This book is an original study of “Cold Rush,” an accelerated race for the extraction and protection of Arctic natural resources. The Northernmost reach of the planet is caught up in the double developments of two unfinished forces – rapidly progressing climate change and global economic investment – working simultaneously in tension and synergy. Neither process is linear or complete, but both are contradictory and open-ended.

This book traces the multiplicity of Cold Rush in the Finnish Arctic, a high-stakes ecological, economic, and political hotspot. It is a heterogeneous space, understood as indigenous land within local indigenous Sámi people politics, the last frontier from a colonial perspective, and a periphery under the modernist nation-state regime. It is now transforming into an economic hub under global capitalism, intensifying climate change and unforeseen geo-political changes.

Based on six years of ethnography, the book shows how people struggle, strategize, and profit from this ongoing, complex, and multidirectional change.

The author offers a new theoretical approach called critical assemblage analysis, which provides an alternative way of exploring the dynamics between language and society by examining the interaction between material, discursive, and affective dimensions of Cold Rush. The approach builds on previous work at the intersection of critical discourse analysis, critical sociolinguistics, nexus analysis and ethnography, but expands toward works by philosophers Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari.

This book will be of interest to researchers on language, discourse, and sociolinguistics interested in engaging with social critique embedded in global capitalism and accelerating climate change; as well as researchers in the social and human sciences and natural sciences, who are increasingly aware of the fact that the theoretical and analytical move beyond the traditional dichotomies like language/society, nature/human and micro/macro is central to understanding today´s complex, intertwined social, political, economic and ecological processes.

If you enjoy the show, support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Reference

Pietikäinen, S. (2024). Cold Rush: Critical Assemblage Analysis of a Heating Arctic. Palgrave Macmillan.

Additional resources

Cold Rush project website
“Language and tourism” on Language on the Move

Transcript (coming soon)

Prof Catherine Travis launches “Life in a New Language” at ALS2024

The annual conference of the Australian Linguistic Society (ALS) is a gathering of like-minded academics and presents a wonderful opportunity to see old friends and meet new ones, and to be intellectually encouraged to engage with language in all its forms and context. This year’s conference at the Australian National University was no different and offered an exciting program.

Our new book Life in a New Language featured prominently, including receiving a second launch (to learn more about the first launch, go here). At ALS, our book was launched by Professor Catherine Travis, the Chair of Modern European Languages in the School of Literature, Languages, and Linguistics at the ANU.

Catherine’s reflections on the book were a thoughtful heart-warming invitation to read Life in a New Language. This is part of Catherine’s testimony:

Many of the stories told are very familiar to me, as I’m sure they will be to all of you – many of you are migrants to Australia, and may have had similar experiences yourselves, and all of you will have been made aware of these kinds of experiences from migrants in your own families, close friends and colleagues.

And the message equally rings true to me, as I hope it will to you. I will just highlight three elements here.

Migrants are too often seen through a deficit lens – what is highlighted is their lack of English that adheres to a standardised norm; their lack of appropriate qualifications; their lack of local experience. This is in contrast to what they bring, which is their multilingual repertoire, qualifications in different settings, and their international experience. We need to address this deficit narrative and recognise that migrant families are raising the multilingual communication mediators of the future; and we need to support them in that endeavour, as our future depends on it.

Life in a New Language already has a veritable fan club

The responsibility for communication is too often placed on the migrant. As the authors state, language is viewed as a “cognitive skill, the level of which can be measured through proficiency tests. But it is also a communicative tool that interactants share to collaboratively achieve common goals” (p.124). This perspective shifts the burden of responsibility onto both parties involved in the interaction, and the authors call for more attention to be given to what it means to communicate well in a linguistically diverse society, to be more aware of the importance of inclusive communication.

And, crucially, the conversation needs to be taken out of the academy. This book goes a long way to doing that, as a highly readable and rich account of migrant stories. I hope that it is read widely, that the migrant stories here are heard, and are listened to.

Life in a New Language is an ethnographic data-sharing and re-use project and so it was also appropriate that we engaged strongly with the themed session on The Wealth of Resources on Migrant Languages in Australia organised by Professor Heike Wiese (Chair of German in Multilingual Contexts in the Humboldt University in Berlin), her doctoral researcher Victoria Oliha, and Dr Jaime Hunt (University of Newcastle).

This themed session aimed to provide a centralised forum for researchers on migrant languages in Australia to connect and present their findings as well as spark a conversation around the resources created through their projects. The following central questions were discussed:

• What empirical resources on migrant languages in Australia have been created? How can we make these resources accessible to the wider research community?
• From what theoretical and conceptual perspectives have migrant languages in Australia been studied? How can such studies inform each other?
• What methods have been used to study migrant languages in Australia? What can we learn from each other methodologically? What new methods could we use to gain further insights?

It is wonderful for Life in a New Language to be part of this conversation. As one of our biggest fan says in this unboxing video: “it teaches you how people develop.”

NSW Police (Image credit: Edwina Pickles, SMH)

Editor’s note: The Language on the Move team closely collaborates with the Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers’ Network (LLIRN). To raise awareness of LLIRN and feature the research of its members, we are starting a new series about exciting new research in specific areas of language and law.

In this first post in the series, LLIRN founders and conveners Dr Alex Grey and Dr Laura Smith-Khan introduce the research of three early career researchers working on language, policing, and criminal justice.

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Alex Grey and Laura Smith-Khan

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The Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers’ Network (LLIRN) came into being in 2019, after an initial symposium involving a group of academics and students, mainly from Australian universities, whose research is interested in the various intersections of language and law. One of our key goals of the symposium was to learn more about each other’s work and create new opportunities to collaborate.

Since then, LLIRN has grown and we have organized and run a number of different initiatives, including multiple panels at conferences across both linguistics and law, a special issue that showcased the work of several of our (mainly early career) members, and a lively and growing mailing list.

Fast forward to 2024, our Listserv now includes members from at least 37 different countries, at diverse stages of their careers, working as academics, as language or legal professionals, and/or in policy or decision-making roles. However, as LLIRN convenors, we have felt that we still have much to learn about the members who make up the network, the expertise they have and their goals. This new blog series intends to address this gap: we want to learn (or “LLIRN”) more about each other, and to make our learning public so that others too can learn more about us.

Northern Territory Supreme Court (Image credit: Dietmar Rabich, Wikipedia)

In the first of this new series, we showcase LLIRN members, Alex Bowen, Dr Fabio Ferraz de Almeida, and Dr Kate Steel, who are working in areas related to language, policing, and criminal justice.

Alex Bowen, University of Melbourne, Australia

Alex Bowen’s in-progress PhD looks at communication about criminal law and justice with Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory (NT) of Australia. His earlier research was about how police in the NT explain the right to silence in police interviews, producing the publications listed below.  He has previously practised criminal and commercial law.

Alex Bowen is interested more broadly in police interviewing, language in legal processes, interpreting and translation, how we understand and talk about law and justice interculturally, and how legal language is influenced by monolingual and colonial assumptions. He is interested in discussing these topics, especially with Indigenous scholars and practitioners, and developing interdisciplinary and intercultural resources for training and education. He may be available for peer review related to the above topics.

Recent publications

Bowen, A. (2019). ‘You don’t have to say anything’: Modality and consequences in conversations about the right to silence in the Northern Territory. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 39(3), 347–374.
Bowen, A. (2021). Explaining the right to silence under Anunga: 40 years of a policy about language. Griffith Law Review, 30(1), 18–49.
Bowen, A. (2021). Intercultural translation of vague legal language: The right to silence in the Northern Territory of Australia. Target. International Journal of Translation Studies, 33(2), 308–340.
Bowen, A. (2021). “What you’ve got is a right to silence”: Paraphrasing the right to silence and the meaning of rights. International Journal of Speech Language and the Law, 28(1), 1–29.

Dr Fabio Ferraz de Almeida, University of Lincoln, UK

Dr Fabio Ferraz de Almeida has experience conducting ethnographic and conversation analytic research in police and judicial settings. This has included research on police interviews with suspects in the UK, criminal hearings in Brazil and, more recently, International Criminal Court (ICC) trials, producing the publications listed below. He is currently working on a paper about the role of judges in witness examination at the ICC, focusing particularly on the tensions associated with their dual-role as both referee and truth-finder.  He lectures in Criminology.

International Criminal Court, The Hague (Image Credit: Wikipedia)

Dr Ferraz de Almeida is broadly interested in studying social interactions in any form of police or legal context and welcomes contact from researchers with similar interests.

