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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 590

Part of Session 141: Taking over the squares (Other abstracts in this session)

Linguistic landscapes as democracy in action: Occupy Los Angeles and City Hall

Authors: Chun, Christian W.
Submitted by: Chun, Christian W. (University of Southern California, United States of America)

In late 2011, large protest movements against systemic social and economic inequalities erupted in cities across the U.S. This paper features a critical multimodal perspective on the interfaces between the animated linguistic landscape (LL) constructed and mobilized by the Occupy Movement in Los Angeles, and the accompanying production of politicized space anchored on the lawn of Los Angeles City Hall. My data are drawn from the visual documentation in the photographs I took of the hand-lettered and illustrated multilingual protest signs prominently featured on the lawn and near vicinity of Los Angeles City Hall, and a filmed workshop on exploring language in the mainstream media with fellow Occupiers.

Employing the theoretical perspective of Lefebvre (1991a, 1991b) on space and the critique of everyday life, and drawing upon the work on multimodal social-semiotics (Kress, 2010; Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2006), linguistic landscapes (Shohamy & Gorter, 2009), sociolinguistics of globalization (Blommaert, 2010), and mediated discourse analysis (Scollon, 2008; Scollon & Scollon, 2003), I first examine how diverse people in the movement took up both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discourses in their articulations of ideas, emotions, grievances, and observations represented in their multilingual, multimodal signs constituting a unique LL, which was a central feature of the Occupy encampment of City Hall.

The discourses featured in this LL will then be explored in their recontextualizations in a workshop I conducted at the People’s Collective University, a school set up in the Occupy encampment. The workshop, entitled “Critical language in action” and posted on YouTube, engaged with the Occupiers and workshop participants the ways in which cultural assumptions and motivated agendas involved in neoliberal global capitalism has shaped how language is used in current political, economic, and cultural discourses and their ensuing interpenetration into everyday ‘common-sense’ discourses. In tracing how the discourses in the Occupiers’ LL were resemiotized in the workshop discussions and how these interconnect with the globalized discourses of dissent and revolt, I argue that in transforming the public space of City Hall from a neutralized, de-democratized institutional landscape into a politicized linguistic space in which democracy was resemiotized in ways that contested dominant ‘common-sense’ meanings, the Occupiers vividly enacted a dynamically-infused, living LL.

This paper will address questions including:

1. What role did the Occupiers’ LL play in focusing public attention on their issues, and how were these messages addressed by the mainstream media?

2. How were the discourses in their LL taken up by the workshop participants?

3. In what ways are these specifically-located LL discourses interconnecting with global actions, movements, and articulations?

4. What are the relationships between the production of texts in the LL and the production of politicized spaces in the environs of Los Angeles City Hall?