Papers by Becky Schulthies
Channeling Moroccanness
Chapter two explores Fassi perspectives on what it meant to engage in public life through literat... more Chapter two explores Fassi perspectives on what it meant to engage in public life through literate listening to news in Morocco. Many scholars have argued that poor Arabic education in Morocco has left a functionally illiterate citizenry who cannot understand the formal Arabic of the news broadcast. This chapter analyzes how laments about listening failures by listening subjects (those who authorized themselves to evaluate these failures) allowed Fassis to create competing yet recognizable Moroccan linguistic practices for public participation. Some challenged scholarly ideas of what it meant to be literate and by extension a skilled reasoner. They evoked an explicit literate listening ideology: awareness (الوعي lwā’ī), glossed as keen reasoning skills, came from verbal interaction with a wide range of interlocutors, not just the educated elements of society. While many Fassis who viewed themselves as literate and educated repeatedly bemoaned the misunderstandings of poorly literat...
Channeling Moroccanness
This chapter introduces the ways Moroccans engaged media despite a widespread feeling of communic... more This chapter introduces the ways Moroccans engaged media despite a widespread feeling of communicative failure. It also outlines how they viewed language and media as sharing some of the same channeling qualities at the same time that they tried to distinguish their views from others. Ethnographic vignettes lay out the key laments generating relationality in Fez: media failure, language mediation, and Moroccanness. This chapter also explains the key semiotic theories on multimodality and phatic connectivity developed throughout the book.
What does it mean to connect as Moroccans via mass media when there is widespread feeling of comm... more What does it mean to connect as Moroccans via mass media when there is widespread feeling of communicative failure? This book approaches the question by exploring situated talk about communicative failure, which speaks to how Moroccans seek to shape social and political relations in urban Fez. Over the last decade, laments of language and media failure in Fez have focused on communicative channels and were not just about social relations that used to be and had been lost, but also what ought to be and had yet to be realized. These channels, or mediums that connected people, ranged from objects such as devotional prayer beads and remote controls; to interactional forms such as storytelling registers, dress styles, and non-standard Arabic writing; and to media platforms like television news, Moroccan religious stations, or WhatsApp group chats. This book describes these multimodal channels and analyzes how, why, and when they moved from facilitator (intermediating connecting mechanism...
Channeling Moroccanness, 2020
Building from the rhymed prose register, chapter four analyzes the ways laments about Arabic writ... more Building from the rhymed prose register, chapter four analyzes the ways laments about Arabic writing have shaped practices of phatic connection in Fez. I look at the ways Fassis engaged darīja writing as a blending of multisensory channels tied to specific media platforms: folklore books, WhatsApp, advertising billboards, and newsprint. Instead of foregrounding the aural/spoken soundscape or the visual/graphic linguascape, I examine the intertwining of these sensorial channels in the sounding of darīja script and scripting of darīja sounds by reading subjects, everyday Moroccans who authorized themselves to weigh in on the politics of writing. Scholars have written about Arabic soundscapes, the acoustic environments, listening practices, and ritual sounding in which Arabic shapes public discourse and Muslim subjects. Others have focused on the emergence of Arabic dialect writing movements as expressions of political movements, local advertising campaigns, and youth-driven social change movements. Both the soundscape and darīja writing literatures hint at the multisensory channel practices and ideologies mobilized to make Moroccan persons, and they include laments about modality failures that motivated writing changes in the last decade. In the face of debates about the role of language in Moroccan national identity, Fassi everyday scriptic heterogeneity pointed to a practice of ambivalence toward written darīja in specific media platforms (billboards, websites, and mobile apps), but not others (books and newsprint). The platforms of writing mattered to the phatic work of making Moroccans in Fez.
Channeling Moroccanness, 2020
Chapter one introduces the linguistic soundscape of Fez, giving a sense of the context in which l... more Chapter one introduces the linguistic soundscape of Fez, giving a sense of the context in which laments about communicative failure arose. It provides some historical background and describes the multilingual resources and sensibilities evoked throughout the book.