Recent publications

Ferraz de Almeida, F., & Drew, P. (2020). The fabric of law-in-action: ‘formulating’ the suspect’s account during police interviews in England. International Journal of Speech Language and the Law, 27(1), 35-58.
Ferraz de Almeida, F. (2022). Two ways of spilling drink: The construction of offences as ‘accidental’ in police interviews with suspects. Discourse Studies, 24(2), 187-205.
D’hondt, S., Perez-Leon-Acevedo, J. P., Ferraz de Almeida, F., & Barrett, E. (2022). Evidence about Harm: Dual Status Victim Participant Testimony at the International Criminal Court and the Straitjacketing of Narratives about Suffering. Criminal Law Forum, 33, 191.
D’hondt, S., Pérez-León-Acevedo, J. P., Ferraz de Almeida, F., & Barrett, E. (2024). Trajectories of spirituality: Producing and assessing cultural evidence at the International Criminal Court. Language in Society, 1-22.
Ferraz de Almeida, F. (2024). Counter-Denunciations: How Suspects Blame Victims in Police Interviews for Low-Level Crimes. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 37, 119–137.

Dr Kate Steel, University of the West of England (UWE), Bristol, UK

Dr Kate Steel’s PhD (2022) and continuing research explore interactions ‘at the scene’ between police first responders and victims of domestic abuse, producing the publication below. This work draws from police body-worn video footage within one force area in the England & Wales jurisdiction of the United Kingdom. This research responds to the typical simplification of the crucial role of communication at the scene is and its under-emphasis in official procedure for the first response to domestic abuse, at both local and national levels.

Dr Kate Steel is now working with another police force to develop language guidance specific to the policing context of domestic abuse first response.  She lectures in linguistics.

Recent publications

Aldridge, M., & Steel, K. (2022). The role of metaphor in police first response call-outs in cases of suspected domestic abuse. In I. Šeškauskienė (Ed.), Metaphor in Legal Discourse (224-241). Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Available from https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/9900169
Steel, K. (2023) “Can I have a look?”: The discursive management of victims’ personal space during police first response call-outs to domestic abuse incidents. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 37(2): 547-572.

What about you?

Do you work or research in an area related to criminal justice and language, or another area where language and law intersect? Join the LLIRN!

What other language and law topics would you like to learn about? Have your say on our next LLIRN “What’s new in language and law research?” blog post. Let us know in the comments or join the network and send us an email!

Upcoming events of interest in this area

Dr Fabio Ferraz de Almeida and Dr Kate Steel will both be presenting their research in the coming months, including at the IAFLL European conference in Birmingham. Dr Fabio Ferraz de Almeida will also present at the Forensic Conversations in Criminal Justice Settings Symposium in Loughborough in September.

Vaccination starts with registration and obtaining a date

Editor’s note: Last year, here on Language on the Move, we ran a series devoted to language aspects of the COVID-19 crisis, and readers will also have seen the special issue of Multilingua devoted to “Linguistic Diversity in a Time of Crisis”. We closed the series in December 2020 but, well into 2021, the language challenges of the COVID-19 crisis continue to hold our attention.

The global focus has now shifted to vaccination and we resume our series with a post by Professor Judy Kalman, Centro de Investigación y Estudios Avanzados del Instituto Politécnico Nacional (CINVESTAV), Mexico, about the literacy practices associated with the COVID-19 vaccination effort. Each step of the vaccination process involved using written language, circulating multimodal representations, and extensive record keeping. In this post, Professor Kalman uses the massive global vaccination effort to illustrate how entangled literacy is in every aspect of our lives.

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Eligible for vaccination? Get your papers ready!

Soldier and patient with documents at the vaccination center

At the beginning of February, Mexico announced it would soon begin vaccinating everyone 60 years and older against the Covid-19 virus. It was something my family and I had been waiting for, having sheltered in place under the #quedateencasa mandate for nearly a year. We received the news via radio, TV, and digital sources. The first instruction was to go online and register for our vaccinations, and an official would notify us of the time and day that we would get our shots. There was an immediate rush of seniors or their children to the official website, where we were instructed to type in our population ID number known as Clave Única de Registro de Población (CURP).

My husband and I recently got our first shot, and I could not help but notice how much the process involved reading and writing. Every step of the way, we—the 650,000 older adults that live in Mexico City—were asked to show official documents, fill out forms, and present written evidence of our identity, place of residence, and age.  Each document that we displayed involved, at some point in our lives, doing the necessary paperwork to obtain it, which in turn meant filling out forms, providing documents, and being approved. In a highly literate society like ours, official documents are passports for participating in many aspects of public life, receiving benefits, and being eligible for social goods. Without them, we are invisible and stymied in our efforts to go to school, get financing, procure housing, vote, and as in this case, receive healthcare (Trimbur 2020; Blommaert, 2008).

Mobilizing for vaccination is a massive literacy effort

Getting vaccinated involves filling out numerous forms

Here, the local authorities organized the distribution of vaccines by place of residence. Once the rollout began, local authorities announced the districts where vaccination would occur at the beginning of each week. General information regarding when and where to go was available to the public via the press, radio, TV, social media, and the official websites. They distributed us by the first letter of our last names and assigned vaccine centers according to neighborhoods. Knowledge regarding literacy practices such as alphabetical order, navigating web pages, reading dates, and following written instructions helped us identify and keep our appointment (Barton and Hamilton 1998; Street, 2014). By going online, we could download a specific location and time to arrive.

Much of our everyday paperwork practices are now digitally mediated by web pages, allowing us to fill out and send in forms with a click of a few keys. However, many of these reading and writing uses are grounded in procedures we used to fill in blanks with a pen (Kalman, 2001; Gitelman, 2014). What was missing from the second announcement was the list of documents that are necessary to be allowed into the vaccination center, but that information traveled swiftly over social media and messaging boards, illustrating how digital technologies enable information to flow almost instantaneously (Lankshear and Knobel, 2008). Vaccine centers were also located on maps to help us plan transportation and parking, exemplifying the multiple formats, modes of representation, and meaning-making devices used for planning and carrying out this public health campaign.  Reading and writing are complex practices, and rather than thinking of literacy in the singular, it is more precise to think of literacies in the plural.

Forms need to be checked and re-checked numerous times

Mobilizing all the seniors living in Mexico City is no small feat and making sure that the operation ran smoothly demands impeccable organization and communication strategies, but also requires a literate population and ways to replicate the information through mass media—TV spots, news coverage, online campaigns—and small media— the production of social messages directed at local and defined audiences via posters, flyers, local radio, hashtags and real-time communication software (Spitulnik 2002) – similar to the neighborhood lock-down notices I observed last year (Kalman, 2020).

Vaccination centers run on literacy almost as much as on vaccines

In our case, we were directed to a local Exposition Center, a facility run by the National University. We gathered our documents together: our official identification, a printout of our appointment, a copy of our registration, our CURP, and proof of residency. Five documents to get our shots, each connecting us to institutions, commercial enterprises, neighborhoods, and our life histories. In a literate world,  the point is not how many people read and write. Once written language is part of a community’s linguistic repertoire, it shapes the way communication is accomplished. Furthermore, it shifts the social hierarchies regarding who can read and write and who cannot, creating social expectations for literacy use (Blommaert, 2008). Who and how many people can read and write has varied over time, and historically the goal of universal literacy is a relatively recent idea (Graff, 1987).

To get into the center, we were asked to show our IDs and handed a numbered card that gave us our place in line.  My number was 4352. Then we were placed in groups of ten and waited until it was our turn to go into the Expo Center. People carried their papers in envelopes, plastic shopping bags, folders, and document protectors. All along the way, monitors wearing green shirts bearing the logos for the Mexico City government lined the route and directed us where to go.

Preparing the syringes is yet another literacy activity

When we entered, we encountered a massive space filled with people coded by their military uniforms, white coats, green shirts, beige vests, and dark blue sweaters. All of them were wearing identification badges with their names, institutional affiliations, and positions, more information than we could  possibly read as we hurried to the tables to take our place in the documentation station.

Official monitors sat on one side of the table and asked us to sit in front of them. Each one had a stack of forms to be filled out: the same information was handwritten on the top half and repeated on the bottom. The form’s two parts were separated by a perforated line, similar to the checkbooks and stubs, creating a copy of the document and its recorded information—one for the patient and one for the public health staff. The staff asked us to show our ID card and then copied our names from it, checked our age, and verified our address to ensure that we were in the right vaccination center, mediating how the form was filled out. Acting as scribes, they used blue ink and clear printed manuscript letters, and all of them wrote by hand (Kalman, 199, 2009). There were no computers or screens, so the information that we had registered back in February was not available or displayed. A few monitors had mobile phones with navigating capacity, but they seemed more for personal use during downtime than for work activities.

