Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, Jens, Zac Boyd, and Míša Hejná. 2024. “Teaching children to discriminate? A quantitative study of linguistic representation in Disney’s “Revival Era” animated films.” MedieKultur: Journal of Media and Communication Research 40 (76): 191–202. https://doi.org/10.7146/mk.v40i76.135083.

Abstract: Rosina Lippi-Green’s (1997, 2012) classic quantitative study of linguistic representation in animated Disney films of the 20th century found these films to be discriminatory. Her main and most publicized finding was that characters who spoke varieties of American English tended to be morally good, while characters with a foreign accent were often evil and untrustworthy. Following a methodological discussion of Lippi-Green’s approach as it relates to our own, we investigate the degree to which her results also describe 273 characters from Disney’s successful “Revival Era,” starting with The Princess and the Frog (2009) and ending with Encanto (2021). We find, among other significant developments, that the foreign-accented characters in these more recent films are distinctively good. Also examined are other relationships between characters’ language, moral standing, gender, and age. Notably, female and younger characters tend to speak Standard American English, and they tend to be more moral than male and older characters. We end by discussing some possible causes of the main developments.

Hejná, Míša, Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, Mark Eaton, Mathias Clasen, Zac Boyd, and Oliver Niebuhr, eds. 2024. Proceedings of the 2023 Aarhus International Conference on Voice Studies. Sciendo (De Gruyter). https://sciendo.com/book/9788366675513.

Abstract: The voice is a carrier of many meanings. It expresses our thoughts and feelings, and it echoes our life experiences and who we are. With the voice positioned at the nexus of human communication, it is no surprise that its study has been of interest to a range of diverse disciplines. It can nevertheless be challenging to connect the findings of individual disciplines in a more holistic understanding of the voice. Approaching this challenge was at the heart of the 2023 Aarhus International Conference on Voice Studies, organized by the Centre of Voice Studies at Aarhus University. The conference was held in Aarhus on the 16th–18th of August 2023 at Aarhus University, Denmark. These proceedings present some of the outcomes of this endeavour. Some contributors focus on sociolinguistics, that is, on the ways in which the voice communicates and negotiates social meanings and relationships. Another focus is applied linguistics. Several contributors investigate how findings about vocal variation can address societal challenges, such as those posed in the realms of forensics and healthcare communication. Some contributions are mainly concerned with interfaces in the sense of how voice interacts with other aspects of linguistics, including syntax and lexis. Finally, many contributors explore how voice contributes to meaningful communication in different media, such as television and audiobooks.

Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, Jens. 2024. “Lost in Standardization: How the Danish Dubbing of Zootopia Diminishes the Film’s Message.” 16:9 (April 3, 2024). https://www.16-9.dk/2024/04/zootopia/.

Abstract: The Danish dubbings of Disney’s animated films are typically faithful to the originals and accomplished in their own right. There is, however, one aspect of the original English voice performances that they rarely capture, which is their creative use of different accents and dialects. Taking Zootopia (2016) as his example, Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen examines how the resulting lack of linguistic diversity can compromise not just a film’s characterization, but also its narrative cogency and thematic impact.

Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, Jens. 2024. “The Voice of the People: Populism and Donald Trump's Use of Informal Voice.” Society 61 (3): 289–302. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-024-00969-7.

Abstract: Many studies have examined characteristic verbal aspects of Donald J. Trump’s political communication, from his authoritarian rhetoric to his preference for short words and simple sentences, as expressions of his populism. This article focuses on his use of non-verbal voice quality. In analyzing the “Trump rallies” and other materials from his successful campaigning before the 2016 United States presidential election, I argue that Trump’s evocative and meaningful uses of pitch, amplitude, speech rate, rhythm, and other vocal measures combine to make his paralanguage exceptionally and counter-normatively informal, and that this informality amplifies his explicitly populist messaging. I conclude by suggesting that Trump’s informal voice solves an important problem for him: It allows him to express his populism with a deeply personal undertone, and thereby potentially to make his claims to popular identification ring intuitively true.

Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, Jens. 2024. “What Science Can't Know: On Scientific Objectivity and the Human Subject.” Poetics Today 45 (1): 1–16. hhttps://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10938579.

Abstract: The humanities are centrally concerned with such human subjectivity—such thinking, feeling, and wondering—as goes into the appreciation of a painting or the absorbed and responsive reading of a novel. It is often argued that the intrinsic subjectivity of these experiences renders them inaccessible to objective science, which seeks to avoid subjectivity. However, this fallacious argument confuses an ontological and an epistemic sense of the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity. The subjectivity of “thinking, feeling, and wondering” describes the mode of existence of these mental states, whereas the objectivity of science describes a mode of investigation, and it is in fact very possible to investigate human mental life by means of objective methods. This article expounds the fallacy and examines its appearances in recent scholarly writings against the use of objective methods in the humanities. The fallacy, as is argued, promotes a widespread misconception that the use of objective methods in the humanities would entail a discounting, or “reduction,” of human subjectivity. By countering this misconception, this article aims to encourage humanists who are drawn to empirical methods.

Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, Jens, and Mathias Clasen. 2023. “Creepiness and the Uncanny.” Style 57 (3): 322–347. https://doi.org/10.5325/style.57.3.0322.

Abstract: To feel nervously and apprehensively “creeped out” is a familiar emotional state, but its cause—what makes something or someone “creepy”—is poorly understood. A recent evolutionary account of creepiness suggests that the emotion arises from a perceived “ambiguity about the presence of threat” (McAndrew and Koehnke 10). However, not all ambiguous threats are perceived as creepy. This article argues that specifically creepy threats arise from disrupted mentalization, by which is meant difficulties in apprehending the mind of another being in such a way as to make that being seem threateningly unpredictable. The authors propose that this explanation of creepiness also explains “the uncanny,” a concept that is closely related to creepiness and to which a much older and larger research literature attaches. Finally, it is suggested that the present account can make sense of some iconically creepy figures of horror fictions, including zombies, ghosts, and ominously unhuman children.

Collaboration between Aarhus University's Centre of Voice Studies and the Recreational Fear Lab.

Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, Jens, Michaela Hejná, Mathias Clasen, and Mark Eaton. 2023. “Evil Voices in Popular Fictions: The Case of The Exorcist.” The Journal of Popular Culture 56 (2): 226–247. https://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.13234

Abstract: This article theorizes evil voices in popular fictions by drawing on the theory of conceptual metaphor. We argue that voices can seem expressive of evil if they give the impression of being impure, that is, sickly, infectious, and broken. The reason is that immoral thoughts and behaviors are metaphorically conceptualized as a form of sickness, and this moral sickness finds embodied expression in a sick voice. We then apply this perspective to a case study of The Exorcist, in which we analyze the vocal performance of possessed Regan’s voice actress, Mercedes McCambridge, before ending with some general observations on the moral rhetoric of purity and sickness in fictions.

Collaboration between Aarhus University's Centre of Voice Studies and the Recreational Fear Lab.

​​​​​​Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, Jens, and Michaela Hejná. 2023. “The Voices of Game Worlds: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Disco Elysium.” Games and Culture 18 (5): 578–597. https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120221115396.

Abstract: This article examines how vocal performances of characters can contribute to sociocritical storytelling in video games. We argue that the vocal performances of video game characters–and in particular their accents–can “fill in” the fictional story worlds of video games through associations with real people and places. These associations allow video games to evoke such social themes as are connected with accent, including privilege, conflict, class, and ethnicity. So evoked, these themes can then be critically examined. We apply this perspective in a sociolinguistic analysis of Disco Elysium, an expansive role-playing game in which the characters' vocal performances come to support the player's sociomoral orientation in the game world. Finally, we discuss a result of our analysis that runs counter to previous scholarship, namely that vocal stereotyping can serve to enhance, rather than to undermine, the player's critical apprehension of game worlds.