Ritu Sharma
University of British Columbia
“The paper attempts to provide a roadmap for a model of linguistic agency that is capable of capturing victimization without ruling out the possibility of agency on the part of the silenced/powerless. Drawing on the feminist pragmatist perspective (Banerjee, 2010), I first highlight limitations in Langton’s and Hornsby’s account of linguistic agency, where the idea of linguistic agency is discussed by centralizing the role of power/authority. My argument here is that Hornsby & Langton’s understanding of power through which they define linguistic agency is caught up in a powerful/powerless binary, which has negative implications for a theory of linguistic agency in the context of oppression.
To establish my claim, I draw on Banerjee’s (2010) view of “”power-over”” (110), where power is discussed purely in terms of “”control”” and “”domination”” (111). Subsequently, incorporating insights from a feminist pragmatist approach, introduced by Mary Parker Follett (1924, 1942), particularly approaching a speech situation through an ontology of relations, I propose a way to develop a nuanced account of linguistic agency. I argue that an ontology of relations in the speech act context can stipulate an intersectional analysis of the power relations between different identity groups that reveals a more complicated relation between power and agency.”
Chair: Dominik Boll
Time: September 11th, 13:30-14:00
Location: SR 1.006, online
SOPhiA 2026 