Markets of Aspiration in Post-Revolutionary Tunisia: The Media and the Message

Location: McCardell Bicentennial Hall 216

Aziz Fatnassi, anthropologist at Champlain College, will talk about the sociolinguistics of Tunisian youth who have experienced the Arab Spring, who aspire to transnational lifestyles, but who remain subject to local expectations and cultural violence. He will show how aspiration, opportunity, and preclusion arise from widely distributed representations of autonomy, independence, and social mobility from the ‘glocal’ to the global scale. He will also show how representation of recent political uprisings allow individuals and groups to demonstrate dominion over revolutionary symbolism.