Language Use in a Multilingual Workplace

This month we published Domestic Workers Talk by Kellie Gonçalves and Anne Ambler Schluter. In this post the authors introduce the book and explain what inspired it. 

This study of Shine (a multilingual cleaning company) was inspired by the dearth of sociolinguistic work carried out in domestic labor contexts and blue-collar workplaces more generally. As Kellie had close familial ties to Magda, Shine’s owner, we were able to gain access to all employees (migrant women who speak Portuguese and Spanish) and several of Shine’s Anglophone clients who reside in an upper-class suburb of New York City. As such, we were able to talk to the company owner (Magda), all of her employees and several clients in order to better understand how communication is achieved in a small private business where European Portuguese serves as the company internal language despite the company’s geographical location in the US, where English is the dominant language.

Our study had a strong ethnographic component to it meaning that we were also able to observe how the company hierarchy was structured and how daily business was carried out. As both Kellie and Anne are speakers of English, Portuguese and Spanish (at different levels), we were able to witness first-hand how different languages and different language varieties were valued, mixed, and used among domestic workers with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

At the same time, we were also able to observe the diverse, creative linguistic and embodied resources drawn on to facilitate communication among domestic workers and their Anglophone clients. Because Magda, the company owner, is a multilingual speaker, she often facilitated communication between her employees and clients thus serving as the main language broker of the company. This fact coupled with domestic workers’ ability to use both Portuguese and Spanish in Newark, NJ (where many domestic workers reside) diminished most domestic workers’ need and even motivation to learn English while simultaneously allowing Magda to control and micro-manage communication between her employees and clients. English was therefore not a prerequisite for employment at Shine.

Due to Magda’s professional background in finance, as well as her managerial and multilingual skills, we also investigated the complex power relations among her, her migrant female employees as well as her Anglophone clients. While we found Magda’s managerial style to be very direct and authoritative, she also had a very soft side to her with regard to both her employees and clients resulting in little turnover of her staff and a high demand for Shine’s cleaning services.

Overall, the book traces the story of Magda as a migrant domestic worker herself, who left Brazil in the 1970s to work as a live-in nanny for an upper-class Brazilian family in New Jersey up until the establishment of Shine in the mid 1980s. We collected data for this project beginning in 2011 until shortly before the book was published in order to provide readers with an accurate and up to date account of how Shine was created and successfully run until Magda’s retirement in 2019 shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic.

We believe our study adds to the growing body of research on language and domestic work by taking embodied sociolinguistics, posthumanism and emotional intelligence into account while simultaneously maintaining a critical perspective on multilingualism, the feminine gendered nature of domestic work as well as the inherent power relations between majority and minority language speakers, where issues of class, gender and citizenship prevail.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Exploring (Im)mobilities edited by Anna De Fina and Gerardo Mazzaferro.

(Socio)linguistic Citizenship and What it Means to Have a Voice

This month we published The Power of Voice in Transforming Multilingual Societies edited by Julia Gspandl, Christina Korb, Angelika Heiling and Elizabeth J. Erling. In this post the editors explain the concept of ‘voice’.

In discourses of philanthropy and social justice, the phrase “to give voice” is used almost as ubiquitously as “to empower”. Often, it is used to mean to speak on somebody’s behalf, perhaps even without their involvement. Yet, much like it is very difficult to give people the power to do anything, we cannot give individuals or communities a voice. In fact, they do not need to be given a voice, nor anybody to speak on their behalf. They, indeed, have a voice. The question is: Is that voice being heard, being taken seriously? Have they been provided with the space and tools to develop a “voice worth hearing”, as Hymes asked in 1996?

The concept of voice is complex and multifaceted, and its meaning can vary depending on the context in which it is used. Indeed, the idea of voice has been taken up by scholars in various fields investigating a range of notions. In our book, we see “voice” as the communicative power and effective expression of a language user’s views and perceptions in a given context. In sociolinguistics, issues of voice concern the potential social exclusion of those who do not have a command of the socially esteemed language varieties that are prevalent in educational and civil contexts. Exercising voice is a way of challenging the inequalities embedded in society and critiquing the way they are systematically reproduced.

