Faculty Research Fellow
Jack Sidnell (Ph.D. Anthropology, University of Toronto, 1998) has conducted long-term ethnographic and sociolinguistic study in the Caribbean and in Vietnam. His empirical research focuses on the intersection of language structure, social interaction, and reflexive reanalysis. In contributions to the fields of anthropology, linguistics, and sociology, Sidnell has addressed a broad set of theoretical questions concerning the semiotic mediation of social relations and the consequences of linguistic diversity for social life.
Fellowship Research Project: Language Reform and Revolutionary Consciousness: Remaking Self and Society under Socialism in Vietnam
In the 1940s and 50s, Vietnamese communists engaged in an ambitious project of language reform as part of their attempt to overturn the prevailing social order and revolutionize ways of thinking. My book Language Reform and Revolutionary Consciousness: Remaking Self and Society under Socialism in Vietnam, which I will complete during my time as a Jackman fellow, examines this project of reform in an effort both to understand the historical development of Vietnamese and to lay the groundwork for a general approach to the ethics, aesthetics and politics of linguistic and semiotic intervention.