Language and the Material Culture of Music (Workshop @ÖLT49) (Austria)

Date: 05-Dec-2025 - 08-Dec-2025
Location: Klagenfurt, Austria
Contact: Elias Schmitt
Contact Email: [email protected]

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics; Discourse Analysis; Philosophy of Language; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics

Submission Deadline: 30-Sep-2025

When linguists investigate musical culture, its discursive character is usually mostly explicated through the analysis of journalistic texts (see e.g. Bär 2024; Stöckl 2011; Thim-Mabrey 2001). This focus on finished musical works and their mediated representations, however, often obscures the creative practices and discursive dynamics ‘in the making’ beyond symbolic references – that is, language use embedded in and shaped by embodied, material interactions (cf. Peirce 1998 [1894]). In contrast, posthumanist (cf. Pennycook 2017) and praxeological (cf. Spitzmüller et al. 2017) perspectives direct attention to the ways in which musical action is described from what Foucault calls a subject position (cf. Foucault 1973: 75), acknowledging the embodied experience of music (cf. Hiekel & Lessing 2014; Oberhaus & Stange 2017) and the material agency of musical-cultural artefacts (cf. Barad 2012).
This interdisciplinary workshop seeks to explore communicative practices of musical and musico-cultural action in relation to the materiality of culture. Possible topics for contributions include:

- How can we conceptualize the experiential relations communicated in different situations where (musico-cultural) objects play an agentive role?
- Which philosophical, sociological, or anthropological assumptions are relevant for analysing such communicative practices in musical contexts?
- In what ways do material agency and concrete language use interact with one another?
- How can this interdependence be analysed from a linguistic perspective?
- To what extent are material (and bodily! cf. Gallagher 2020) forms of agency constitutive of both language use and communicative practice?
- How might usage-based cognitive linguistic theories (cf. Zima 2021) offer new interpretative frameworks here?
- And how can media, in their material dimensions, be productively addressed from a mediolinguistic perspective?

Our goal is to discuss the following interrelation: First we want to address the relationship of language and the non-linguistic, as theorised in posthumanism (cf. Braidotti 2013), material culture studies (cf. Samida et al. 2014), and new materialism (cf. Coole & Frost 2010). These frameworks allow us to reconsider cultural discourse beyond purely constructivist paradigms by grounding it in material and embodied realities. This raises questions about the relationship between material culture and immaterial phenomena, making language and music – often assumed to be disembodied – particularly fruitful objects of study. Based on these two specifically human capacities, we aim to revisit the interplay between the human and the non-human in creative and communicative practice and ask: Can reflecting on musical culture in these terms provide methodological insights for understanding cultural discourse more broadly?

To reflect the interdisciplinary scope of our topic and objectives, the workshop will consist of five 20-minute presentations (each followed by 10 minutes for discussion), as well as an introductory keynote and a brief closing discussion.

Please send abstracts of 150 to 300 words by September 30, 2025, to [email protected]. Submissions should follow the Unified Style Sheet for Linguistics for references and citations. If possible, we prefer the speakers to be physically present, but a digital presentation is of course also possible.