Doctoral Dissertation Research: Speech Registers and Religious Soundscapes

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This linguistic anthropological research project involves a case study of a context in which religiously conservative women work at the margins of a religious soundscape as increasingly vocal participants of a specific genre of preaching meant to deepen the audience's faith. This project, which trains a linguistic anthropology doctoral student in methods of scientifically rigorous data collection and analysis, examines how discussions of women's voices, both in the sense of acoustic qualities and as a category of public discourse, are central to debates about female piety and form a key component of how feminine speech becomes a linguistic register. By examining how women navigate the terms of their marginalization in linguistically creative ways, this project seeks to broaden the participation of groups often underrepresented in science and strengthens scientific infrastructure through international collaborations between both linguistic and anthropological research communities. Moniek van Rheenen, under the supervision of Dr. Webb Keane of the University of Michigan, proposes to explore how religiously conservative women face the challenge of being public figures while demonstrating appropriate piety in their linguistic practice. The researcher will be conducted at two sites (in two major cities known for their active preaching networks) and across different contexts of mediation, including face-to-face interaction, social media communication, and mass media circulation. Utilizing ethnographies of communication, participant observation, interactional analysis, and elicitation tasks, the researcher seeks to identify how salient linguistic variables such as pitch and prosody are taken up as part of an emerging register of feminine language. This research will contribute to debates in linguistic anthropology about how gender ideologies are constructed through language, theories in the anthropology of religion about everyday lived experience, and analyses of agency and activism.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.