. Pleasant, a gentrifying neighborhood in Washington, DC, and I trace these developments and their connections with changes in the l…
White, Whole Wheat, Rye: Jews and Ethnic Categorization in Washington, D.C
White is used to signify, often implicitly, a number of qualitatively different phenomena, thereby masking both different and similar positionalities between and within ethnic groups. In Jewish Washingtonians' talk of Whiteness, the different weights which speakers assign to ethnic culture, marginality, and skin color lead to shifting and contradictory ascriptions of Jews to the category White. These ascriptions complicate the binary discourse of…
Writing the Relationship: Ethnographer-Informant Interactions in the New Media Era
With the ever-increasing accessibility of new communications media, there has been growing discussion among ethnographers about how new media data such as e-mails, SMS/texts, blogs, news article comment sections, or community group websites have impacted the practice of ethnography. Generally, questions center around the characteristics of the data itself. Less often discussed is the effect of new communications media on relationships between eth…
White, Whole Wheat, Rye: Jews and Ethnic Categorization in Washington, D.C
White is used to signify, often implicitly, a number of qualitatively different phenomena, thereby masking both different and similar positionalities between and within ethnic groups. In Jewish Washingtonians' talk of Whiteness, the different weights which speakers assign to ethnic culture, marginality, and skin color lead to shifting and contradictory ascriptions of Jews to the category White. These ascriptions complicate the binary discourse of…
Public toilets for a diverse neighborhood: Spatial purification practices in community development discourse
This paper explores the dialectic of place and community identity in Mount Pleasant, a multi-ethnic and multi-class U.S. neighborhood where definitions of place are hotly contested among its residents. In a grant proposal for public toilets, Mount Pleasant writers use linguistic strategies such as presupposition, deixis, and contrast, coupled with discursive themes of filth and geography, to construct a core of the Mount Pleasant community. The w…
Contesting Public Space and Citizenship: Implications for Neighborhood Business Improvement Districts
While research on business improvement districts (BIDs) has considered the constraints BIDs can place on the negotiation of public space and citizenship, little work has focused on the process of establishing neighborhood BIDs (NBIDs), and few scholars have examined perceptions of public space held by actual neighborhood constituents. This article analyzes a participatory mapping project and messages on a neighborhood e-mail list to compare the v…
Turf Wars: Discourse, Diversity, and the Politics of Place
Mango Fufu Kimchi Yucca: The Depoliticization of “Diversity” in Washington, D.C. Discourse
The rise of the commodified city has encouraged new attention to the symbolic systems that structure our understandings of difference and inequality in urban areas. This paper analyzes one of those systems, namely discourse. I examine how the term diversity has developed multiple meanings over the past 10 years in Mt. Pleasant, a gentrifying neighborhood in Washington, DC, and I trace these developments and their connections with changes in the l…
Commodified language in Chinatown: A contextualized approach to linguistic landscape1
In Washington DC's newly gentrified Chinatown, recent commercial establishments, primarily non-Chinese owned chains, use Chinese-language signs as design features targeted towards people who neither read nor have ethnic ties to Chinese. Using this neighborhood as a case study, we advocate a contextualized, historicized and spatialized perspective on linguistic landscape which highlights that landscapes are not simply physical spaces but are inste…
Positioning the interviewer: Strategic uses of embedded orientation in interview narratives
The structure and function of a sociolinguistic interview sets up a context that affords informants the opportunity to achieve their own goals. We examine how an informant manipulates the reception format of the speech event, using embedded orientation to characterize information as alternately given or new, and the interviewer consequently as an insider or outsider. Whereas previous analyses have examined how embedded orientation highlights or s…
Writing the Relationship: Ethnographer-Informant Interactions in the New Media Era
With the ever-increasing accessibility of new communications media, there has been growing discussion among ethnographers about how new media data such as e-mails, SMS/texts, blogs, news article comment sections, or community group websites have impacted the practice of ethnography. Generally, questions center around the characteristics of the data itself. Less often discussed is the effect of new communications media on relationships between eth…
What to Do in DC-Day or Night
Precarious Rhetorics
OUR COLLEC TION has come together in the midst of the rise of the global Right.It will likely be received and circulate in a global context wherein this ascendency has been consolidated through an entrenched hard-right populism, marked by xenophobia and racialized social orderings, and characterized by nativist, heteronormative, hypermasculine, and heteropatriarchal leadership styles and structures.Such structures are apparent in the authoritaria…
Signs at work: New labor relations and structures of feeling in Washington, D.C.’s Covid landscape
We use a geographically informed notion of landscape and Williams’ (1977) framework structure of feeling to examine ‘closed’, masking, and social distancing signs on businesses in the Washington, DC central-city neighborhood of Adams Morgan. We argue that the semantic content and discursive structure of the Covid signs, together with the in-the-moment feeling of walking down empty streets while a little-understood virus had just started raging, p…
Semiotics of a Covid landscape: Tactical urbanism in a pandemic
This paper brings together urban planning and linguistic perspectives to examine the semiotic landscape of a Washington, DC ‘streatery’ in the context of the intersecting public health- and place-based economic crises unleashed by the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing from Garay-Huamán and Irazábal-Zurita’s (2021) work on neoliberal Social Structures of Accumulation (SSA), we examine how different layers of Adams Morgan’s emergent Covid landscape are ro…
Sociology (9 works) · Political science (8 works) · Law (6 works) · Linguistics (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Anthropology (5 works) · History (5 works) · Art (4 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (4 works) · Aesthetics (3 works)