RSSRuqaiya Hasan: a Life in Linguistics
Nov 19
Ruqaiya Hasan: a Life in Linguistics
February 16-17, 2015
Macquarie University
At this symposium, hosted by the institution where Ruqaiya Hasan spent the most years of her career, and where she conducted some of her best known research, we will examine Hasan’s legacy, retrospectively and prospectively. Ruqaiya Hasan is one of our discipline’s most thoughtful and exciting scholars. Over a 60 year career, she showed the penetrating power of language. She understood that the reach of linguistics was “life-wide”, because this was also the central characteristic of language. She took her critical faculties to the examination of socialization, education, literary aesthetics, the making of mind in society, literacy and globalization, the intricacies of grammatical form, as well as the enormous scope of language, and what this means for the discipline of linguistics. She was a scholar who could think deeply, and range widely.
In her scholarship, she entered into dialogue with the ideas of the greatest thinkers on language in the 20th century: Saussure, Vygotsky, Vološinov, Bahktin, Firth, Mukařovský, Malinowki, Whorf, Labov, Bernstein, Halliday, Bourdieu, Derrida, Austin, Searle, Leech, and Levinson. And she showed herself to be at least their equal.
This two day event will begin with workshops on some of the key aspects of linguistic theory and application developed in Hasan’s work, including
- · the relations of language and context
- · language, ideology and semantic variation
- · language and verbal art
- · cohesion and cohesive harmony
- · theorising and analysing meaning
On the second day, we will host a series of talks which will examine the intellectual vistas of her career, and explore the new horizons she has opened up in her relentless inquiry into the nature of language as humans’ most powerful collective resource.
The two day symposium will be free-of-charge. Registration details will be shortly available. On the evening of 17th of February all participants are invited to attend a dinner where we will share our memories of Ruqaiya as a friend, a colleague and a mentor. We will circulate details of dinner venue and cost closer to the event.
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