James Slotta
Assistant Professor — Ph.D., University of Chicago

Contact
- E-mail: jslotta@utexas.edu
- Office: WCP 5.134
- Campus Mail Code: C3200
Interests
political communication, knowledge and power, expertise, communicative infrastructures and imaginaries, the social life of information, cultural epistemologies, anarchic politics; Papua New Guinea, North America
Biography
My research focuses on a range of issues relating to political communication, expertise, the relationship between knowledge and power, and the ways information is embodied and circulates in language. I am particularly interested in the communicative infrastructures and imaginaries that underpin political life in both the liberal democracies of North America and the "anarchic" communities I work with in the South Pacific.
Much of my research to date has centered on the languages and communicative practices of people living in the Yopno valley of Papua New Guinea. Like many in the global south, people in the rural communities there have found themselves for the past century on the receiving end of knowledge that comes from elsewhere: missionaries bringing Christianity, colonial officials instituting school-based education, NGOs introducing environmental conservation. In considering why people in the Yopno valley have largely embraced these forms of knowledge and the institutions that provision them, I've been led to look more closely at the significance of listening as a political activity in the region—at the vital role that listening plays in the anarchic politics of Yopno villages, and more particularly, at the role that listening to the expertise of others plays in this politics. Growing out of this research, my book manuscript, On the Other Side of the Word: The Power of Listening at the "Ends of the Earth," offers an ethnographic account of "anarchic listening" in Yopno political life, and explores how practices of anarchic listening have led people to embrace thoroughly hierarchical national and global institutions, schools and churches foremost among them.
A second strain of my research looks at political communication in North America, and particularly at the vicissitudes of a liberal democratic ideal of open and free communication in the public sphere. Though the "actually existing" public sphere always fails to realize this ideal, I am interested in the way this communicative ideal animates and haunts political communication in US and Canada. As part of this interest, I have looked at the way "truth and reconciliation" processes in Canada serve as ritual enactments of proper liberal democratic communications, which aim to right past communicative wrongs. And, I have discussed how the verbal stylings of a recent president of the United States (and the media's coverage of them) have raised the specter of a growing communicative divide cleaving the public sphere and bringing into question the very existence of an American public.
Language lies at the center of all of my research, as a medium essential to the communication of knowledge and information. A third facet of my research concerns how knowledge is embodied in language and discourse—the genres, the ways of speaking, the vocabulary, and the grammar through which knowledge becomes palpable and circulates in social life. In collaboration with cognitive scientists Kensy Cooperrider and Rafael Nunez, I have looked at the ways spatial metaphors are used to encode temporal information in Yopno speech and gestures. I have examined the unique kinds of information encoded in the vocabulary of contemporary American English slang. And, with Luke Fleming, I have explored commonalities in the ways languages encode information about kinship relationships, and the apparently universal sociolinguistic practices grounded in these semantic similarities.
You can find a relatively complete list of my publications here. And a list of the courses I teach is available here.
Courses
ANT 302 • Cultural Anthropology
31845-31900 • Fall 2022
Meets MW 3:00PM-4:00PM JES A121A
GC
SB
ANT 320G • Endangered Languages
31870 • Spring 2022
Meets MW 1:00PM-2:30PM WCP 4.118
E
(also listed as LIN 373E)
T C 302 • Relativism
41690 • Spring 2022
Meets TTH 2:00PM-3:30PM RLP 0.124
Wr
ID
ANT 302 • Cultural Anthro-Honors-Wb
31830 • Spring 2021
Meets MW 1:00PM-2:30PM
Internet; Synchronous
GC
SB
ANT 391 • Rsch/Grant Proposal Writing-Wb
32235 • Spring 2021
Meets T 9:00AM-12:00PM
Internet; Synchronous
ANT 324L • Us Lang Diversity/Conflict-Wb
