Social interaction isn’t just something we habitually do day-to-day, online and off; it is also what we sometimes reflect on, instrumentalize, and seek to transform into a technology of its own–to reaffirm or change the world. As a linguistic and cultural anthropologist, I study interaction both closely–with video and transcripts–and expansively in social and historical context.
Projects
Liberal Listening
Many think listening across differences can counter polarization and shore up democratic lifeways. But when, why, and how should we listen? In a period marked by so-called “cancellation,” we need to take seriously contestation surrounding receptivity. In 2021, with student researchers, I started a team-based ethnographic study of liberal listening on a university campus.
Technosemiotics
We all know that media technologies are transforming the way we interact, but what counts as “media” is often very narrowly understood. Since 2016, I have co-led with Miyako Inoue (Stanford Anthropology) a collaboration that brings linguistic anthropology into closer dialogue with media history, media anthropology, and science and technology studies.
Scale
For decades, social scientists and social activists alike have envisioned “the interpersonal” as a micropolitical domain, a site in which otherwise diffuse formations–authoritarianism, heteropatriarchy, anti-black racism–manifest themselves in practice. Yet how exactly does this politics relate to a politics elsewhere? And what troubles have come from trying to scrutinize interaction “closely,” “microscopically”?
I am a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. My latest book, From Small-Talk to Microaggression: A History of Scale, will be published in fall 2024 through The University of Chicago Press.
Contact: mlemp@umich.edu