Maggie Ronkin

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I am a PhD candidate specializing in discourse analytic sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and linguistic anthropology at Georgetown University. My earlier interests centered on 19th and 20th century language ideologies in India, especially on relations between colonial projects and realizations and contestations of them in the creation of Hindi. From 1996 to 1999, I studied macrosociolinguistics, particularly language movements, and gave talks on stereotypifications of speech and images of persons in the wake of the Ebonics controversy in the USA. With Helen E. Karn, I co-authored a paper on the racialized mocking of Ebonics on multiple Internet sites that appeared in the Journal of Sociolinguistics and earned me Presidential honorary membership in the American Dialect Society.

My dissertation, set in Lahore, Pakistan, draws from autobiographical narratives to examine the discursive resources that an Urdu and Panjabi-speaking domestic worker uses to construct and project her identity. Prominent among these resources are deictically anchored dialogs, with which the narrator creates and manipulates voices in zones of textual patterning to position herself in relation to others and to negotiate and display facets of moral selves. Embarking on the home stretch of my dissertation last fall, I participated in a seminar that explored how role inhabitation in self-storying brings into play linguistic and extralinguistic resources that position speakers toward circumstances, and assessed claims that selves are relational, at least partly constructed in narration.

Bridging my research areas are my interests in language and inequality, and in how linguistic practices constitute identities, which, experienced, ratified, resisted, and altered through discursive-semiotic activities, inform understandings of social processes in the human sciences. In support of my work, I have been named a Fellow by Georgetown, the Linguistic Society of America, and the American Institute of Pakistan Studies. As a Georgetown Fellow, I taught, co-organized the Round Table on Languages and Linguistics, and helped run a speakers' series featuring founders of the field of discourse analysis. Recently, I convened an outreach seminar that surveyed Sufism through lectures augmented by recordings of poetry and music.

In Spring 2007, I was invited to the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. There I taught Introduction to India, a gateway course cross-listed in Asian Studies, Anthropology, History, and Religious Studies. Emphases were on the organization of human experience via constructions of collective identities, and on general 19th and 20th century history, using India and South Asia: A Short History. In addition, I designed and taught Language and Society in South Asia, an upper-level undergraduate course cross-listed in Asian Studies and Anthropology. One of my students in Asian Cultures and Languages received the George H. Mitchell Award for Academic Excellence in recognition of his outstanding senior research project.

In Summer 2007, I was invited to become a visiting scholar at the University of Texas and Lok Virsa, Pakistan's Institute of Folk and Traditional Heritage. Lok Virsa documents, revives, and publicizes rich cultural traditions, leads preservation activities in Central Asia, and works with many international cultural organizations. My own research is on the central calendric event celebrated by African-Pakistani Sheedis. It aims to illuminate how micro-level ritual enactments re-construct heritage identities that contest biological and social identity construals. Elucidation of the cultural politics of ritual expression will contribute to understanding practices of African South Asian communities, and to Pakistan scholarship's visibility within the human sciences.

In Fall 2007, I taught The Ethnographic Analysis of Speaking in the Department of Anthropology at George Washington University. One of my students in this writing intensive course had his papers on judges' jury instructions accepted by the Arizona Anthropology and Linguistics Symposium and UCLA's Conference on Language, Interaction, and Culture. I also convene Moazzam Siddiqi's outreach seminar at Georgetown University on the Indian roots of Urdu.