J Babcock
Biographic Data
| ID | 23485 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Babcock |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Babcock |
| SIGNATURE | BABCOCK J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Department of Anthropology Brown University Providence Rhode Island USA |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9264-2873 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 46 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
“Life Ain't Gonna Be Like You Always Wanted”: Mixed media animation (charcoal, dirt, indigo dyed cotton, molasses, sugar, and watercolor on paper) by Rebecca Louise Carter, 2024
This review engages with Rebecca Louise Carter's mixed media animation work, “Life Ain't Gonna Be Like You Always Wanted,” exhibited as part of Sonder: The Black Biennial . Curated by Amadi Williams and Isaiah “Prophet” Raines, the Black Biennial was on view from April 19 to June 2, 2024, at the Rhode Island School of Design's Gelman Gallery in Providence RI. Carter's animation was excerpted from The Weight of the Heat: A Meditation on Black Aliv…
The Polyglot: Plurilingual Wonders, “Mother Tongue” Hegemony, and Totalizing Images in and of Singapore
Singapore is an officially multiracial, multilingual, multicultural, and multireligious locale defined nationally by its “multi” status. Despite this, Singaporeans routinely find themselves targeted by discourses that evaluate their supposed deficiencies in English and their state‐assigned “Mother Tongues,” even as these languages get positioned as dually necessary for full participation in a globalized world and authentic ethnoracial personhood.…
Semiotic Determinacy: Sovereign Citizens’ Approach to Legal Language
Some people have become disenchanted with modern bureaucratic forms and modern governments, and in their attempts to imagine an alternative, have joined the sovereign citizen counterpublic, a right-leaning movement comprised of loosely affiliated groups rejecting the validity of national laws that are present in the United States, Australia, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, and other countries. These groups focus their energies on legal syste…
How does the state ignore? Ideologies and practices of substantive and procedural listening in U.S. school board meetings
A ghost town called Singapore: The politics of geographic storytelling, from the "wild heart of Saugatuck" to "Singapore Dunes, LLC
For over 180 years, Singapore, a town buried under the sands on Lake Michigan's shore, has sparked imagination-and controversy. Names and naming are integral to the conflict, revealing competing investments in the site as space, place, property, and land. In this piece, we mobilize Indigenous, Black feminist, and anthropological perspectives to track how competing categorizations of the former town deploy names and naming as centerpieces in acts …
Introduction: Mother Tongue as Global Politics
For racialized speakers living in the wake of colonial modernity, "mother tongues" persist as perilous, precarious terrain. Far from being a straightforward linguistic resource or a totalizing, self-evident identity marker, "mother tongue" is always positioned, partial, and political. As a category, "mother tongue" encompasses projects across disparate sites, histories, and interactional grounds beyond South Asia, where the concept has been most …
“DecolonialPedagogies.Space”: Youth-led, Open-source Instructional Design as Experiential Learning and Meta-pedagogical Empowerment
This commentary describes a pedagogical experiment in youth-led, open-source learning design carried out between Autumn 2022 and Spring 2023 while I was teaching in the University of Chicago’s Colonizations sequence. “Colonizations” is one among several sequences that undergraduate students can elect to take to satisfy their College Core requirement in “Civilization Studies.” Using an iterative “Design a Learning Module” assignment sequence – com…
Toward a “Both-And” Semiotics of Intersectionality: Raciolinguistics beyond White Settler-Colonial Situations
In proposing a “both-and” semiotics of intersectionality, this special issue responds to recent timely studies of white supremacy, anti-Blackness, settler supremacy, and other oppressive systems undertaken by linguistic anthropologists and other critical scholars of language. Contributors to this issue turn our attention toward two pressing concerns that are at stake in the continued theorization of raciolinguistics: First, we insist that the con…
(De)coupling Positional Whiteness and White Identities through “Good English” in Singapore
English in Singapore occupies an ambivalent status as both global bridge and threat to local “cultural values” (Tan 2017). English is also constructed as threatened by Singlish, or Singaporean Colloquial English (Wee 2018). This article first elaborates the historical-institutional production of a covert raciolinguistic community—“Caucasian” English speakers—whose speech ideologically contrasts with Singaporeans’ “non-native” English. It then ana…
Toward a non-binary semiotics of intersectionality: Linguistic Anthropology in the Wake of Coloniality
This special issue proposes a non-binary semiotics of intersectionality to both draw attention to and unsettle binary participation frameworks of "the-West-and-its-others." Contributors demonstrate how intersectionality can reconfigure scholarly approaches to the semiotic analysis of social life, expanding the bounds of the ethnographic as both genre and site of ideological work while also suggesting new stakes for conceptualizations of the perso…
