Description:

Throughout the academic year, the Center for Latinx Digital Media invites you to a series of weekly seminars held over Zoom on Thursdays. You can now register (click here) to the upcoming seminar of the Winter 2022 quarter, happening on Thursday, January 20, at 12-1 PM US CT. Professor Dolores Inés Casillas (University of California, Santa Barbara) will give a presentation entitled ““We espeekinglish tu!!!”: Listening while Latinx to Radio and Sound Media.”

Abstract: This presentation focuses primarily on immigrant engagement with U.S. Spanish-language and bilingual media with special attention given to radio, sound, and language play. The format of sound, the low cost of radio sets, and its real-time capabilities have long lent themselves to fostering a sense of intimacy with Spanish-dominant, immigrant listeners. Likewise, I share how book-audio (CD) sets within the Learning English market also capitalizes on the practice of mobile listening for immigrant consumers. Ultimately, listening and sound constitute two significant yet overlooked areas within Latinx Media Studies.

Dolores Inés Casillas is Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies and Director of the Chicano Studies Institute (CSI) at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses primarily on immigrant engagement with U.S. Spanish-language and bilingual media and the representation of accented Spanish and English languages within popular culture. She is the author of Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-language Radio and Public Advocacy (NYU Press, 2014), which received two book prizes, and co-editor with María Elena Cepeda (Williams College) of the Companion to Latina/o Media Studies (Routledge Press, 2016) and co-editor with Mary Bucholtz and Jin Sook Lee (UC Santa Barbara) of Feeling It: Language, Race and Affect in Latinx Youth Learning (Routledge Press, 2018). Her current manuscript explores the politics of language learning and language play as heard through different media technologies.

This event is co-sponsored by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, the Center for Global Culture and Communication, the Department of Radio/Television/Film, the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, and the Latina and Latino Studies Program.