Channeling Moroccanness, 2020
Chapter three continues to analyze how Fassis understood moral literacy through an oral storytell... more Chapter three continues to analyze how Fassis understood moral literacy through an oral storytelling register of rhymed prose revamped for civic education via television: هدرة الميزان hadra lmizān. From the late 2000s to 2016, a group of Moroccan cultural producers repurposed a rhymed prose form of darīja associated with grandmothers and street performers to convey “modern” Moroccan civic values. Most often this involved promoting equality for women. In doing so, they sought to make a linguistic register, rhymed prose, into a mediator of Moroccanness, shaping viewers’ perceptions of civic engagement through a nostalgic medium primed with equality content. Both Fassis and state media producers calibrated the channel shift as doing the same Moroccanness work: preserving or “revitalizing” a “traditional” form that connected Moroccans morally. And yet they understood it in different ways because of implicit and explicit media ideologies about how to relate to registers in specific mediums. This chapter challenges media professionals’ assumptions that the positive associations with this storytelling register, when linked with “modern” content and values, would be sufficient as a mechanism for shaping morality perspectives of Fassis. Instead, the viewing practices were more important for the register uptake, or lack thereof.
Channeling Moroccanness, 2020
Chapter five brings morality, literate listening, and sonic reading together to explore the semio... more Chapter five brings morality, literate listening, and sonic reading together to explore the semiotics of the “Moroccan model of Islam,” a state-sponsored effort to shape religious discourse and practices via media in the wake of “extremism.” In May 2003, Morocco experienced a major religiously motivated attack, in which thirty-seven Moroccans were killed. Extremist Islam, learned through foreign media, was blamed. In particular, people claimed satellite television and small portable media (like audio cassette and VCR tapes, as well as VCD and DVD disks, and more recently internet videos) had corrupted and confused Moroccans about proper Islam. One of the Moroccan state responses was to re-cultivate what they called the Moroccan model or pattern of Islam نموذج المغربي, namūdhaj almaghribī, a historically “moderate” Islam, which they would spread via modern radio and television stations, training institutes, and global dissemination of training materials. The Moroccan pattern of Isla...
Ethnos, 2020
What vegetal modalities and botanic intertwinings situate cross-species communications and collec... more What vegetal modalities and botanic intertwinings situate cross-species communications and collectivities, and for whom? In much anthropological writing of previous eras, plants have served as a medium for analysing human sociality. Their ubiquitous presence and seemingly sessile silence, invisibility, anosmia and backgrounding have been one of the key posts of twentieth-century social and economic theory, despite the voices arguing for otherwise socialities. Recent work has moved plants to the fore to rethink our understandings of many core anthropological themes. This special issue adds to that work by foregrounding phytocommunicability, the ideologies about cross-species interaction shaping the kinds of work we do, observe, and make visible ethnographically. Special Issue Introduction What vegetal modalities and botanic intertwinings situate cross-species communications and collectivities, and for whom? Plants have been a part of social science research for much of the last century. In anthropology, plants served primarily as a medium for analysing human sociality and health: ethnoscience classification systems and human cognitive processes (e.g.
Anthropology Today, 2019
Disposable email services provide temporary email addresses, which allows people to register onli... more Disposable email services provide temporary email addresses, which allows people to register online accounts without exposing their real email addresses. In this paper, we perform the first measurement study on disposable email services with two main goals. First, we aim to understand what disposable email services are used for, and what risks (if any) are involved in the common use cases. Second, we use the disposable email services as a public gateway to collect a large-scale email dataset for measuring email tracking. Over three months, we collected a dataset from 7 popular disposable email services which contain 2.3 million emails sent by 210K domains. We show that online accounts registered through disposable email addresses can be easily hijacked, leading to potential information leakage and financial loss. By empirically analyzing email tracking, we find that third-party tracking is highly prevalent, especially in the emails sent by popular services. We observe that trackers are using various methods to hide their tracking behavior such as falsely claiming the size of tracking images or hiding real trackers behind redirections. A few top trackers stand out in the tracking ecosystem but are not yet dominating the market.