Seeing (or perceiving) difference in multiracial Singapore: Habits of looking in a raciolinguistic image economy
This article examines the habits of looking that mediate perception in the self-consciously multiracial Southeast Asian island city-state of Singapore. I proposelookingas a concept for understanding how perceivers work to transform ambiguous, ambivalent encounters with difference into determinate, visibly self-evident encounters with race. I argue that, in Singapore, habits of looking get materialized via a visual epistemology of race: as efforts…
Postracial Policing, "Mother Tongue" Sourcing, and Images of Singlish Standard
After decades of denigration and targeting by the state, Singlish-or Singaporean Colloquial English-has come into its own as a "uniquely Singaporean" phenomenon (Wee 2018), both a source and site of projects of raciolinguistic value-creation (Rosa and Flores 2017). Today, Singlish is often presented as emblematic of broader "racial harmony" among Singapore's four official races, yet it has also become an arena for articulating and rejecting criti…
Postracial Policing, "Mother Tongue" Sourcing, and Images of Singlish Standard
After decades of denigration and targeting by the state, Singlish-or Singaporean Colloquial English-has come into its own as a "uniquely Singaporean" phenomenon (Wee 2018), both a source and site of projects of raciolinguistic value-creation (Rosa and Flores 2017). Today, Singlish is often presented as emblematic of broader "racial harmony" among Singapore's four official races, yet it has also become an arena for articulating and rejecting criti…
Toward a “Both-And” Semiotics of Intersectionality: Raciolinguistics beyond White Settler-Colonial Situations
In proposing a “both-and” semiotics of intersectionality, this special issue responds to recent timely studies of white supremacy, anti-Blackness, settler supremacy, and other oppressive systems undertaken by linguistic anthropologists and other critical scholars of language. Contributors to this issue turn our attention toward two pressing concerns that are at stake in the continued theorization of raciolinguistics: First, we insist that the con…
(De)coupling Positional Whiteness and White Identities through “Good English” in Singapore
English in Singapore occupies an ambivalent status as both global bridge and threat to local “cultural values” (Tan 2017). English is also constructed as threatened by Singlish, or Singaporean Colloquial English (Wee 2018). This article first elaborates the historical-institutional production of a covert raciolinguistic community—“Caucasian” English speakers—whose speech ideologically contrasts with Singaporeans’ “non-native” English. It then ana…
Toward a non-binary semiotics of intersectionality: Linguistic Anthropology in the Wake of Coloniality
This special issue proposes a non-binary semiotics of intersectionality to both draw attention to and unsettle binary participation frameworks of "the-West-and-its-others." Contributors demonstrate how intersectionality can reconfigure scholarly approaches to the semiotic analysis of social life, expanding the bounds of the ethnographic as both genre and site of ideological work while also suggesting new stakes for conceptualizations of the perso…
Seeing (or perceiving) difference in multiracial Singapore: Habits of looking in a raciolinguistic image economy
This article examines the habits of looking that mediate perception in the self-consciously multiracial Southeast Asian island city-state of Singapore. I proposelookingas a concept for understanding how perceivers work to transform ambiguous, ambivalent encounters with difference into determinate, visibly self-evident encounters with race. I argue that, in Singapore, habits of looking get materialized via a visual epistemology of race: as efforts…
Introduction: Mother Tongue as Global Politics
For racialized speakers living in the wake of colonial modernity, "mother tongues" persist as perilous, precarious terrain. Far from being a straightforward linguistic resource or a totalizing, self-evident identity marker, "mother tongue" is always positioned, partial, and political. As a category, "mother tongue" encompasses projects across disparate sites, histories, and interactional grounds beyond South Asia, where the concept has been most …
How does the state ignore? Ideologies and practices of substantive and procedural listening in U.S. school board meetings
Postracial Policing, "Mother Tongue" Sourcing, and Images of Singlish Standard
After decades of denigration and targeting by the state, Singlish-or Singaporean Colloquial English-has come into its own as a "uniquely Singaporean" phenomenon (Wee 2018), both a source and site of projects of raciolinguistic value-creation (Rosa and Flores 2017). Today, Singlish is often presented as emblematic of broader "racial harmony" among Singapore's four official races, yet it has also become an arena for articulating and rejecting criti…
Toward a “Both-And” Semiotics of Intersectionality: Raciolinguistics beyond White Settler-Colonial Situations
In proposing a “both-and” semiotics of intersectionality, this special issue responds to recent timely studies of white supremacy, anti-Blackness, settler supremacy, and other oppressive systems undertaken by linguistic anthropologists and other critical scholars of language. Contributors to this issue turn our attention toward two pressing concerns that are at stake in the continued theorization of raciolinguistics: First, we insist that the con…
