The Media Ecology of Speech: The Interface of Speech and Labor in the YMCA's Americanization Campaigns

• In Event: Competitive Papers in Media Ecology I

Abstract

Through a historiographic and media ecology approach, this paper investigates the interface between speech techniques and labor in the YMCA’s early 20th century Americanization campaigns and reveals how, as a corporeal regime, speech instruction became a conservative technology which affirmed a marked, hierarchical order within the industrial relation. A media ecology approach to speech, which conceives of speech as an embodied environment, accounts for the historically situated, communicative production of classed, gendered, and raced bodies.

Author

• Zornitsa Keremidchieva, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities