This course explores what we do with language and other modes of expression and how these modes shape our communicative capacities. How do we decide what communication is appropriate face-to-face or via text or email? Why do we gossip? What informs our beliefs about civility and obscenity? How do we decide what credible speech is? What happens when a culturally rooted expressive form is taken up for other aesthetic and political ends? We will explore such questions by studying theories and ethnographies of a range of phenomena: dance, gossip, poetry, asylum appeals, advertisements, protest speech, and more.