The materiality of literacy

Literacy practices keep everyone moving and in line

Once our form was filled out, we were directed to a waiting area and then accompanied by more monitors in green shirts to take our place in line in a series of folding chairs. As I scanned the room, I saw people, pens, paper, clipboards, packaging everywhere. Accomplishing literacy also includes access and availability of the material goods for reading and writing, from something to protect printed documents to handheld digital devices. Misplacing a pen or tearing a form could hinder the vaccination recording process and perhaps require rewriting forms rather than reprinting or resending a digital one (Barton and Hamilton, 2005). Actors’ participation, the materiality of reading and writing, and processes for producing literacy are bundled together in literacy practices.

There were multiple stations where nurses were filling syringes—even these had numbered scales on them to measure the precise doses.  They seemed to be writing short notes, perhaps to keep track of the vaccination lot numbers and vials. Organizers also designated areas for those adults who needed special attention. These were signaled by a monitor carrying a red flag that said Atención Prioritaria. As we waited our turn, a monitor came up to us individually and checked our forms to make sure they were correctly filled out and that the top matched the bottom.

Each vial of our vaccine provided six shots, and we were seated in groups of six to wait for our injections. Medical personnel collected our forms, and one person at the station made annotations on the top part of each one. I am assuming (but could not see) that they were recording the information on the vial. Two vaccinators worked their way down the line of three chairs, giving us our shots one by one. When they finished, they showed us the vial and lot numbers and explained what the writing on the vial said. They made a particular point of pointing to the laboratory and reading the accompanying numbers, although we were not sure what it meant. They also told us how the vaccine works and underlined the importance of continuing to use face masks and social distancing even though we had been vaccinated. One of the monitors returned the bottom part of the form and told us to be sure not to lose it, that we would need it for our next shot. She also said that the department of health would contact us as soon as it was scheduled, and this could take from 20 to 40 days.

The text on the vaccine bottle is as important as its content

We then got up and were taken to an observation area and asked to remain there to make sure nobody had a severe reaction. After about 20 minutes, someone from the medical staff told us that we could go. As we walked out the door, monitors again checked our forms one last time to ensure all of the needed information was there. They told us once again not to lose this vital piece of paper and insisted on the importance of continuing with public health measures.

Literacy is a collective effort

All over the world, people are lining up to get vaccinated. But they are also searching in their files, organizing documents, filling out forms, registering information, keeping track of forms and syringes. This massive vaccination effort illustrates how entangled our activities are with literacy and how reading and writing is a situated practice. Dominant versions of reading and writing underline their individual nature, but here we see how producing and interpreting texts and circulating knowledge are collectively organized and shared activities. And while we have become accustomed to thinking in terms of keyboards and screens, this process also reminds us of the power of pen and paper. Writing technologies coexist and are mobilized into action as our practices and purposes demand them.

References

Everyone in the waiting room is engaged in a literacy practice, even if only holding on to their paperwork

Barton, D., & Hamilton, M. (2005). Literacy, reification and the dynamics of social interaction. Beyond communities of practice: Language, power and social context, 14-35.
Blommaert, J. (2008). Grassroots literacy: Writing, identity and voice in Central Africa. Routledge.
Gitelman, L. (2014). Paper knowledge: Toward a media history of documents. Duke University Press.
Graff, H. J. (1987). The labyrinths of literacy: Reflections on literacy past and present. Psychology Press.
Kalman, J. (1999). Writing on the Plaza. Scribes and their clients in Mexico City. NJ: Hampton Press.
Kalman, J. (2001). Everyday paperwork: Literacy practices in the daily life of unschooled and underschooled women in a semiurban community of Mexico City. Linguistics and Education, 12(4), 367-391.
Kalman, J. (2009) Literacy Partnerships: Access to Reading and Writing through Mediation en: Edited by Basu, Kaushik, Bryan, Maddox and Anna Robinson-Pant. Interdisciplinary Approaches to Literacy and Development. pp. 165-178
Kalman, J. (2020). Signs of the times: Small media during Covid-19 in Mexico City. Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/signs-of-the-times-small-media-during-covid-19-in-mexico-city/
Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (Eds.). (2008). Digital literacies: Concepts, policies and practices (Vol. 30). Peter Lang.
Spitulnik, D. (2002). Alternative small media and communicative spaces. In G. Hydén, M. Leslie, & F. Ogundimu (Eds.), Media and democracy in Africa (pp. 177-205). London: Routledge.
Street, B. V. (2014). Social literacies: Critical approaches to literacy in development, ethnography and education. Routledge.
Trimbur, John. (2020). Grassroots Literacy and the Written Record: A Textual History of Asbestos Activism in South Africa. Channel View Publications.

Editor’s note:

To view the other RECLAS ethics rants, click here.

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When I think back to my last ethnographic study, one of the fondest memories I have is drinking tea and coffee with young women from Afghanistan in a school cafeteria. They were students at that school, working towards their basic education degrees, and had come to Finland a few years before I met them there. As the cafeteria emptied, we would often stay behind for one more cup, laugh, chat, show off the latest pictures we took on our phones, and exchange advice about workout apps and videos. When I describe, analyze, and interpret data from these conversations, who I am matters. In the women’s circle, I was an insider and outsider at the same time. I am a white, college-educated, relatively wealthy European and represent the population that too often others and mistreats them. But, like them, I am also a woman, an immigrant, a mother, and a Finnish learner – so in many ways, we could relate and they were able to trust me. My research can’t be understood unless one understands my positionality in it.

What is researcher positionality?

Researcher positionality can be defined as the position a researcher takes towards the world around them in general and vis-à-vis a particular research topic or study, its process, and participants in particular (Holmes, 2010). Both are shaped by a researcher’s identities, including social factors such as race, class, gender, sexual identity, ability, citizenship status as well as linguistic and cultural backgrounds, familial histories, personal experiences, and professional trajectories. All of these may – more or less overtly – have a bearing on the research process at every stage from the conceptualization of a study to the dissemination of findings (Holmes, 2016).

As Holmes (2010) emphasizes, a researcher’s worldview “concerns ontological assumptions …, epistemological assumptions …, and assumptions about human nature and agency” (p. 2), all of which shape how we engage in research. For instance, our research is rooted in what we believe to exist, how we know about, organize, and describe these entities, and how we understand the position of human power and its limits within a particular context. Such knowing and believing pans out in particular power dynamics that permeate the research process, e.g. between researcher and the researched, in the representation of voices in writing, and in the legitimation of knowledge (Muhammad et al., 2015). Unpacking those dynamics can increase the transparency and ethicality of our work.

(Why) Do we need this?

The notion that our identities and worldviews as researchers shape the work we do is not an uncontroversial one, especially given that much scientific work has aimed to minimize or even eliminate the researcher’s person from the research process with the goal of claiming objectivity or neutrality. Such claimed objectivity or neutrality, oftentimes conflated with the unmarked male, white, and middle-class position in scholarly work, has long been at the core of scientific quality measures, particularly when researchers have aimed to present their work as independent of the researcher, replicable beyond its original context, and thus scientifically valid. In Western religious pre-Enlightenment societies, such “research without researcher” has played an important role in establishing scientific traditions and methods, often in opposition to religious beliefs (Lin, 2015), but was also, to the detriment of qualitative research, foundational in promoting the positivist paradigm as the dominant and only legitimate one within many academic contexts. Although in some ways qualitative research is still struggling to shed this positivist yardstick, the notion that all research is shaped by researcher positionalities has in recent decades gained traction. While there may be great differences in how researchers approach their work ontologically, epistemologically, and methodologically, we all make decisions, act in particular social contexts, and are shaped by what we know, believe, and strive for. As Lin (2015) puts it,

Problems emerge if we fail to recognize the inherent partial and positioned nature of every research study (and researcher) that is inevitably located in a certain sociohistorical and epistemological position. (p. 15)

In a similar vein, Hamby (2018), speaking for social scientists and particularly her field of psychology, calls for a shedding of the ”cloak of objectivity” (para 7), emphasizing that “lack of objectivity is not just a problem, it is also an opportunity”. (para 9). Acknowledging one’s positionality, she argues, can enhance a researcher’s awareness of their own biases, assumptions, and points of development, but also their (potential) contributions to the field. It can enable us to

• better understand our own biases and (expected) blind spots, so we can begin to challenge them
• better understand and reflect on our position in the research field (e.g., insider-outsider of a community), and based on this, identify ways of building more ethical and fruitful relationships with our participants, colleagues, and audience
• interpret our findings with greater confidence and greater care, and in general, increase the trustworthiness of our work

It is important to keep in mind that stating our (potential) biases does not erase them. Our intellectual reflections cannot lift us beyond our socio-material realities (e.g., who, where, when, with whom we are …) and we cannot confess-away our subjectivity or create a “neutral” place from which we operate. However, the process and statement of acknowledging our positionality can open doors to a deeper understanding of our place and purpose within our field for our participants, our audience, and ourselves.

