Juan Luis Rodríguez

Juan Luis Rodríguez

Associate Professor

Ph.D, Southern Illinois University (Carbondale) 2011

Office: Powdermaker Hall 315H
Phone: (718) 997-2928
Fax: (718) 997-2885
Email: juan.rodriguezaponte@qc.cuny.edu

I am an Associate Professor of anthropology at Queens College, CUNY. My expertise is on semiotic and linguistic ideologies, specifically how these are mobilized in the process of state formation and the emergence of diasporic identities. My work relies on a discourse-centered approach to language and culture taking actual instances of language use and performative practices as the starting point of my ethnographic research. I combine this approach with an interest in practices of translation and semiotic transduction. I take translation practices as part of a more general process of transduction of political speech into political influence through the distribution of state resources. My book, Language and Revolutionary Magic in the Orinoco Delta (Bloomsbury Academic Press), explores the role of translation and transduction in the process of transforming oil revenue into political influence arguing that these are interconnected processes that help us understand the place of Warao speakers in the context of the Venezuelan public political sphere. Over the last year (2019-2020) I started a new research project in collaboration with Dr. Miki Makihara, funded by CUNY’s PSC-Research Foundation and a Research Enhancement Grant from Queens College, in which I explore linguistic intimacy in the Venezuelan diaspora both in Chile and the U.S. In this new project I will conduct a multi-site ethnographic investigation on the ways in which the largest migratory phenomenon in the hemisphere have produced new linguistic and semiotic practices.