Silencing and speaking up
The ZAS conference is on Oppressive Speech, Societies & Norms. “Silencing, Speaking up & Free Speech” is one of the themes. The irony of organizing such a conference and then booting one of the speakers is conspicuous.
It reads to me as if it fits the theme of the workshop (which isn’t “scientific” in the first place – “oppressive” is not a scientific concept) perfectly.
Speech can be used to change societies in bad ways. It supports institutional oppression, establishes new oppressive norms, silences opponents, spreads disinformation and propagates feelings of hate. Online communities magnify the effects of individual speech acts. This workshop series, comprising five meetings, will dive into five different aspects of oppressive speech. We’ll look at social norms and institutions, silencing and free speech, social meaning, norm-shifting and disinformation. We’ll bring several tools and perspectives from linguistics, social modelling, and philosophy, including game theory, semantics/pragmatics and speech act theory. We’ll seek answers to how oppressive speech works and how to defend against it.
Unless we change our minds when we read the abstract, in which case all bets are off.
To be fair, I don’t think they’re being entirely hypocritical. It seems clear from the quoted passages that the main problem as far as ZAS are concerned is “oppressive speech”, whereas “silencing” falls into the “what to do about it” category.
It looks like some of them are now going to be able to draw on their own practical experience of deploying silencing tactics and oppressive speech. How fortuitous is that?
Perhaps they’ll have a special pat-on-the-back session about all the people they refused to listen to, and how brave that was.