Language as Hope: Communicative Practices, Resistance to Violence, and Collective Futures

This talk presents the central argument of the book Language as Hope (Silva & Lee, Cambridge University Press, 2024). Based on long-term ethnographic research with activists, educators, and residents of favelas in Rio de Janeiro, the presentation examines how communicative practices emerge in contexts shaped by urban violence and political conflict. Rather than treating hope as a purely emotional or abstract disposition, the talk approaches it as a practical and semiotic work produced collaboratively in interaction. Drawing on examples from community-based educational initiatives, activist media practices, and everyday conversations in the favelas, I show how participants mobilize linguistic and semiotic resources to challenge dominant narratives that frame their communities primarily through crime and insecurity. These practices create spaces for collective reflection, memory work, and political imagination, allowing participants to reinterpret their experiences and articulate alternative visions of social life.

About the seminar

The aim of this seminar is to support M2 and PhD students interested in the use of language practices in contexts such as the family, school, work, health or justice, traversed by issues of power and inequality. An important place is given to relevant methodological approaches and theoretical frameworks (interactional sociolinguistics, critical sociolinguistics, sociology of language, discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, political anthropology etc.) and to the circulation of knowledge from varied geographical areas and academic traditions in order to link the study of language practices with contemporary socio-anthropological and political issues.

With the support of the Inalco Doctoral School and UMR SeDyL.