Voice is closely related to agency, which refers to the ability to take action and effect change in one’s environment. In order for marginalized voices to be heard and for people to exercise agency, they need to be able to communicate effectively and persuasively in a given context. It is not only about being heard but also about the “freedom to develop a voice worth hearing” (Hymes, 1996: 64). If minority language users are to be taken seriously, they need to understand and connect with the people and contexts that they seek to change. Cultivating this voice takes time, effort, and the support of others through education, whether formal or informal (Rampton, Cooke & Holmes, 2018).

In this context, (socio)linguistic citizenship is a valuable concept. It refers to what people do with and around language(s) to position themselves agentively, and to craft new subjectivities of political speakerhood, often outside of those prescribed or legitimated in institutional frameworks of the state. Although bottom-up approaches are a key aim of (socio)linguistic citizenship, their facilitation is connected to a range of challenges, particularly regarding the sustainability of any such efforts. This highlights the importance of voice, including voices from the grassroots, and the importance of an engaged, committed community.

Speakers and signers of minoritized communities need a platform, the space and tools to gain knowledge, spread their ideas, and make themselves heard. Research on their languages should therefore include commitments to voice, to participation and agency, lest researchers become unwitting accomplices in linguistic oppression. Reclaiming control over one’s language and reality –  that is what it means to exercise’s one’s voice.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Struggles for Multilingualism and Linguistic Citizenship edited by Quentin Williams, Ana Deumert and Tommaso M. Milani.

Writing an Academic Graphic Novel Or, Can Academic Writing be Creative?

This month we published Political Activism in the Linguistic Landscape by Philip Seargeant with Korina Giaxoglou and Frank Monaghan. In this post Philip explains why he chose to present his research in the form of a graphic novel.

The stimulus for my new book, Political Activism in the Linguistic Landscape, was to try to find ways of discussing, in an academic monograph, something which is a predominantly visual phenomenon. Linguistic landscape research is about the display of language in public space. It’s about how the language of signs, posters, placards and any other genre of public communication is used to express social meaning in communal settings. An important element of this language use is its existence as a material object. It’s also very often accompanied by images and it draws its meaning from the context and cultural space in which it’s displayed. So rather than simply including the odd grainy photo of the cases I was analysing, I wanted a more visually-oriented way of dealing with the way that words, images and location come together to create meaning when people are taking to the streets to protest against what they see as political injustice. In other words, I wanted to create a multimodal account of what is a very multimodal spectacle.

A page from the book

The solution – or at least my attempt at a solution – was to use the genre of a graphic novel (broadly understood) as a means of both presenting the examples of political activism I was looking at and analysing the ways in which these signs combined with context and audience to make meaning.

But there was also another reason for experimenting with this format. One which has as much to do with the genre as it does with the subject of the book. And which reflects on the extent to which academic writing is allowed to be ‘creative’.

Recently in my department, there was a discussion amongst colleagues about how generative AI – ChatGPT and the like – is going to affect the production and publishing of academic texts. The discussion echoed the wider public panic about the disruption this technology will have on society generally: human enterprise will be replaced by machines, plagiarisers and pedlars of disinformation will proliferate, and so on and so forth.

One specific line of argument was that the marketplace for academic texts will be flooded by facile articles which are of negligible intellectual interest but have the semblance of competently written academic prose. Academic writing as we know it will become a genre of algorithmically-determined and excessively formulaic text production and we’ll soon be overwhelmed by people churning out articles devoid of creative ideas and enquiry.

The arguments behind this position adhere to a widespread reaction to technological change which views it as irredeemably dystopian. This is an essentially conservative argument: the fear that while we have, over the years, developed rationally-based conventions for dealing with the challenges we face as a civilization, this new technology will undermine those conventions and upset the balanced flow of life as we know it.

But as an argument it also fails to acknowledge that ‘academic writing’ has already become a practice that is algorithmically-determined and excessively formulaic, and that the motivation for producing academic texts often has little to do with creative knowledge production and more to do with the fulfilling of institutional requirements.

