The Symposium About Language and Society Austin; University of Texas at Austin

Conference: Symposium About Language and Society, Austin (SALSA) at the University of Texas at Austin in Austin,Texas
January 16 – 17, 2026

Presentation: Performing Stigma, Negotiating Hierarchy: Semiotic Practices of Chinese Vocational Students

Final Report:

Conference Overview
I participated in SALSA XXX, an national conference in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics, where I presented a paper examining the production and circulation of stigma surrounding vocational education in contemporary China. SALSA provided a valuable interdisciplinary forum for engaging with scholars working on language, ideology, media, and social inequality, and offered an important opportunity to receive feedback on a developing research agenda that will inform my future dissertation fieldwork.

Research Focus and Argument
China’s exam-centered educational system supports a pronounced hierarchy, positioning vocational school students at the lowest and most stigmatized tier. Following the government’s Diversion Policy of 2021, which limits academic high school enrollment to 50 percent, up to half of all middle school graduates are now directed into vocational education. In public discourse, vocational students are frequently labeled as “failures,” “low-quality”, or morally suspect. My research is motivated by a central paradox: when such a significant proportion of the nation’s youth is assigned to a stigmatized educational category, how does that stigma persist, remain morally justified, and face so little challenge? My presentation addressed this question through an analysis of a highly popular short video produced by a vocational school student vlogger on the Chinese platform Kuaishou. Drawing on linguistic anthropology and semiotic theory, I showed how stigma is not merely imposed from above, but actively negotiated, performed, and reproduced through everyday communicative practices — particularly through social media. Rather than treating stigma as a static label, I conceptualized it as an interactional and relational process that gains authority through circulation across institutions, families, schools, and digital platforms.

Key Contributions
The presentation made three main contributions:

Empirical Contribution: By analyzing vocational students’ own media production, the paper foregrounded how marginalized youth actively engage with stigma as a resource for visibility and self-positioning within constrained social and economic conditions.
Theoretical Contribution: The paper advanced a semiotic approach to stigma, emphasizing the role of voice, reported speech, and audiovisual contrast in producing ironic and ambivalent stances toward institutional authority. This approach moves beyond structural explanations to show how stigma becomes experientially real through everyday semiotic practices.
Broader Implications: The analysis situates vocational stigma within broader patterns of social inequality, including class stratification, rural – urban divides, and unequal access to educational resources. It highlights how educational hierarchies are reproduced not only through policy and institutions, but also through culturally recognizable signs and moral evaluations that circulate across social domains.

Conference Outcomes and Feedback
The presentation generated engaged discussion with scholars in linguistic anthropology, particularly those working on semiotics, discourse, and language ideology. Audience feedback focused on theoretical framing rather than empirical scope, with several participants offering suggestions on how to further articulate stigma as a distributed semiotic process across interactional, institutional, and ideological scales. Discussions also addressed questions of voicing, indexicality, and circulation, helping me refine how to link close-grained semiotic analysis to broader social formations. These exchanges have been instrumental in sharpening the conceptual core of my dissertation project and clarifying its contribution to ongoing debates in linguistic anthropology.

Significance for Ongoing Research
This conference presentation represents an important step in the development of my dissertation project on educational stigma, youth, and social inequality in China. The feedback and intellectual exchange at SALSA have directly informed my plans for summer pre-fieldwork with an educational NGO working with vocational students, and have helped sharpen my theoretical framing as I prepare for long-term field research. I am grateful to the Kellogg Institute for supporting my participation in this conference, which significantly contributed to my academic training and the advancement of my research agenda.