B Urciuoli

Biographic Data

ID69244
NAMEB Urciuoli
GIVEN NAMESB
FAMILY NAMEUrciuoli
SIGNATUREURCIUOLI B
AFFILIATIONSHamilton College
ORCID0000-0002-4901-4572
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS42
TOTAL CITATIONS628
AUTHOR COUNT42
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1991
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2025
H-INDEX11

  • Revisiting the Strategically Deployable Shifter: Manipulating Indeterminacy for Semiotic Power and Profit

    Open AccessB UrciuoliARTICLESigns and Society2025

    The specificity of acts of reference emerges from their indexical nature, not from any fixed denotation inherent in referring expressions. Referential indeterminacy is generally not an issue or is easily corrected. But it can be taken advantage of when hierarchic relations are in play: people can deploy the semiotic potential of indeterminacy in ways that covertly index advantageous alignments based on shared values, while seeming to make the sam…

  • Anthropology from different angles: A Tale of the Neoliberal Arts

    Open AccessB UrciuoliARTICLEEtnografica2024References: 13

    A discipline's value depends on the institutional position of its valuers. In U.S. liberal arts undergraduate education, trustees, marketers, and parents routinely link disciplinary value to "return on investment". This market logic is evident in rhetoric equating a discipline's worth with the cost of department maintenance and the lucrativeness of careers pursued by majors. Yet students are also expected to buy the liberal arts experience as a w…

  • The discursive emergence of the cultural actor: Commentary on He, Kang, and Lo

    Open AccessB UrciuoliARTICLEPragmatics Quarterly Publication…2022

    This commentary compares and discusses the ways that discourse analyses by He, Kang and Lo, this volume, demonstrate the indexical, contingent, complex and ongoing nature of cultural process, manifest at the micro-level of ordinary interaction

  • Spanish and English Language Issues in the United States

    Open AccessB UrciuoliOTHERThe International Encyclopedia of…2020

    Spanish‐English language issues in the United States are best understood in relation to the social and political histories within which they formed. Research has demonstrated the formal characteristics of linguistic varieties, the social functions that constitute their users' communicative competence, the ideologies that shape their users' perceptions of their linguistic practices, and the ways that social and political histories frame the racial…

  • The Irony of Diversity Numbers

    Open AccessB UrciuoliARTICLESigns and Society2018Cited by: 4References: 9

    This article compares “official” college representations of race as diversity with narratives by students of color about racialized experience, with particular attention to the metasemiotic principles governing the first and the discursive organization of the second. Colleges and universities (like other contemporary organizations) represent race as a set of equally weighted, equally ordered demographic categories not explicitly differing in mark…

  • The compromised pragmatics of diversity

    Open AccessB UrciuoliARTICLELanguage & Communication2016Cited by: 11References: 13

  • La « diversité » comme capital: La re-conceptualisation néolibérale de la différence linguistique et sociale

    B Urciuoli, Anne-Hélène Kerbiriou et al.ARTICLEAnthropologie et Sociétés2016Cited by: 5References: 24

    Dans les discours néolibéraux sur le travail, les travailleurs sont imaginés comme des faisceaux de compétences, certaines étant dites « formelles » (le savoir et les techniques), d'autres « informelles » (les aptitudes et les caractéristiques sociales). Dans cette conception, tout attribut pensé en termes de travail productif, même les différentes formes de se comporter socialement, peut être considéré comme une compétence. En particulier, les m…

  • Neoliberalizing markedness: The interpellation of “diverse” college students

    Open AccessB UrciuoliARTICLEHau Journal of Ethnographic Theory2016Cited by: 12References: 9

    For students at elite US liberal arts colleges, symbolic capital accrues to their association with the institution itself, and for racially unmarked (white) students, symbolic capital can also accrue to other, informal associations with such institutions, such as friend and family ties or social fraternities. For racially marked students at elite schools, sources of symbolic capital are more limited to institutional venues such as the classroom a…

  • The Semiotic Production of the Good Student: A Peircean Look at the Commodification of Liberal Arts Education

    Open AccessB UrciuoliARTICLESigns and Society2014Cited by: 13References: 15

    Liberal arts education has become highly commodified, but what is the nature of the object commodified? I argue that that objectification is brought together through the branding process in the form of the Good Student, an unambiguously positive image of the product of higher education. Drawing from Peircian concepts and from recent works on branding as semiotic process, I show how college marketers produce this construction. I also argue that th…