The precepts that underpin what has become known as ‘academic writing’ are all too often lost beneath a complicated and dogmatic rulebook of conventions. And the excessively formulaic nature of academic texts frequently has the consequence of hampering the very purpose they’re meant to fulfil. All too regularly the compelling argument or the insightful analysis gets squeezed down to almost nothing due to requirements to list tangentially-related studies simply for the performative value of indicating that you’re aware of them, or the necessity of name-checking alternative theoretical approaches which you have no intention of actually drawing upon. The result is that the process of both writing and reading such texts becomes increasingly laborious – in a way that’s in inverse proportion to the amount of value or stimulus one gets from them.

There’s no reason why academic writing needs to be such a formulaic practice, however, and no reason why it can’t be creatively exploratory. The basic precepts for an academic text are fairly straight-forward: it should be soundly argued, based on valid and documented evidence, and should extend our understanding of some phenomenon or other. As long as it aims at this, the format should, presumably, be able to take whatever form the writer wishes.

And there’s been some recent work which does precisely this. To take just one example, the ethnographic playscripts produced by Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese (and also published by Multilingual Matters) present interactive data and its analysis in the form of drama, and in doing so foreground the voices of their subjects in a much more immediate and inventive way than a traditional research report can.

It was against this background that the idea to try something that breaks from the entrenched conventions of the academic presentation of ideas and analysis came about. Whether the book achieves what I was aiming at isn’t for me to evaluate. But hopefully, as well as offering a case study of how political activism can make use of the linguistic landscape to good effect, the book also acts as its own case study for how we can explore alternative ways of writing about research.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Ode to the City – An Ethnographic Drama by Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese.

Linking Translanguaging and Translation

This month we published Translanguaging in Translation by Eriko Sato. In this post the author explains why she chose to study translation in relation to translanguaging. 

In this book I wanted to show the long-term, often invisible contributions of translanguaging to the development of our languages and societies through the analysis of translated texts. Why translated texts? Think about who the translators are and what they do. Translators are bilinguals who stand right at the boundary between two languages and cultures to help two groups of people understand each other. Their criticality and creativity as bilinguals are crucial for overcoming linguistic and cultural barriers to convey their own interpretation of a text to a new audience. Accordingly, the traces of translanguaging in translation can give us insight into bilinguals’ pivotal language practices. Translated texts can indeed serve as valuable primary data for applied linguists who study translanguaging, language contact, and historical development of languages that reflect surrounding sociocultural contexts.

I examined Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Hindi and English texts with focus on script types, onomatopoeias, pronouns, names, metaphors, puns and other context-sensitive linguistic elements. The analysis shows that translators’ translanguaging is often ideologically driven and motivated by implicit agendas such as:

• to respect/adopt the culture of the source text (ST);
• to achieve intercultural communication, rather than cross-cultural communication;
• to create new concepts, sensitivities and rhetorical tools;
• to resist the dominant socio-political power of the culture of the target text (TT);
• to manipulate the perception of historical events.

Translators push or pull linguistic boundaries as needed, and their translanguaging actions consequently shape and reshape our languages, both vocabulary and grammar, and our societies and cultures.

My study sheds light on the problems caused by monolingualizing forces in translation and brings a new dimension to the field of applied linguistics, in particular, sociolinguistics. It is very rare to find features of the source language (SL) in English translations published in Anglophone societies to the extent that translations appear as originals as claimed by Lawrence Venuti. However, SL words and morphemes are scattered across pages in English translations published in highly multilingual societies such as India. Translation practices indeed mirror each society’s dominant attitude toward multilingualism.

The implication of my study extends to language teaching. Translation activities and the use of languages other than the target language (TL) have been unfairly banned or highly discouraged in many language classrooms over decades. The monolingualizing language teaching is effective in forcing  novice language learners to utter words and phrases in the TL but is not effective in fostering their competence in intercultural communication. Language learners, especially novice learners, need to use their “full” linguistic repertoire to approach unfamiliar words and unknown cultural concepts, compare them with those in their own culture, connect them to other subjects that are relevant to them, and start engaging in the community of TL speakers, and communicate with them based on their renewed identity. Translanguaging liberates language learners and emerging bilinguals from linguistic intimidation and allows them to engage in meaningful intercultural communication, the ultimate goal of language learning.