Language & Communication, 2015
Introduction: "diversity talk" and its others Like many special issuesincluding a number that hav... more Introduction: "diversity talk" and its others Like many special issuesincluding a number that have appeared in this very journalthis volume grew out of a conference. The more typical "hatching grounds" for such endeavors include annual events like the American Anthropological Association meetings or other conferences positioned within recognizable "invisible colleges" (cf. . However, the conference spawning this particular volume was of a different sort. It was entitled "Language and Super-diversity: Explorations and Interrogations," and was held June 5-7, 2013, at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. 1 It was occasioned by the rising prominence among social scientistsincluding those studying the social dimensions of language useof "superdiversity." 2 First coined in Britain , scholars working in Europe have been particularly apt to deploy "superdiversity" as an analytic framework. In Vertovec's words, "superdiversity" is "a notion intended to underline a level and kind of complexity surpassing anything . [a given] country has previously experienced" (2007:1024). Or, in Jan Blommaert's terms, the term "superdiversity" is better thought of as denoting a "tactic . defined primarily by a theoretical and methodological explorative perspective" (Blommaert, this volume, p. x). In contrast to its burgeoning currency in Europe, the term has at times been met on the Western side of the Atlantic with deeper skepticism; recent work by Angela Reyes (2014) and Aneta Pavlenko (2014), among others, reflects this outlook. Bearing this scholarly context in mind helps illuminate some of the differing approaches taken by the authors featured here when taking up discussions about linguistic variation -"diversity talk" and other discursive registers engaging with (linguistic) sameness and difference. Scholars studying language in social context have long sought to understand the meaning and nature of linguistic difference, social difference, and the alignment between the two (e.g.
... Samira Farwaneh, Sulaf al-Zoubi, Halima Mjahed, Abdelhafid, Mohamed Zawahiri, Abdessalam, Moh... more ... Samira Farwaneh, Sulaf al-Zoubi, Halima Mjahed, Abdelhafid, Mohamed Zawahiri, Abdessalam, Mohammed Barakat, Wafa El Abdi, Lubna Boakraa, Fatiha Faraoun, Siham Oubry, Zoubida Rami, Lhoucine and Zahra Boum, Mirella, Denise Badawi, Razan al-Salah, Nermine al ...
Discourses of War and Peace, 2013
Al ʿarabiyya Journal of the American Association of Teachers of Arabic, 2014
Despite a long literate tradition and the modernist push for standardization in the Arab world, o... more Despite a long literate tradition and the modernist push for standardization in the Arab world, online orthographies of Arabic seem to be in a centrifugal phase of increasing heterogeneity reflecting myriad spoken varieties and educational practices. In this analysis, I explore the intersection of some language and media ideologies in YouTube video comments to better understand why self-identifying Arabs employ and allow heterography in online interactions, and what that tells us about their metapragmatic models for writing.
Al ʿarabiyya Journal of the American Association of Teachers of Arabic, 2014
Despite a long literate tradition and the modernist push for standardization in the Arab world, o... more Despite a long literate tradition and the modernist push for standardization in the Arab world, online orthographies of Arabic seem to be in a centrifugal phase of increasing heterogeneity reflecting myriad spoken varieties and educational practices. In this analysis, I explore the intersection of some language and media ideologies in YouTube video comments to better understand why self-identifying Arabs employ and allow heterography in online interactions, and what that tells us about their metapragmatic models for writing.
Despite a long literate tradition and the modernist push for standardization in the Arab world, o... more Despite a long literate tradition and the modernist push for standardization in the Arab world, online orthographies of Arabic seem to be in a centrifugal phase of increasing het - erogeneity reflecting myriad spoken varieties and educational practices. In this analysis, I explore the intersection of some language and media ideologies in YouTube video com- ments to better understand why self-identifying Arabs employ and allow heterography in online interactions, and what that tells us about their metapragmatic models for writing. One of the most important ideologies of historically literate societies is that writing is for reading, a set of physical and cognitive activities designed to identify the "meaning" of a text (Blommaert 2005, 114). In a folk theory of writing common in the United States, the connection between writing and reading is assumed to be direct and unmediated, sim -
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Papers by Becky Schulthies