31108 • Fall 2020
Meets MW 2:30PM-4:00PM
Internet; Synchronous
CD
ANT 393 • Discourse Power Knowledge
31280 • Fall 2020
Meets T 2:00PM-5:00PM WCP 4.174
Hybrid/Blended
ANT 320L • Endangered Languages
31620 • Spring 2020
Meets MWF 2:00PM-3:00PM WCP 4.118
(also listed as LIN 373)
ANT 392N • Intro To Grad Ling Anthropol
31840 • Spring 2020
Meets F 9:00AM-12:00PM WCP 4.120
ANT 302 • Cultural Anthropology
30890-30915 • Fall 2019
Meets TTH 2:00PM-3:00PM GAR 0.102
GC
SB
ANT 393 • Lang Variation/Style/Register
31310 • Fall 2019
Meets TH 9:00AM-12:00PM WCP 4.114
ANT 302 • Cultural Anthropology
31510-31535 • Fall 2018
Meets MW 3:00PM-4:00PM GAR 0.102
CD
SB
ANT 302 • Cultural Anthropology
30580-30615 • Spring 2018
Meets MW 11:00AM-12:00PM BEL 328
CD
SB
ANT 307 • Culture And Communication-Hon
30725 • Spring 2018
Meets MW 1:00PM-2:30PM SAC 4.118
CD
SB
ANT 302 • Cultural Anthropology
31190-31215 • Fall 2017
Meets MW 12:00PM-1:00PM CLA 0.126
CD
SB
ANT 320L • Polit/Polity/Power Of Words
31415 • Fall 2017
Meets MW 10:00AM-11:30AM SAC 4.118
ANT 302 • Cultural Anthropology-Honors
31115 • Spring 2017
Meets TTH 2:00PM-3:30PM SAC 4.118
CD
SB
ANT 320L • Lang Endangerment/Rights
31225 • Spring 2017
Meets TTH 11:00AM-12:30PM SAC 4.174
(also listed as LIN 373)
ANT 302 • Cultural Anthropology
30990-31025 • Fall 2016
Meets MW 2:00PM-3:00PM ART 1.102
CD
SB
ANT 307 • Culture And Communication
31120 • Fall 2016
Meets TTH 3:30PM-5:00PM CLA 0.112
CD
SB
(also listed as LIN 312C)
Publications
Slotta, J. 2021. Pragmatics. The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology (Wiley). (https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118786093.iela0323)
Amha A, Slotta J., and Sarvasy HS. 2021. Singing the Individual: Name Tunes in Oyda and Yopno. Frontiers of Psychology 12:667599. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.667599
Slotta J. 2020. Endangered Languages and Porous Selves. Comment on Don Kulick’s A Death in the Rainforest. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 10(2): 650-5
Slotta, J. 2020. The Significance of Trump’s Incoherence. In Janet McIntosh and Norma Mendoza-Denton (eds), Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies, pp. 52-62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Slotta, James. 2019. The annotated Donald Trump: Signs of Circulation in a Time of Bubbles. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 29(3): 397-416. (https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.12228)
Fleming, Luke and James Slotta. 2018. The pragmatics of kin address: A sociolinguistic universal and its semantic affordances. Journal of Sociolinguistics 22(4): 375-405. (https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12304)
Cooperrider, Kensy, James Slotta, and Rafael Núñez. 2018. The preference for pointing with the hand is not universal. Cognitive Science. DOI: 10.1111/cogs.12585
Slotta, James. 2017. Can the subaltern listen? Self-determination and the provisioning of expertise in Papua New Guinea. American Ethnologist 44(2): 328-340.
Cooperrider, Kensy, James Slotta, and Rafael Núñez. 2017. Uphill and downhill in a flat world: The conceptual topography of the Yupno house. Cognitive Science 41: 768-799.
Slotta, James. 2016. Slang and the semantic sense of identity. Texas Linguistics Forum 59: 119-128.
Slotta, James. 2015. The perlocutionary is political: Listening as self-determination in a Papua New Guinean polity. Language in Society 44(4): 525-552.
Fleming, Luke and James Slotta. 2015. Named relations: A universal in the pragmatics of reference within the kin group. Proceedings of CLS 51, 165-179. Chicago: Chicago Linguistics Society.
Slotta, James. 2015. Phatic rituals of the liberal democratic polity: Hearing voices in the hearings of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. Comparative Studies in Society and History 57(1): 130-160.
Slotta, James. 2014. Revelations of the world: Transnationalism and the politics of perception in Papua New Guinea. American Anthropologist 116(3): 626–642.
Cooperrider, Kensy, Rafael Núñez, and James Slotta. 2014. The protean pointing gesture: Variation in a building block of human communication. In P. Bello, M. Guarini, M. McShane, & B. Scassellati (Eds.), Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 355-360). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
Slotta, James. 2012. Dialect, trope, and enregisterment in a Melanesian speech community. Language & Communication 32: 1-13. doi:10.1016/j.langcom.2011.11.003