Eriko Sato
Stony Brook University
eriko.sato@stonybrook.edu

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might like Translanguaging as Transformation edited by Emilee Moore, Jessica Bradley and James Simpson.

Multilingual Contexts of Language Standardization and Variation

We recently published Language Standardization and Language Variation in Multilingual Contexts edited by Nicola McLelland and Hui Zhao. In this post the editors explain how the volume came together.

It’s no accident that this volume is a cooperation between two editors from quite different research backgrounds: one of us (McLelland) comes from a European tradition of language standardization studies, while the other (Zhao) is trained in variationist sociolinguistics, with a particular focus on Chinese. What brought us together for this collaboration was our shared desire to shed new light on language standardization and variation in three crucial ways.

First, we wanted to bring language standardization and language variation studies, which in effect examine two sides of the same coin within sociolinguistics, into conversation. Second, we wanted to shine the light firmly on the languages of Asia, thus far badly under-represented in our fields compared to Europe and the English-speaking world. Third, we wanted to add momentum to the growing recognition of multilingualism in sociolinguistic studies.

Every chapter in the volume, therefore, deals with language variation and/or standardization in a multilingual context in Asia. In many multilingualism case studies, one of the languages involved is English, so it’s worth noting that while English is indeed relevant in several of our case studies, all of our authors tackle contexts that are already multilingual before we factor in English.

Readers will, we trust, draw their own lessons from the volume, but as we send it into the world, it’s worth highlighting what we editors have been privileged to learn from the project ourselves. We’ve certainly learned more about the “hidden multilingualisms” of the world, not least within China: our volume includes contributions looking at minoritized languages within China’s borders, including Mongolian, Sibe, Tibetan, and Zhuang, as well as shedding light on the relationship between different Chinese languages and varieties spoken both within China (Beijing, Shanghai) and elsewhere (Malaysia).

Several studies in our volume are also a reminder to those of us schooled in the historical language standardization of certain major European languages that standardization remains a burning real-world aspect of contemporary language planning and policy, for example as it concerns Tibetan and in Patani Malay spoken in Thailand.

We’ve also been confronted once more with how intimately language standardization and/or the acceptance of variation and of language varieties are entangled with questions of social, cultural and political power – whether it’s a case of exercising power in deciding how language varieties are talked about (e.g. the case of Jejueo in South Korea), or in seeking to resist hegemonic power through language standardization (Zhuang in China), or in how language usages express identities (e.g. dialect “cosplay” or the performance of transgender identity in Japanese).

Our volume is in English, even though for us and for every one of our contributors, English is just one language among our multilingual repertoires. The irony, for a volume focussed on “multilingual contexts”, is not lost on us. But we are grateful to our contributors for giving us – and our readers – insights into rich and diverse instances of multilingual contexts of language standardization and variation in Asia. We trust that readers will share our appreciation of those new perspectives too.

This volume is the result of a conference held at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China, as part of the project Multilingualism: Empowering Individuals, Transforming Societies, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (www.meits.org ).

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Language Prescription edited by Don Chapman and Jacob D. Rawlins.

Q&A with Clare Mar-Molinero, Editor of “Researching Language in Superdiverse Urban Contexts”

We recently published Researching Language in Superdiverse Urban Contexts edited by Clare Mar-Molinero. In this post the editor answers some questions about her research and the inspiration behind the book.

How did you become interested in this field of study?

As a sociolinguist I’ve always been interested in multilingualism and its impact on society but initially I studied this through my interests in the Spanish-speaking world. More recently, however, and inspired by the work of people such as Jan Blommaert, Ben Rampton, Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese, amongst many others, I started to think more about the impact of migration to urban centres particularly, and also realized that there was much to explore and investigate on my own doorstep in Southampton.

What was the initial inspiration for the book?

This book continues this focus on multilingualism, migration and urban contexts but shifts my emphasis to the research methods we use to explore these. A conference at the University of Southampton that I organized (funded by the MEITS/OWRI/AHRC) invited contributions and discussion round these themes and paved the foundations for the book’s chapters.