An important question to ask is what information we include in a positionality statement and how we go about that. Having engaged in a self-reflexive process does not mean we disclose all aspects of it – this would likely be unnecessary or impossible, and in some cases inappropriate, risky, and even unethical (e.g., because participants’ anonymity/safety or the researcher’s integrity/freedom are at stake). As we make decisions about what to include in a paper that is publically or widely available, the following questions can offer guidance:

• What are my goals as a researcher, particularly in regards to the study/paper in question?
• What/who has shaped my processes of selecting (and not selecting) the research field, participants, methods, terms, data, literature, etc.?
• How are my choices tied to who I am, what I know, what I have access to, and what I believe in?
• How may my choices differ from the ones of a reader/colleague who belongs to a different social, cultural, or disciplinary group? What do they need to know about me so they can relate to my choices?

If we keep in mind that the overall purpose of a positionality statement, in the end, is to make our work more transparent, we can minimize the risk of it either becoming a merely rhetorical exercise on the one hand or a disclosure that puts us or others at risk on the other hand.

Group membership: Where do I (not) belong?

When we explicate our position toward our topic, participants, and research processes, we do so in order to get a better sense of what we know and see and what we do not know and see. This is particularly true for researchers who work with populations that they are not members of. Most typically, group membership will be dynamic, complex (Dwyer & Buckle, 2009), partial and/or situational (see Huisman, 2008: Milner, 2007), so that awareness of one’s own insider- and outsiderness, privilege and power position (Muhammad et al., 2015), is a crucial first step (although no guarantee) towards building respectful and ethical relationships. In such situations, it becomes crucial to know how to actively disrupt deficit discourses and hegemonic notions of normality and knowledge, to name only a few harmful practices that researchers from socially dominant groups will encounter and unfortunately oftentimes perpetuate.

Useful questions to ask

• Which (racial, cultural, professional, ethnic, linguistic …) groups do I belong to, and in what ways? How has that shifted or might that shift in the future?
• How do my group memberships manifest themselves? How do they relate to each other?
• What is easy for me to see/focus on because of these memberships? Where do I assume to have blind spots? What might someone else see in my field/data/literature… ?

Epistemologies: What do I (not) know?

Part of the question about one’s own researcher identities, worldview, and relationship to the topic, process, and participants is also to develop a critical understanding of what we do and do not and what we can and cannot know (Muhammad et al., 2015). Many individuals and communities have historically been excluded from academic knowledge and knowledge production, so that research and its dissemination are still dominated by male, white and middle-class norms (e.g., Ahmed, 2017; Banks, 2009; Ennser-Kananen, 2019; Scheurich & Young, 1997). Although it cannot be an individual’s responsibility to rectify this, every researcher can be explicit and honest about their own epistemological limitations and contribute to a move towards epistemic and epistemological justice (Ennser-Kananen, 2019).

Useful questions to ask

• Which (racial, cultural, professional, ethnic, linguistic …) context does the literature I read and cite do belong to? What are or could be the blindspots and omissions of my work? (See Piller, 2018)
• What parts of the research process will I be able to do relatively easily because of my racial, cultural, professional, ethnic or linguistic memberships? Which ones might be challenging?

Positionality statements

Positionality statements are often integrated into introductory or methodology sections of research articles or theses, but they can also consist of smaller parts scattered throughout a piece of writing. Both qualitative and quantitative researchers can and should offer a statement of this kind that enables the reader to get a better sense of their approach to the topic, the research process, their analyses, interpretations, and conclusions. While positionality statements by definition have to be individualized and personalized, I recommend the ones by Matias and Mackey (2015, pp. 33-34) and Arsenault (2018, pp. 52-55) as inspiration and models for how such statements can be realized. Once a positionality statement has been made in written or spoken form, the job of acknowledging and critically reflecting on our position continues. In the end, positionality work underlines the importance of a supportive and (self-)reflective academic community, where open dialogue and spaces to learn are valued and fostered (not just tolerated). It is on all of us to create such spaces.

References

Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Durham: Duke University Press.
Arsenault, C. (2018). How white teachers’ identity development translates to classroom interactions with minority students. Doctoral dissertation. Educational, School, and Counseling Psychology. Retrieved in March 2020 from https://uknowledge.uky.edu/edp_etds/80
Banks, J. A. (2009). Knowledge construction and the education of citizens in diverse societies. Keynote speech. Interkulturell Pedagogik, Göteborg, Sweden.
Delamont, S. (2018). Truth is not Linked to Political Virtue: Problems with Positionality. In B. Clift, J. Hatchard & J. Gore (Eds.). How Do We Belong? Researcher Positionality Within Qualitative Inquiry: Proceedings of 4th Annual Qualitative Research Symposium (pp. 1-6). University of Bath.
Dwyer, S.C., Buckle, J. L. (2009). The space between: on being an insider-outsider in qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 8(1), 54–63.
Ennser-Kananen, J. (2019). Knowledge is power is knowledge: Can we break the cycle of epistemic and epistemological injustice? Tiedepolitiikka, 4, 22-40.
Hamby, S. (2018). Know thyself: How to write a reflexicity statement. Psychology Today. Retrieved in March 2020 from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-web-violence/201805/know-thyself-how-write-reflexivity-statement
Holmes, P. (2016). Navigating languages and interculturality in the research process: The ethics and positionality of the researcher and the researched. In M. Dasli & A. R. Díaz (Eds.). The Critical Turn in Language and Intercultural Communication Pedagogy (pp. 115-132). New York: Routledge.
Holmes, A.G. (2020). Researcher positionality: a consideration of its influence and place in research. A new researcher guide. Available at http://shanlaxjournals.in/journals/index.php/education/article/view/3232
Huisman, K. (2008). “Does this mean you’re not coming to visit anymore?”: An inquiry into an ethics of reciprocity and positionality in feminist ethnographic research. Sociological Inquiry, 78(3), 371-396.
Lin, A. M. Y. (2015). Researcher positionality. In F. M. Hult, & D. C. Johnson (Eds.), Research Methods in Language Policy and Planning: A Practical Guide (pp. 21-32). London: Routledge.
Matias, C. E., & Mackey, J. (2016). Breakin’ down whiteness in antiracist teaching: Introducing critical whiteness pedagogy. The Urban Review, 48(1), 32-50.
Milner IV, H. R. (2007). Race, culture, and researcher positionality: Working through dangers seen, unseen, and unforeseen. Educational researcher, 36(7), 388-400.
Muhammad, M.; Wallerstein, N.; Sussman, A. L.;  Avila, M.; Belone, L.; Duran, B. (2015) Reflections on researcher identity and power: The impact of positionality on community based participatory research (CBPR) processes and outcomes. Critical Sociology, 41
Piller, Ingrid. 2018. Why are you not citing any African female expert? Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/why-are-you-not-citing-any-african-female-expert/
Scheurich, J. J., & Young, M. D. (1997). Coloring epistemologies: Are our research epistemologies racially biased?. Educational researcher, 26(4), 4-16.

Editor’s note:

To view the other RECLAS ethics rants, click here.

***

Let me start with a brief warning: most of this rant is not about ethics but about legal compliance, and deals with the impact of the EU’s newly adopted General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (EU) 2016/679. This may seem a bit odd at first, because law and ethics represent two fundamentally different orders of normativity, one a formal system of bureaucratically enforced rules, the other grounded in the self-regulation of conduct. Yet, engaging with this new bureaucratic-legal framework does require social scientists to take an ethical stance of some sort. This is particularly the case for those of us who do research in/on the public realm.

GDPR became operative on May 25, 2018. It sets a new standard for the technical and organizational measures that public authorities, business, and non-profit organizations must take to prevent data security breaches and to give individuals control over their own personal data. It states, for example, that personal data cannot be exported outside the EU, and that processing is only allowed if one can prove that the data were collected in accordance with one of the lawful grounds recognized by the regulation. When you are processing someone’s personal data, you should also let them know that you are doing so, by providing them a privacy notice.

GDPR caused quite a stir among anthropologists and social scientists, with certain voices bordering on the apocalyptic. A workshop at SOAS, for instance, had the title “Is anthropology still legal?” (Humphris 2018). Others were more optimistic and argued that the new regulation might help social science researchers to cast off the straitjacket of biomedicine (Sleeboom-Faulkner and McMurray 2018), or pointed out “regulatory provisos […] that accommodate for the specific requirements of ethnographic research” (Corsín Jiménez 2018: 1), creating room for ethnography’s exploratory character and recognizing the dialogical nature of its data-constitution practices.