(De)coupling Positional Whiteness and White Identities through “Good English” in Singapore
English in Singapore occupies an ambivalent status as both global bridge and threat to local “cultural values” (Tan 2017). English is also constructed as threatened by Singlish, or Singaporean Colloquial English (Wee 2018). This article first elaborates the historical-institutional production of a covert raciolinguistic community—“Caucasian” English speakers—whose speech ideologically contrasts with Singaporeans’ “non-native” English. It then ana…
Toward a non-binary semiotics of intersectionality: Linguistic Anthropology in the Wake of Coloniality
This special issue proposes a non-binary semiotics of intersectionality to both draw attention to and unsettle binary participation frameworks of "the-West-and-its-others." Contributors demonstrate how intersectionality can reconfigure scholarly approaches to the semiotic analysis of social life, expanding the bounds of the ethnographic as both genre and site of ideological work while also suggesting new stakes for conceptualizations of the perso…
Seeing (or perceiving) difference in multiracial Singapore: Habits of looking in a raciolinguistic image economy
This article examines the habits of looking that mediate perception in the self-consciously multiracial Southeast Asian island city-state of Singapore. I proposelookingas a concept for understanding how perceivers work to transform ambiguous, ambivalent encounters with difference into determinate, visibly self-evident encounters with race. I argue that, in Singapore, habits of looking get materialized via a visual epistemology of race: as efforts…
“DecolonialPedagogies.Space”: Youth-led, Open-source Instructional Design as Experiential Learning and Meta-pedagogical Empowerment
This commentary describes a pedagogical experiment in youth-led, open-source learning design carried out between Autumn 2022 and Spring 2023 while I was teaching in the University of Chicago’s Colonizations sequence. “Colonizations” is one among several sequences that undergraduate students can elect to take to satisfy their College Core requirement in “Civilization Studies.” Using an iterative “Design a Learning Module” assignment sequence – com…
“Life Ain't Gonna Be Like You Always Wanted”: Mixed media animation (charcoal, dirt, indigo dyed cotton, molasses, sugar, and watercolor on paper) by Rebecca Louise Carter, 2024
This review engages with Rebecca Louise Carter's mixed media animation work, “Life Ain't Gonna Be Like You Always Wanted,” exhibited as part of Sonder: The Black Biennial . Curated by Amadi Williams and Isaiah “Prophet” Raines, the Black Biennial was on view from April 19 to June 2, 2024, at the Rhode Island School of Design's Gelman Gallery in Providence RI. Carter's animation was excerpted from The Weight of the Heat: A Meditation on Black Aliv…
The Polyglot: Plurilingual Wonders, “Mother Tongue” Hegemony, and Totalizing Images in and of Singapore
Singapore is an officially multiracial, multilingual, multicultural, and multireligious locale defined nationally by its “multi” status. Despite this, Singaporeans routinely find themselves targeted by discourses that evaluate their supposed deficiencies in English and their state‐assigned “Mother Tongues,” even as these languages get positioned as dually necessary for full participation in a globalized world and authentic ethnoracial personhood.…
Semiotic Determinacy: Sovereign Citizens’ Approach to Legal Language
Some people have become disenchanted with modern bureaucratic forms and modern governments, and in their attempts to imagine an alternative, have joined the sovereign citizen counterpublic, a right-leaning movement comprised of loosely affiliated groups rejecting the validity of national laws that are present in the United States, Australia, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, and other countries. These groups focus their energies on legal syste…
How does the state ignore? Ideologies and practices of substantive and procedural listening in U.S. school board meetings
A ghost town called Singapore: The politics of geographic storytelling, from the "wild heart of Saugatuck" to "Singapore Dunes, LLC
For over 180 years, Singapore, a town buried under the sands on Lake Michigan's shore, has sparked imagination-and controversy. Names and naming are integral to the conflict, revealing competing investments in the site as space, place, property, and land. In this piece, we mobilize Indigenous, Black feminist, and anthropological perspectives to track how competing categorizations of the former town deploy names and naming as centerpieces in acts …
Introduction: Mother Tongue as Global Politics
For racialized speakers living in the wake of colonial modernity, "mother tongues" persist as perilous, precarious terrain. Far from being a straightforward linguistic resource or a totalizing, self-evident identity marker, "mother tongue" is always positioned, partial, and political. As a category, "mother tongue" encompasses projects across disparate sites, histories, and interactional grounds beyond South Asia, where the concept has been most …
Political science (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Linguistics (5 works) · Socioeconomic Development in Asia (5 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · Gender Studies (4 works) · Law (4 works)