  • The promise and practice of service learning and engaged scholarship

    Open AccessB UrciuoliARTICLELearning and Teaching2013

    Service learning and other engaged scholarship programmes ideally operate in an academic framework to enhance student understanding of citizenship and community engagement. In reality, given the constraints on institutional budgets, such programmes are likely to be underfunded and academically understaffed. Structured as choices on an institutional menu, programmes are routinely touted as transformative though what they transform may be indetermi…

  • Language Management/Labor

    B Urciuoli, Chaise LadousaARTICLEAnnual Review of Anthropology2013Cited by: 60References: 98

    How language is conceptualized as labor is a function of the economy within which profits are made and businesses are structured. Under capitalist regimes, language practices have been conceptualized as apart from labor, as part of the means of production, and as the product. Under neoliberal regimes and conditions of globalization, and depending on the language worker's job description and status as managed or managing, ethnicity/race, gender, a…

  • Learning to Speak, Learning to Listen: How Diversity Works on Campus by Susan E. Chase

    Open AccessB UrciuoliARTICLEAmerican Ethnologist2012References: 1

  • Discussion Essay: Semiotic Properties of Racializing Discourses

    Open AccessB UrciuoliARTICLEJournal of Linguistic Anthropology2011Cited by: 12References: 10

  • Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University by Gaye Tuchman The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities are Reshaping the World by Ben Wildavsky

    Open AccessB UrciuoliARTICLEPoLAR Political and Legal…2011References: 1

  • Entextualizing diversity: Semiotic incoherence in institutional discourse

    Open AccessB UrciuoliARTICLELanguage & Communication2010Cited by: 17References: 6

  • Talking/Not Talking about Race: The Enregisterments of Culture in Higher Education Discourses

    Open AccessB UrciuoliARTICLEJournal of Linguistic Anthropology2009Cited by: 42References: 28

    In higher education "diversity" discourses, culture routinely stands in for race, but its use is unevenly enregistered. Examination of three web pages at one college shows contrasting entextualizations of culture: in promotional discourse, culture is loosely associated with diversity; in describing student organizations, culture is variously associated with race, ethnicity, nationality, language, and gender; for multicultural programs, culture is…

  • Skills and selves in the new workplace

    Open AccessB UrciuoliARTICLEAmerican Ethnologist2008Cited by: 287References: 37

    In the neoliberal imaginary of contemporary capitalism, workers' employment value depends on their skills. Skills terms, especially communication, team, and leadership, formulate aspects of personhood and modes of sociality as productive labor. The key semiotic properties of skills terms are strategic indexicality (expressing alignment with corporate values) and denotational indeterminacy (knowledge and practices referred to as skills are quite d…

  • Problematic Language Assessment in the US Census

    Open AccessAna Celia Zentella, B Urciuoli et al.ARTICLEAnthropology News2007Cited by: 3

  • Why Anthropologists Should Oppose English Only Legislation in the US

    Open AccessLaura R Graham, Alexandra Jaffe et al.ARTICLEAnthropology News2007

  • Colormute: Race talk dilemmas in an American school - By Mica Pollock

    Open AccessB UrciuoliARTICLEJournal of the Royal Anthropologica…2007

  • Richard Buttny , Talking problems: Studies of discursive construction

    Open AccessB UrciuoliARTICLELanguage in Society2006

    Richard Buttny , Talking problems: Studies of discursive construction . Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. Pp.ix, 214. Hb $45.00. Richard Buttney's Talking problems: Studies of discursive construction addresses the centrality of ordinary talk as a key site in the construction of human sociality and social reality. He characterizes talk about problems as a linguistic abstraction from actions or events that call for solutions. Such d…

  • Open Forum on AAA and Labor Relations

    Open AccessB UrciuoliARTICLEAnthropology News2005

  • What Counts as Anthropological Knowledge

    Open AccessB UrciuoliARTICLEAnthropology News2005

  • Society for Cultural Anthropology

    Open AccessB Urciuoli, Pauline Turner Strong et al.ARTICLEAnthropology News2005

  • Society for Cultural Anthropology. SCA at the AAA: Cultural Horizons Award

    Open AccessB Urciuoli, M M J FischerARTICLEAnthropology News2004