This rant picks up one specific issue: the way GDPR engages with the ‘public sphere.’ Contrary to what many of us (including myself) initially naively assumed, the new directive does not provide a free ticket for processing personal data that are already publicly available. A crude lexicostatistic analysis of the regulation reveals that the adjective public systematically collocates with authorities, interest, and security. Public availability and public accessibility are occasionally mentioned, but as a basis for positing additional restrictions rather than as a license for processing. In short, GDPR is concerned with personal data, regardless of whether they were collected in a ‘public space’ or in the ‘public domain’. The GDPR’s restrictions on their use apply regardless. Yet, interpreting and applying GDPR does force us to critically interrogate what we precisely mean when we talk about public space. This is what this text purports to do. I will try to recover some of the polysemy hidden underneath the surface of this presumably monolithic category, and to this end, I will be tossing Goffman against Habermas (without claiming any credits as to the originality of such a move, see, for example, Sarangi 2011). Note that I am not interested, at least not initially, in distinguishing between ‘public place,’ ‘domain’, or ‘sphere.’ The underlying spatial metaphor that is present in all three of them refers “not [to] a thing but rather [to] a set of relations between things” (Lefebvre 1991: 83), and that is what matters at this point.

The intimacy of the public sphere

One anchoring point for theorizing the public sphere is Goffman’s well-known distinction, first advanced in The presentation of self in everyday life (1959), between front– and backstage. Frontstage is the arena where social actors act out the roles that are societally and institutionally expected from them, carefully controlling their performance in the knowledge that it will be evaluated by an audience of others. The backstage is the region where actors prepare for this role performance, where they can deviate from the script and engage in the performance of a more authentic self, unexposed to the public gaze. The notion of frontstage, then, is the one that is readily equated with the ‘public’ sphere (see, for example, Sarangi 2009). However, one should not forget that frontstage also inevitably refers to a constellation of people entangled with one another through co-presence (Goffman 1963). Co-presence occurs whenever social actors are aware that they are within each other’s perceptual range. It manifests itself in relentless mutual monitoring and in the reflexive self-regulation of one’s own conduct, in an attempt to regulate whatever information about ‘self’ and ‘other’ might be leaking through.

Do these pedestrians offer “publicly available data”?

If we look at it from this perspective, a large part of what we routinely gloss as ‘public’ suddenly acquires an unexpected intimate quality. Public conduct is not just a scripted role. It is a scripted role that we inhabit, and therefore it will always contains glitches, moments of uncertainty, and failures to meet expectations. These are highly intimate moments, and GDPR enforces respect for this intimacy. Nobody likes being caught on camera picking their nose, or arguing with their partner on the way to the supermarket. As a rule, GDPR prevents the processing of personal data collected during such ‘public’ performances of intimate conduct. The same rules apply as to other information which allows individual data subjects to be identified: You can only process personal data collected in a public place (for example, footage containing faces and/or voices) if you can demonstrate that processing is done based on one of the lawful grounds specified in Art. 6 (consent of the data subject, processing in the public interest, etc.). In a way, this makes perfect sense. The fact that someone engages in a certain kind of behavior in a publicly accessible space should not be taken to mean that it is up for grabs as data.

This new GDPR framework does not entirely prohibit Goffman-styled inquiries into how people navigate public spaces. Although it forbids processing personal data (photos, video footage, audio recordings) collected without permission from the data-subject, carefully anonymized field notes (which do not provide any clues as to the identity of the data subject) are still perfectly lawful. A good example is my earlier work on the various forms of practical geographical knowledge that Dar es Salaam commuters need for traveling from one part of the city to another (D’hondt 2009). As a rare instance of conversation-analytic research that does not use recordings of conduct, it combined a systematic interrogation of my own practical knowledge, as a user of informal minibus transport, with vignettes illustrating “noteworthy patterns of behaviour” (Iphofen 2015: 47) that I occasionally jotted down while on the move. As such, it represents a form of observational practice that, although not covert, elides the formal solicitation of consent (Iphofen 2015: ibid.). This practice can be questioned from an ethical angle, but under GDPR it does not pose a problem of legal compliance since no personal data are being collected. Dar es Salaam is a megalopolis of over four million inhabitants. Each day, literally hundreds of thousands of city residents rely on minibus transport for getting to work, school, etc. There is no way in which my fellow commuters whose conduct accidentally drew my attention could ever be identified from the short written notes that I entered in my notebook, let alone from the schematic descriptions of courses of action that ended up in the resulting publication.

Public, as in res publica

In The structural transformation of the public sphere (1962[1989]), Habermas describes how the aggregate of print media, coffee houses, lodges and reading clubs that spread through 18^th century Europe resulted in the formation of a new critical space, separate from the state, where individuals could interact and exchange ideas on public matters in a way that had never been possible before. Habermas’ account of this budding ‘public sphere,’ which mediates between the private life-world and the state apparatus, has subsequently been criticized from various angles. Later on, Habermas (1981) himself added that in modern mass-societies, the available space for rational-critical debate is gradually contracting, as clear-cut demarcations between the public and private, and between state and society, are eroded by bureaucratization and consumerism. Feminist scholars pointed out the policed nature of the public-private distinction and the pervasiveness of exclusionary mechanisms, while poststructuralists and postcolonialists called into question its monolithic character and insist on a plurality of public spaces (for a useful overview, see Koller and Wodak 2008). Still, the idea of a universally accessible common deliberative space has a strong normative presence in contemporary society. It is enshrined in Art. 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, on the freedom of expression and information. Social scientists are an integral part of this deliberative space, and instances of critical interventions that have transformed ongoing societal debates are manifold. Blommaert and Verschueren’s (1998) critical inquiry into the rhetoric of tolerance underpinning the 1990s debate on immigration in Belgium is a classic example of a study that fundamentally altered the structure of the debate it commented upon, by pointing out uncanny similarities between the discourse of far-right parties and of the self-declared tolerant majority. Arguing pro domo, I would say that my current ethnographic work on trial performance at the International Criminal Court (ICC; see, for example, D’hondt 2019) falls under the same category. Transnational legal orders, like the one epitomized by the ICC, exert a growing impact on national legal systems. However, the way in which the public exercise of authority by this transnational institution is negotiated in the court’s daily operation has never before been subject to critical scrutiny.

International forums like the ICC (but also the UN’s Universal Periodic Review or the UN Human Rights Committee, see Cowan and Billaud 2017, Halme-Tuomisaari 2018) are undeniably ‘public’ in the sense of Goffman, as the actors involved will always tailor their frontstage conduct to that of the other participants who are co-present (one might also add virtual audiences here, as many of these events are live-streamed). Still, one can sensibly argue that many of the restrictions on data processing mentioned in the previous section do not apply here, precisely because what transpires on these international forums is intrinsically connected to the deliberative space Habermas identified. Importantly, GDPR offers us a good starting point for developing such an argument.

GDPR formulates a set of general principles for personal data processing that apply universally. However, in addition it also specifies a number of ‘specific processing situations’ in which the application of these rules is legitimately curtailed (‘derogations’). It is up to the respective EU member states to specify the precise scope and content of these exemptions. In the national data acts through which the different member states implement GDPR, they must itemize the articles of the original GDPR that do not apply in these specific processing situations. Hence, GDPR Art. 89(2) stipulates that national legislations may provide exemptions for data processing “for archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific or historical research purposes or statistical purposes.” Significantly, this article does not contain any provisions as to where the research in question is supposed to take place, and Recital 159 explicitly includes “privately funded research.” In fact, the only place in GDPR that explicitly mentions academia is Art. 85, on the freedom of expression. This article gives EU member states the responsibility to specify exemptions in order to “reconcile the right to the protection of personal data pursuant to this Regulation with the right to freedom of expression and information, including processing for journalistic purposes and the purposes of academic, artistic or literary expression.” Of course, the nature of these exemptions will slightly vary form one member state to another, but the overall effect of Art. 85 is a “redefinition of the social sciences on a par with journalism, characterizing their activities as in the public interest and their pursuits as in themselves valuable as academic knowledge” (Sleeboom-Faulkner and McMurray 2018: 23). Not surprisingly, the British Academy and the Economic and Social Research Council in 2017 advised that British universities should maximally exploit the derogations this article provides. Similarly, the European Association of Social Anthropologists explicitly insists that “ethnographic research [should be placed] within the special clause on ‘academic expression’ included in Article 85(2) of the GDPR [, … which] has been designed to guarantee the critical social value of humanities and social sciences research” (EASA 2018: 1).