As you compiled your book, did anything in the research particularly surprise or intrigue you?

As the contributions developed it became very clear that there was a strong consensus and focus from all of us on the growing understanding of translanguaging, the importance of (self) reflexivity as researchers, the multi-modality of linguistic communication (and therefore the usefulness of linguistic landscapes) and the core role of the researcher-researched relationship.

What is your next research project?

I am hoping in the medium term to consolidate many years of working with Mexican academics (many as former PhD students) to put together a volume discussing language policies in Mexico – the role of global English, of neoliberal education policy (or the current AMLO regime’s claim to move away from this), the integration of returnee migrants and their language practices, the recognition (or not) of the indigenous languages, and how this all varies hugely across a very large and diverse country, with the ever-present dominating shadow of their US neighbor.

I also continue to have a strong urge to explore and research the challenges of multilingual practices in contemporary football: How is it managed? What issues does it present? What wider lessons does the phenomenon tell us about how multilinguals work together, etc etc. I have tried to study this with our local premiership team, with various false starts, as access for the researcher is difficult and often impossible, not helped by the constant changing circumstances of owners, players and managers, all of different nationalities, coming and going.

What books – either for work or for pleasure – are you reading at the moment?

I’ve indulged my love of magical realism and read Isabel Allende’s latest novel, A Long Petal of the Sea, which also centers round other of my passions: the Spanish Civil War and the Pinochet era in Chile. It turned out not to be one of her more magical realist novels, but gripping nonetheless. I’m also struggling to read Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, which should tick many of my interest boxes: travelling across the US, the scandal of the US immigrations treatment of Latin American migrant children, an interest in ‘soundscapes’, etc, etc. Despite many rave reviews, I’m finding it hard going, though, and maybe over self-conscious.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Learning and Using Languages in Ethnographic Research edited by Robert Gibb, Annabel Tremlett and Julien Danero Iglesias.

Chronotopicity: The Inseparability of Time and Space

This month we are publishing Chronotopic Identity Work: Sociolinguistic Analyses of Cultural and Linguistic Phenomena in Time and Space edited by Sjaak Kroon and Jos Swanenberg. In this post the editors discuss how their book explores the concept of chronotopicity.

How often have you encountered a colleague, for instance at an international sociolinguistics conference, who started talking to you about Bakhtin? And how often did you subsequently engage in a somewhat vague and not very satisfying discussion about some of Bakhtin’s central concepts like heteroglossia or chronotopicity?

Over the last few years, chronotopicity has received renewed attention, not only in the field of literary studies where Bakhtin coined it, but also in other scientific fields. The inseparability of time and space also applies to, for example, social interaction and recently several scholars have shed new light on the possible contributions of the concept of chronotopicity to theorizing in sociolinguistics. This almost automatically led to questions on whether and how the concept could be used in empirical, mainly ethnographically-oriented sociolinguistic research.

In our edited volume Chronotopic Identity Work, we attempt to bring together a variety of empirical studies that put some flesh on the bones of the rather abstract chronotopic theorizing as presented thus far in the field of sociolinguistics. By doing so, we aim to show how Bakhtin’s concept of chronotopicity can be used for unraveling the intricate relationships between language, culture and identity in an era of globalization, digitalization and superdiversity.

Our cooperation with colleagues who agreed to face the challenge of using chronotopicity as a central concept in their research has taken us to:

• young adults in Mongolia interacting on Facebook through mixed and inverted language practices;
• fame-seeking identity plays by so-called baifumei (white, rich, beautiful, young women), within the Chinese ‘attention economy’;
• changes in picturing bureaucratic personhood through descriptions with deictics in local newspapers in Indonesia;
• touristic entertainment in a former traditional rural neighborhood in China;
• the commodification of cultural heritage and identity work in an ethnic minority community in Enshi, China;
• navigations of teachers and students between different language regimes in a multicultural school in Denmark;
• normative behavior and attitudes regarding different language resources in and around school situations in the Netherlands;
• the construction and meaning of Polish identity in an immigrant community in a superdiverse neighborhood in Belgium.

