Engendering Silence Paper Proposal
By saturdayNovember 25, 2015 - 12:05
In taking the idea of engendering silence with more of a political science flair, I was thinking about connecting Stanley's ideas about language being used to silence in a political setting to our discussions in Joel's class about The New Jim Crow.
In particular I'm interested in the section about silencing by denying access to vocabulary: "it is difficult to have a reasoned debate about the costs and benefits of a policy when one side has seized control of the linguistic means to express [...] claims". It seems like this manifests itself in two ways: silencing voices by controlling the language around a debate, and silencing voices by assigning language to a person/movement/group in order to discredit them.