It seems, then, that there are at least two sets of derogations that social scientists can invoke to legitimize their data processing: the research exemption (Art. 89) and the one that guarantees the freedom of academic expression (Art. 85). For those of us working in critical research traditions, this second exemption is particularly relevant and liberating. Although GDPR makes no mention of the public sphere as such, it nevertheless provides the necessary exemption social scientists require for participating in the shared deliberative space outlined by Habermas, guaranteeing their right to critically engage with ongoing societal debates and allowing data processing on the condition that it is necessary to execute that right.

Ethics, after all

As I anticipated at the start, this excursion into legal compliance finally takes us back to ethics. For the time being, GDPR is still in the process of interpretation, and we are still waiting for case law in order to find out where lines will be draw and how GDPR will eventually be interpreted. This is a moment of uncertainty, and there is a tendency among universities and funders to err on the side of caution.

The chilling effect of these new regulations is real. It should be clear, however, that GDPR, in fact, offers quite some maneuvering space to those of us who are working with public data. At this stage, it would be perilous for applied linguists and ethnographers to assume a quietist stance.

The most dangerous kind of censorship is self-censorship.

In the current circumstances this aphorism is more relevant than ever. As scholars, we should be prepared to defend the available space for critical intervention. Universities should be prepared to back its scholars in this, as this debate revolves around basic democratic principles. In the end, even going to court should not necessarily frighten us. After all, it is an opportunity to stand up for the values we believe in.

References

Blommaert, Jan, and Jef Verschueren. 2002. Debating Diversity. London: Routledge.
British Academy & ESRC. 2017. A British Academy and Economic & Social Research Council submission to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) call for views on the General Data Protection Regulation derogations.
Corsín Jiménez, Alberto. 2018. A Data Governance Framework for Ethnography. Madrid, CSIC.
Cowan, Jane K. and Julie Billaud, 2017. The ‘public’ character of the Universal Periodic Review: Contested concept and methodological challenge. In: Niezen, R. and M. Sapignoli (Eds.), Palaces of Hope. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp.106-126.
D’hondt, Sigurd. 2009. Calling the stops in a Dar-es-Salaam minibus: Embodied understandings of place in a drop-off routine. Journal of Pragmatics 41, no. 10 (2009): 1962-1976.
D’hondt, Sigurd. 2019. Humanity and its beneficiaries: Footing and stance-taking in an international criminal trial. Signs and Society 7 (3), 427-453.
European Association of Social Anthropologists. 2018. EASA’s Statement on Data Governance in Ethnographic Projects.
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY, Doubleday.
Goffman, Erving. 1963. Behavior in Public Places. New York: Free Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1962 (1989). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge, Polity.
Halme-Tuomisaari, Miia, 2018. Methodologically blonde at the UN in a tactical quest for inclusion. Social Anthropology 26 (4), 456-470.
Humphris, Rachel. 2018. Is anthropology still legal? Notes on the impact of GDPR. Birmingham, IRiS.
Iphofen, Ron. 2015. Research Ethics in Ethnography/Anthropology. European Commission, DG Research and Innovation.
Koller, Veronika, and Ruth Wodak. 2008. Introduction: Shifting boundaries and emergent publics. In: R. Wodak and V. Koller (Eds.), Handbook of Communication in the Public Sphere. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 1-17.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Sarangi, Srikant. 2011. Public discourse. In: Jan Zienkowski, Jan-Ola Östman, and Jef Verschueren (Eds.), Discursive Pragmatics. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 248-265.
Sleeboom-Faulkner, Margaret, and James McMurray. 2018. The impact of the new EU GDPR on ethics governance and social anthropology. Anthropology Today 34 (5), 22-23.

Editor’s note:

To view the other RECLAS ethics rants, click here.

***

Approaches, frameworks, methodologies, and research designs have consequences for research ethics. Here I will discuss some things I have learned in my career as a fieldworker and researcher mainly while meeting minority language speakers in remote places and while trying to formulate practical relevance of my research for the wider public. I will specifically address the perception of research by research participants,  and the ethics of interviewing and other methods. I will close by sharing my take on researcher activism.

What’s in it for research participants?

All research should ideally benefit the researched communities and individuals in some meaningful and sensible way.

In general, participants have been happy to discuss language issues with me, some have even considered the interviews as an opportunity to tell their life stories to somebody and to have it recorded. Others mentioned, that, as a linguistic minority, they  have been “forgotten”. Participating in research felt like a good way to them to place their lives or their village on the map.

Petteri with research participants during fieldwork (Photo by Karina Tímár)

To meet my participants’ expectations, I have found it especially important to publish and present results not only in dominant languages and academic forums but also in the local language(s) and in accessible forums: in my case that has meant Hungarian and open access journals. Research published in English is largely irrelevant to my participants as it is mastered only by few of them.

In short, I consider it an important part of research(er) ethics to practice multilingual research multilingually (see Piller 2016 on the critique of doing research on multilingualism monolingually).

Beyond the research interview

In my dissertation, I provided detailed analyses on the constraints of the research interview as an ‘objective’ research tool by pointing out that the views on language produced in an interview are co-constructed by the interviewee and the interviewer. This helped me to see the research participants and researchers as equal partners in the production of information and knowledge, and my dissertation work made me very critical also towards objectivizing stances to research interviews. For example, certain things are often mentioned (or not and in a certain way) by an ‘informant’ only because they were asked (or not) by the researcher (in a certain way).

Most importantly, however it turned my attention to research ethics of treating the people we study as equal research participants, not merely as ‘informants’.

During my post-doctoral project (2011—2013), I became interested in the study of linguistic landscapes. The study of linguistic landscapes, or visual semiotics represents a turn “from spoken, face-to-face discourses to the representations of that interaction order in images and signs” (Scollon & Wong Scollon 2003: 82). In my current project (2016–2021), my fieldwork and data generation has also been focused on visual methods.

Originally developed to minimize the impact that researchers have on shaping the data, these methods have the potential to address the basic challenge research interviews have: interviewing appears to put the researcher in a dominant position.

Practicing inclusive research

Taking the concerns of research participant’s positionality and agency vis-a-vis the researcher seriously is a cornerstone of inclusive research. In my current project, I employed a local research assistant, who has been a significant help in building shared interest with the participants and partner institutions.

Revitalization program teachers have come to see our research as beneficial, especially due to the use of digital visual methods, which have provided examples of pedagogical experiments. To take one example: we have carried out iMovie projects with children, where the children’s first video recorded their villages and self-selected topics at home with an iPad provided by the project. Then they edited iMovies with the iPads during a revitalization class and finally showed the final recordings to other children, researchers, parents, and teachers.

Fieldwork projects, such as the iMovie project have served my research aims to gain analysable data through visual methods and thus getting access to participant language views and language practices.

Teachers’ views of research may have been changed as well: some more experienced teachers mentioned that previous research has not been similarly rewarding and that it had been difficult to engage the children in activities such as filling out questionnaires and surveys. In our case, they could see an immediate benefit for the program in the heightened student motivation to use the revitalization language.

Should researchers be activists?

To address this question, I need to begin by reflecting on my analytical framework, the study of language ideologies. I define language ideologies broadly as common linkages between language and non-linguistic phenomena in a given community. In the study of language ideologies I follow, it is a basic assumption that no idea or view about language comes from nowhere. As Silverstein (1998:124) explains:

We might consider our descriptive analytic perspective […] as a species of social-constructionist realism or naturalism about language and its matrix in the sociocultural realm: it recognizes the reflexive entailments for its own praxis, that it will find no absolute Archimedian place to stand – not in absolute “Truth”, nor in absolute “Reality” nor even in absolute deterministic or computable mental or social “Functional Process”. Analysis of ideological factuality is, perforce, relativistic in the best scientific (not scientistic) sense.

From an ”activist” approach, we could investigate how inequality is constructed through language ideologies and then show how such language ideologies are untrue, or “bad” representations of reality or how ideology is produced by “false consciousness” (as argued by Marx, see Blommaert 2006). Such an interpretation of ideology as a distortion of reality performed in order to naturalize a questionable political ideology, has been embraced by certain strands of Critical Discourse Analysis, where the analyses thus examine different linguistic forms and processes of twisting the truth (e.g., the use of metaphors to mislead interpretation, see Reisigl & Wodak 2001).

However, the activist goal of “speaking truth to power” is not an aim shared by researchers in linguistic anthropology, since language ideologies are everywhere and due to the lack of the “Archimedian place” mentioned by Silverstein above, they are false or true according to the perspective we choose or premise we follow (see also Gal, 2002).