We think this collection of sociolinguistic analyses through the lens of chronotopicity clearly illustrates how the concept can be used in empirical research and how it contributes to the understanding of identity work in relation to the context of time and space.

Sjaak Kroon and Jos Swanenberg

Department of Culture Studies & Babylon, Center for the Study of Superdiversity, Tilburg University (The Netherlands)

a.p.c.swanenberg@uvt.nl

 

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Multilingualism, (Im)mobilities and Spaces of Belonging edited by Kristine Horner and Jennifer Dailey-O’Cain.

Multilingualism – An Asset or A Threat?

We recently published Multilingualism, (Im)mobilities and Spaces of Belonging edited by Kristine Horner and Jennifer Dailey-O’Cain. In this post the editors explain the themes covered in the book.

Like many others in our profession, the two of us are highly mobile people. Each of us changed countries in order to take up our current academic positions – Kristine commutes between the small European country of Luxembourg and the UK, and Jennie relocated from the United States to Canada – and of course our work as linguists is full of regular trips both of the “long-haul” and “short hop” variety.

Even as much of the world we live in considers this kind of mobility of privileged white professional academics as unremarkable, though, the mobility of other kinds of people – such as those from the global South – is often considered far more problematic. While some of us can claim the right to call ourselves “skilled worker immigrants” or even “expats” (a term that conjures up a sort of glamorous yet highly temporary “just passing through” lifestyle), others are dismissed by the societies we live in as “foreign workers” or “migrants”.

It is not all that different with multilingualism. Some forms of it are regarded as an asset or even as an essential skill (such as learning English or French in school and making use of those languages in an eventual work setting), while others can often be deemed problematic or even threatening to national unity. In the end, whether language is a resource, a barrier, or even a site of struggle will tend to come down to who you are, which languages you speak, and especially which contexts you are trying to use those languages in.

Our new book is about what mobility means in different circumstances, some of the different ways that language plays a role in those situations, and how complex social processes play a role in how these occasions and uses of language in those instances are perceived. In addition to our introduction, it includes nine previously unpublished research papers based on fieldwork in Africa, Asia, Australasia and Europe, and three insightful commentaries from experienced researchers that help tie the different papers together. Before publication, many of the contributing authors had the opportunity to discuss work in progress at workshops in Sheffield, England and Cape Town, South Africa. These meetings led to thought-provoking discussions that led us to reflect further on our positionality as scholars. This process was pivotal to the development of the book.

Divided into three thematic sections, the book explores the contestation of spaces and the notion of borders, examines the ways that heritage and authenticity are linked or challenged, and interrogates the intersections between mobility and hierarchies as well as the ways that language can be linked to issues of belonging. We believe that future research will benefit from connecting scholarship in sociolinguistics more closely to scholarship in migration studies and globalization studies. This book is a step along this pathway.

 

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Migration Control edited by Markus Rheindorf and Ruth Wodak.

Understanding the Language of Our Daily Lives

This month we are publishing Critical Inquiries in the Sociolinguistics of Globalization edited by Tyler Andrew Barrett and Sender Dovchin. In this post the editors talk about what inspired them to put the book together.

The contemporary world is full of different languages. These languages are everywhere: Signage, advertisements, popular culture, social media, streets, classrooms, offices, gossip – you name it. These languages are chaotic, messy, unexpected and cluttered. They are part of our everyday lives, whether you want it or not. They are, in fact, quite ordinary! Many of us, however, seem to simply ignore or disregard the messiness and ordinariness of these diverse languages. Because, they are – “SCRUFFY!” After all, who cares about the scruffy language, right? We somehow tend to take seriously ‘the standard’, ‘the official’ and ‘the formal’, while disregarding the most intimate part of our daily communications. Nonetheless, our book strives to show how developing an intimate relationship with ‘the unconventional’, ‘the scruffiness’, and ‘the messiness’ of our daily language practices may see us realize who we are indeed as human beings, as individuals, and as social members. This very messy side of language is, in fact, part of our identities, selves, natures, and characteristics.

