Unsettling Signs: Indexical Disorder and the Diacritics of Raciolinguistic Life

The framework of indexical order has been powerfully deployed in sociolinguistic and broader semiotic analyses throughout the world. This presentation critically engages with prevailing empiricist approaches to indexicality which focus on signs’ heterogeneous meanings across contexts. It examines institutionalized attributions of deficiency and experiences of structural marginalization to offer the alternative framework of indexical disorder, which emphasizes the profound role of modern colonialism and racism in overdetermining signs’ meaningfulness. The goal is to develop new insights into organizing power structures across contexts, as well as to rethink how indexicality can be a crucial analytic for understanding and unsettling these structures.


Jonathan Rosa is Associate Professor of Education, Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies, and, by courtesy, Anthropology, Linguistics, and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He is author of Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad (2019, Oxford University Press) and co-editor of Language and Social Justice in Practice (2019, Routledge). His work has been published in scholarly journals such as Harvard Educational Review, American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, and Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, as well as featured in media outlets including The New York Times, The Nation, NPR, and Univision.