To conclude, our research participants and their communities should benefit from the research. To reach this goal, my approach has been to focus on inclusive ethnography and methods of data collection that provide meaningful activities, events and discussions for the research participants and participating institutions. I have focused on examples of best practices, and at the same time remained critical by not trying to pretend that I can speak truth to power.

Finally, a goal for every study should also be to help people understand why research in general is needed and beneficial for people outside of academia.

References

Blommaert, J. 2006. Language Ideology. In Brown, K. (ed). Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics. Second edition, vol. 6. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 510-521.
Gal, S. 2002. Language Ideologies and Linguistic Diversity: Where Culture Meets Power. A magyar nyelv idegenben. Keresztes, L. & S. Maticsák (eds.). Debrecen: Debreceni Egyetem, 197-204.
Nind M. 2014. What is inclusive research? London: Bloomsbury.
Piller, I. 2016. Monolingual ways of seeing multilingualism. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 11(1), 25–33.
Reisigl, M. & R. Wodak 2001. Discourse and Discrimination. Rhetoric’s of Racism and Anti-Semitism. London: Routledge.
Scollon, R. & Wong Scollon, S. 2003. Discourses in place. Routledge: London.
Silverstein, M. 1998. The Uses and Utility of Ideology: A Commentary. Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. Schieffelin, B., K. Woolard & P. Kroskrity eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 123-148.

Ethnography as the “devil’s handwriting”

The Devil’s Handwriting takes its title from the memoir of Paul Rohrbach (1869-1956), a German travel writer and colonial official. The memoir, published in 1953, when the Third Reich provided an ineluctable prism on the German colonial empire (1884-1918), advances the idea of a satanic mode of writing: travel writing such as that produced by the young Rohrbach about Africa and China had laid the basis for the evil of colonialism. Steinmetz makes this idea the central hypothesis of his fascinating inquiry and finds a close relationship between ethnographic representations and colonial policies. This may seem unsurprising and harks back to Edward Said’s dictum “from travelers’ tales […] colonies were created” (Orientalism, p. 117).

What is surprising is the many different forms of colonial policy and practice that The Devil’s Handwriting reveals. Even in the relatively short-lived and comparatively small German colonial empire, colonial governance was highly variable. That variation cannot be explained by socioeconomic or materialist theories, as Steinmetz shows with reference to three specific colonies: Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia), Samoa and Qingdao (in Shandong province). Each of these held a distinct and very different place in the European imagination prior to colonization.

Abject and devious savages

Ovaherero in chains, 1904 (Source: Der Spiegel)

Precolonial accounts of the people of Southwest Africa were extremely negative and represented them as sub-human savages. One 19^th century German explorer, for instance, described the Khoikhoi as “bizarre red people” of “pronounced ugliness” with an “animal-like clicking language” (p. 154). The Germans did not invent these tropes of African abject savagery but fell back on the accounts of earlier European travelers. Already in 1612, for instance, a British official had described the Khoikhoi as “brute and savage, without religion, without language, without laws or government, without manners or humanity, and last of all without apparel” (p. 81; spelling adapted to modern English).

By the time the German colonial state arrived in Southwest Africa in the late 19^th century, these negative representations of Africans as abject savages had become entrenched in the minds of Europeans. Additionally, these previous encounters added another dimension, namely that of deviousness, shiftiness and insincere cunning. The Cape Colony, which had been under European (first Dutch, then British) rule since the late 17^th century, had brought numerous Europeans – traders, settlers, explorers, soldiers and missionaries – to Southern Africa. 19^th century German arrivals felt that contact with these earlier Europeans had served to corrupt the locals even further. One travel writer opined that “contact with civilization seems to make the savage more savage” (p. 156).

The military leadership of Southwest Africa, 1905 (Source: Der Spiegel)

In this perverted logic, conversion to Christianity was seen to make the natives “worse” rather than “better”. One missionary, for instance, wrote in a letter: “According to many whites it is much easier to interact with a pagan who has had no contact, or very little, with the mission than with the baptized ones. […] In many cases this is sadly often true” (p. 121, fn. 195)

These entrenched negative perceptions of Africans – as abject savages who had been further degraded through contact with Europeans – largely precluded any kind of engagement with them, as is particularly obvious from the fact that Europeans rarely attempted to learn local languages. In fact, many considered African languages unlearnable. The Khoikhoi language was variously described as similar to the “clucking of turkeys”, the “screaming of cocks” or to the sound of farting. This “apishly [rather] than articulately sounded” “incomprehensible” language kept frustrating Europeans:

But while Europeans expressed frustration at being unable to learn the local tongue, Khoikhoi picked up English or Dutch very quickly. Europeans seemed incapable of reaching the obvious conclusion that the locals had more linguistic talent than their foreign visitors. (p. 82)

The Europeans’ staunch belief in their own superiority meant that they wanted to transform Africans. Their assumption that communication and meaningful interaction were difficult, if not impossible, meant that they considered force and violence the preferred mode of engagement. Consequently, colonial policy aimed to seize the land and livestock of local populations in order to turn them into a “deracinated, atomized proletariat” (p. 203). Where locals resisted, extreme violence was readily used, as in the 1904 “Annihilation Order”, which ushered in the 20^th century’s first genocide, of the Ovaherero.

2014 exhibition of (pre)colonial South Pacific photos at the Hamburg Museum of Anthropology entitled “A view of paradise”

Noble savages

In hindsight, the Ovaherero Genocide is often read as a precursor to the Holocaust and an indicator that German colonialism was exceptionally brutal and destructive. Steinmetz, however, contends that this argument suffers from a methodological error, namely the lack of comparison with other national cases. It is not his aim to compare German colonialism with the colonialism of other European nations although he does point out in passing similarities of the Ovaherero Genocide with the extermination of Tasmanian Aborigines and the Queensland Frontier Wars between 1840 and 1897. Steinmetz advances the comparative case “intranationally” with reference to two other German colonies, Samoa and Qingdao. Although these were part of the German colonial empire at the same time as Southwest Africa, colonialism played out quite differently there.

European ideas about Samoa, as of the South Pacific generally, were rather different to those they had of African. Like Africans, Samoans were portrayed as inferior savages. However, in contrast to Africans, Samoans were considered beautiful, noble and virtuous and were thought to live in paradise in harmony with nature.

German enthrallment with Samoans coupled with their belief in racial hierarchies produced some absurd ideological maneuvers. For instance, when German settlers in 1934 (by which time Samoa was a colony of New Zealand) formed a chapter of the Nazi party, they duly made a case that Samoas were “Aryans”. Crazy as that may seem, Samoans were not the only ones whose “race” kept changing in European eyes:

One of the most absurd aspects of European discussions of “race” during the nineteenth century is the way in which certain populations “changed color” as their relative standing within comparative ethnographic discourse shifted. Thus, the Witbooi changed from black to yellow after 1894 […] and the Chinese changed from white to yellow over the course of the nineteenth century. Samoans underwent a process of racial lightening, becoming more like the early image of Tahitians – who themselves began to seem swarthier to Europeans as they lost their charm.” (p. 302)

“Looking into paradise” was not innocent: “scientific” photography in physical anthropology, Samoa, ca. 1875 (held in the collection of the Hamburg Anthropology Museum)

In short, by the late 19^th century, Samoa had become paradise in the European imagination. Therefore, the aim of colonial policy was not to change Samoans but – to the contrary – to keep them in their supposed paradisiacal state. To achieve that the use of explicit force was rarely considered and the idea was that the colonial state would offer a firm paternal hand. In contrast to Southwest Africa, where the possibility of learning local languages did not seem to enter the minds of Europeans, it did in Samoa. The colony was governed through the medium of Samoan and, to a lesser degree, English. Colonial officials periodically responded to reprimands from Berlin and pointed out that the use of German in the South Pacific was not practical. The two German colonial governors (Samoa was a German colony for only 14 years) both became proficient Samoan speakers, adopted Samoan titles and styled themselves as traditional Samoan chiefs. Their identification with the colony was such that one of them declared himself to be Polynesian when he was no longer in office.

An advanced civilization

Just to be clear, it is not Steinmetz’ intention to argue that Samoan colonialism was “good”. All colonialism involves subjugation and exploitation, and Samoa was no exception. In fact, he trains his eye not on the colonized but the colonizers and his argument revolves around one of the perennial problems of intercultural communication: the ways in which stereotypes inform action. While European stereotypes about Africans and Samoans were relatively consistent, this was not the case with China.

