Adam Harr

I've always been fascinated by the power of language, so after college I moved to Java, Indonesia to be immersed in languages, cultures, and intellectual traditions that seemed as far as possible from my birthplace in the mountains of Southwest Virginia. I returned to the U.S. the following year, my brain buzzing, and enrolled in my first anthropology course at the University of Virginia.

My dissertation research examined how social change is reflected in and precipitated by people’s use of different languages. I conducted two years of ethnographic research in multilingual communities in the highlands of central Flores, a beautiful island in eastern Indonesia that is home to astonishing linguistic, cultural, artistic, and intellectual diversity. I am grateful to have had the profound privilege of conducting long-term research in other folks' homes.

Since becoming a parent to two wild and curious kids, my research interests have shifted closer to my own home. The questions I am most drawn to now are ones that have practical implications for improving people's lives. I am currently enrolled in nursing school and pursuing licensure as a Registered Nurse, an experience that I hope will directly inform future research on communication, care, and the use of AI technologies in clinical settings.

At St. Lawrence University, I feel incredibly lucky to teach courses in linguistic and cultural anthropology, including Language and Human Experience, Medicines and Meanings, and Childhood Across Cultures. In each of my courses, I aim to collaborate with students in hopes that we all come away with a renewed sense of wonder at the strange/beautiful/terrible worlds we humans create and inhabit.

Selected Publications

• 2024 Scalar Poetics in Ritual Language. In The Oxford Handbook of Ritual Language, edited by by David Tavárez. Oxford University Press.
• 2022 Ancestral Centers and Bureaucratic Boundaries: Sociolinguistic Scaling in an Eastern Indonesian Polity. In New Directions in Linguistic Geography: Exploring Articulations of Space, edited by Greg Niedt. Palgrave.
• 2020 Recentering the Margins? The Politics of "Local Language" in a Decentralizing Indonesia. In Contact Talk: The Discursive Construction of Contact and Boundaries, edited by Zane Goebel, Debbie Cole, and Howard Manns. Routledge.
• 2019 Sociolinguistic Scale and Ethnographic Rapport. In Rapport and the Discursive Co-Construction of Social Relations in Fieldwork Settings, edited by Zane Goebel. Mouton de Gruyter.
• 2015 Moving Words: Christian Language in the Modern World. In Reviews in Anthropology 44: 1-17.
• 2013 Suspicious Minds: Problems of Cooperation in a Lio Ceremonial Council. In Language & Communication 33(3): 317-326.

Selected Presentations

• 2023 "Scalar Disruptions in Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker" presented at the Science Fiction Research Associate Conference, Technische Universität Dresden, August 8
• 2019 "Shifting Ideologies of Language and Place in an Eastern Indonesian Polity" presented at the Symposium on Analyzing Ideologies, Attitudes, and Power in Language Contact Settings, Stockholm University, May 16-17
• 2017 “Scaling the Nation: Multilingual Politics in a Decentralizing Indonesia” presented at the Conference on Contact-Induced Multilingual Practices, University of Helsinki, June 1-2
• 2016 "All Politics is Local: Spatial Deixis as Rhetoric in an Eastern Indonesian Polity" presented at Symposium on Language, Indexicality, and Belonging, Oxford University, April 7-8
• 2015 “Recentering the Margins? The Politics of Local Language in a Decentralizing Indonesia” presented at the Conference on the Sociolinguistics of Globalization at the University of Hong Kong, June 3-6