Inspired by research in the debate of ‘sociolinguistics of globalization’ (Blommaert, 2010), we wanted to present a collection of research aimed at addressing this very messy, albeit ordinary, side of language. Since language can be understood from several different perspectives, as it is part of just about everything we do in daily life, this meant that our research would address several academic disciplines that include Linguistics, Sociology, Political Science and even Philosophy. However, these fields are often used to reinforce traditional ideas about ‘the standard’, ‘the official’, and ‘the normal’, which meant that we had a big task ahead of us as we were essentially suggesting, along with Blommaert (2010), that our traditional approaches of understanding the language of our daily lives were at times imprecise and in need of a makeover.

While rethinking our understanding of the language of our daily lives was indeed a challenge, although the data kind of spoke for itself in many ways, our biggest challenge was perhaps tying the interdisciplinary themes together as cohesive contributions to the discussion and debate of the ‘sociolinguistics of globalization’. Although we are often conveniently able to casually discuss the complexities of the debate using idealist and very general descriptions of culture, language, politics, and identity, it was challenging to present cutting-edge research that contributed to knowledge in such a way that it is worthy of publication. We hope we have achieved this aim with this project.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Aspiring to be Global by Shuang Gao.

Starting a Dialogue between Social Semiotics and Complexity Theory

We recently published Making Signs, Translanguaging Ethnographies edited by Ari Sherris and Elisabetta Adami. In this post the editors introduce us to the book and its unique Bricolage and Talmudic sections.

Preparing this volume has been a work of encounters which gave way to layers of experiences and we hope is just one possible opening to a new way of thinking about how we make and interpret meaning. It started as a serendipitous encounter between the two of us, when we met once at a symposium on translanguaging and ethnography and later began conversations on the possibilities of crossing perspectives, in an attempt at starting a dialogue between social semiotics and complexity theory. The experiences of the volume’s contributors form additional layers at the core of this volume from ethnographic/documentary linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic landscape, and multimodality (broadly conceived). The volume is also a site of encounters among four theorists of what we envisage as among the most innovative and promising perspectives on research and activism across inclusive approaches to communication, language and education with a Bricolage piece asking Jan Blommaert, Ofelia García, Gunther Kress and Diane Larsen-Freeman to answer ten key questions and trace interrelations with each other’s viewpoints.

Besides the eye-opening preface by Jeff Bezemer and Gunther Kress, and the introduction written by us, the volume hosts seven chapters presenting empirical studies that relocate margins at the centre, through investigations of phenomena and settings that have been little explored so far, and by attempting various entanglements between approaches that have rarely been combined. Research of and through these uncharted entanglements allows the authors (and hopefully the readers) to show how observing and documenting domains of communication that are often neglected can not only problematize traditional ways of knowing, but also shed new light onto social interaction, meaning-making and human communication as a whole.

Finally, the volume attempts at stretching the boundaries of (the often too limiting) academic genres. It does so first and foremost in the Bricolage; the process of its making has been a wonderfully enriching enterprise, for us, the editors, and (we like to believe) for the four theorists too, who had never met on (screen and) paper before. Working with them at the Bricolage, we have not only had further proof of the immense intellectual value of Diane, Gunther, Jan and Ofelia, but also experienced the immensely humane, thoughtful and caring characters of the four. We hope that the Bricolage may be the first of a series opening a new genre enabling academic dialogue through joint forms of writing. A second genre innovation is in the final chapter of the book, in which we draw from the Talmudic tradition to construct commentaries to each of the empirical chapters that add additional layers, imagined next steps in meaning-making and interpretation. The commentaries ask themselves how these studies would be reframed and (re)investigated further by adopting a social semiotic and a complexity theory perspective. This, too, is an attempt to start a dialogue between two approaches that have good grounds for potential mutual integration and yet had not met until now. We hope this dialogue will continue further with those who read the book. We look forward to hearing from you!

Elisabetta Adami e.adami@leeds.ac.uk

Ari Sherris arieh.sherris@gmail.com

 

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Engaging Superdiversity edited by Karel Arnaut, Martha Sif Karrebæk, Massimiliano Spotti and Jan Blommaert.