Lauren Zentz – författare

This book offers unique insights into the use of Facebook after the 2016 US presidential election, interrogating how users in private groups draw on individual experiences in movement building and identity construction while also critically reflecting on ethnographic practices around social media. The volume draws on the author’s own involvement in a specific Facebook group focused around activism and community organizing in Texas following the 2016 US presidential election. Chapters draw on the frameworks of "small stories" and "stance" to unpack the ways in which group members use parts of their individual stories to signal beliefs to others, present themselves in relation to the group, and signal virtues of moral authority on various pressing political issues. Building on these analyses, Zentz goes on to address ways in which the scales of politics are being navigated and modified at the grassroots level in our highly networked world. This book contributes to ongoing conversations about the realities of internet use within linguistic anthropology and new media studies, and how researchers might seek to account for social media use and access to this data as these technologies develop further. This book is key reading for students and scholars in linguistic anthropology, media studies, and activism and social movement studies.

This book offers unique insights into the use of Facebook after the 2016 US presidential election, interrogating how users in private groups draw on individual experiences in movement building and identity construction while also critically reflecting on ethnographic practices around social media. The volume draws on the author’s own involvement in a specific Facebook group focused around activism and community organizing in Texas following the 2016 US presidential election. Chapters draw on the frameworks of "small stories" and "stance" to unpack the ways in which group members use parts of their individual stories to signal beliefs to others, present themselves in relation to the group, and signal virtues of moral authority on various pressing political issues. Building on these analyses, Zentz goes on to address ways in which the scales of politics are being navigated and modified at the grassroots level in our highly networked world. This book contributes to ongoing conversations about the realities of internet use within linguistic anthropology and new media studies, and how researchers might seek to account for social media use and access to this data as these technologies develop further. This book is key reading for students and scholars in linguistic anthropology, media studies, and activism and social movement studies.

In Echo Chambers and Epistemological Bubbles: Communicative Flirtations with the End of Democracy, Lauren Zentz offers a critical linguistic ethnographic examination of moral-political discourse on social media following the January 6, 2021, US Capitol insurrection. Moving beyond the oft-used "echo chamber" hypothesis, Zentz proposes that contemporary digital political communication is better understood as ideological "trench warfare," where routine exposure to opposing viewpoints fuels retrenchment and out-group delegitimization rather than open-minded democratic deliberation.Focusing on the Twitter practices of prominent “left-leaning” American political influencers, this monograph operationalizes a "sociolinguistics of morality". Through detailed micro-analyses of stance, deictics, deontics, underspecification, mockery, and chronotopic scaling, Zentz demonstrates how these actors discursively construct and defend an Enlightenment-based, scientistic, and inclusive democratic episteme against contemporary US far-right metapolitical movements. The book concludes with an argument that the traditional "left versus right" American binary is no longer analytically viable; instead, the United States faces a profound epistemological rupture pitting liberal democratic norms against anti-democratic authoritarianism.This timely volume provides crucial theoretical frameworks for researchers in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, political communication studies and more, for graduate students and researchers seeking to understand the sociolinguistic architectures of modern democratic crises

Against the background of language and nation formation in Indonesia, this book demonstrates how language planning is inseparable from the broader actions of the state, and how postcolonial nationalism and globalization have had profound implications for language use and state actions to control it. Using language planners’ texts, national and regional policy statements and the discussions of university English majors, it explores the borders of what can be defined as Indonesian, Javanese and English languages, and how this is informed by ideologies of language and nationalism in contemporary Indonesia. The tensions played out in the book between the ideologically perceived languages around which policies are built and the realities of linguistic performance and the resources of the individual are echoed across the globe, making this book crucial reading for anyone interested in the interplay of language planning and language use.