China had been known to Europeans since the Middle Ages and hence there was significant variability in the ways it was represented in ethnographic writing. From early vague views of a fabled land emerged a highly positive representation starting with the 16^th century Jesuits of China as a well-ordered advanced society that was superior to Europe. These discourses of Sinophilia were in the 19^th century complemented with yet another, now negative, strand of representations of Chinese as members of an inferior race. While negative views started to gain currency, the earlier positive representations never died out entirely and so discourses about China were always much more poly-vocal than was the case with Africa and the South Pacific.

The transformation of Sinophilia into Sinophobia was, of course, tied to colonial expansion at the time and another emerging idea was “that China was ‘crying aloud for foreign conquest’” (p. 389). The Germans particularly coveted a colonial port similar to what the British had with Hong Kong and so they annexed Qingdao on the east coast in 1897. The first couple of years of colonial rule saw a focus on aggressive segregation between the colonizers and the colonized. However, this hostile approach did not last long, not least because colonial officials from the military were increasingly replaced with administrators who had a background in Chinese studies or had previously worked as translators and interpreters.

Many of the Qingdao colonial officials were graduates of the Oriental Languages Department at the University of Berlin, a language-training institute with the mission to prepare graduates for the foreign service. Graduates achieved high levels of proficiency in Chinese and imbibed a spirit of Sinophilia. Putting these men in charge of colonial policy resulted in “a program of rapprochement, syncretism, and exchange between two civilizations conceptualized as different but relatively equal in value” (p. 470).

Another legacy of German colonialism: Tsingtao Beer. The brewery, which was founded in 1903, is today a major tourist attraction (Source: Wikipedia)

A bilingual high school and college were founded with the aim to orient Chinese elites towards Germany. The high school employed Chinese teachers to teach Chinese, math, physics and chemistry, and German teachers to teach German and history. In contrast to colonial schools elsewhere, there was no religious instruction and Christian holidays were not observed. The college similarly aimed at an equilibrium between German and Chinese elements and offered a mixed curriculum. Institutions such as these and the colonial policies they were based on “took for granted that China was an advanced civilization on a level equal to that of Europe. Opening these floodgates within a colonial context pointed beyond European claims to sovereignty and supremacy, beyond colonialism” (p. 534).

Beyond colonialism?

German colonialism ended with Germany’s defeat in World War I and its unconditional surrender. This did not mean independence for its colonies but a change in occupying power. Southwest Africa was assigned to South Africa, Samoa to New Zealand and Qingdao came under Japanese occupation.

The afterlife of German colonialism is highly variable, too. Discussions with Namibia over reparations and a formal apology are ongoing although, as Steinmetz points out, the economic structures created by colonialism remain in place, with 30% of all Namibian farms owned by Germans or their descendants. In Samoa, German colonialism seems largely forgotten or, at least, not a matter of public debate; and Qingdao is capitalizing on its German heritage by having it turned into a tourist attraction.

Overall, The Devil’s Handwriting is a brilliant historical study of a key question in intercultural communication: how are discourses of culture related to practices in intercultural engagement? My brief overview here cannot do justice to the wealth of detail it offers but anyone interested in history, colonialism and intercultural communication will enjoy this book. Another highly recommended!

Happy reading! And don’t forget to share your progress. If you tweet about it and mention @lg_on_the_move, you’ll be in the running for our monthly draw of a copy of Intercultural Communication. The March winner has been announced on Twitter:

Each month we celebrate the #Language-on-the-Move community by gifting a copy of Ingrid Piller's "Intercultural Communication" @EdinburghUP to one of our interactive followers. The March winner is @KhawlaBadwan. Who will get lucky in April? pic.twitter.com/0liU8J2EyD

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) April 1, 2018

Related content, Reading Challenge

• Globalization between crime and piety
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2018

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• What makes foreigners weird? A quick guide to orientalism
• Yiman doesn’t have a word for massacre
• Intercultural communication and imperialism
• What would you do?

Secure the Soul examines Christian practices of self-transformation in five spaces of globalization: high security prisons, reality TV shows, offshore call centers, child sponsorship programs, and Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centers. One key participant, Mateo, who has been in and out of all these institutional spaces, provides the narrative arc of the book. Mateo is introduced early in the book as an iconic type of a particular global person: a Guatemalan child migrant who is “illegal” in Los Angeles, becomes involved in drugs and organized crime, and, as a young adult is deported back to Guatemala, where he gets stuck between belonging and non-belonging:

Mateo, […] was not tall, but he was obviously strong. He had broad shoulders, a thick neck, and a sturdy back. He could be mistaken for an athlete, a boxer perhaps, were it not for his gait. He walked like a gangsta. This is his word, not mine. He walked a little slower, a little more stridently than the average Guatemalan. Mateo had a kind of swagger that made him stand out. He knew it, and he liked it. The bald head, the baggy jeans, and the tattoos peeking out from under his collar—it all signaled a certain kind of time spent in the States. His stunted Spanish was also a tell. Mateo was not from Guatemala. Everyone knew as much. But, of course, he was. Everyone knew that, too. (O’Neill, 2015, p. 2f.)

Language – “his stunted Spanish” – is a key signal of Mateo’s identity as someone who got caught up in the specific global circuits that link Guatemala and the USA.

A very short history of Guatemala

The territory that today constitutes Guatemala was sucked into the vortex of globalization in 1511 with the conquista, the Spanish colonization of Latin America. After more than 300 years, Guatemala gained independence from Spain in the 19^th century. By that time, its agricultural exploitation by multinational companies based in the US was in full swing. By the mid-20^th century, United Fruit was the largest landowner and employer in Guatemala. As the interests of United Fruit would have been jeopardized by an attempted modest land reform by a democratically elected government in 1954, the United States intervened. The coup d’état plunged Guatemala into more than three decades of a genocidal civil war. Today, Guatemala is officially at peace but is the most violent non-combat zone on earth. It is also still in the clutches of an exploitative globalization for which Guatemala is nothing but a way station: in 2011, 84% of all cocaine produced for the US market passed through Guatemala.

Many have sought to escape this hell by migrating north. However, while Guatemalan bananas and drugs are welcome there, its people are not. Caught up in the “War on Drugs” and the “War on Terror”, deportation back to Guatemala has soared since the beginning of the 21^st century.

Language and global crime

Guatemala’s civil war pushed tens of thousands of refugees into poor neighbourhoods of Los Angeles in the 1980s (along with El Salvadorians, Hondurans and Nicaraguans). In these harsh circumstances, their children quickly became involved in gangs and two transnational criminal organizations, Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18, gained strength from the 1990s onwards. From modest beginnings in Los Angeles, these gangs have now gone global. One step in their globalization was the US policy of deporting migrants with a conviction.

These deportees met minimum life chances, a complete lack of social services, and a glut of weapons left over from the region’s civil wars. And, as men and women born in Central America but oftentimes raised in the United States, the youngest of these deportees did not speak Spanish fluently; they had no close family ties and no viable life chances but gang life. (O’Neill, 2015, p. 15)

Call center signage, Guatemala (Source: O’Neill, 2015, p. 107)

Lack of proficiency in Spanish is one of many factors that further limits the opportunities of deportees back in Guatemala and pushes them into gangs. Conversely, their proficiency in English is another. However, their proficiency in English sometimes becomes profitable in other ways.

Language and global service work

In addition to organized crime, a sector that has been growing in Guatemala is call center work. Off-shoring call center work to India or the Philippines has increasingly given way to “near-shoring”. In this process, the work is still outsourced to a low-wage country but one that is in the same time zone and has greater “cultural affinity.” Linguistically, deportees make ideal call center workers. Having learned English “not just in LA public schools but also in the U.S. prison system or while shuttling product from Los Angeles to Las Vegas” (p. 99), their English accents are ideal to maintain the illusion that the US customer is actually speaking to a US service agent.

At the same time, their habitus constitutes a problem. The fact that their bodies are full of tattoos remains invisible in call center work but addiction, problems with punctuality and following tedious scripts, or anger in the face of customer abuse were more difficult to hide. Call centers attempt to manage employee’s habitus through Protestant Christian piety mixed with corporate maxims. In most cases, this was not enough to keep employees on the job, off the streets and out of drugs for long. As long as the deportees came rolling back in, this was no problem for management, though:

Instead they troll the airports looking for more talent. “The ones that we fight for are the mojados [wetbacks],” the director of human resources admitted. “They are the most valuable here. Because they have perfect English. Perfect. We can place them in any account. We find them in the airport.” (O’Neill, 2015, p. 116)

Prisoner transport vehicle, Guatemala (Source: O’Neill, 2015, p. 35)

Language and global Christianity

The language of Protestant self-improvement permeates the sites in which the deportees circulate. Without material resources or any vision for social change, North American Christian piety is the sole means through which a destitute population comes to be governed. These global communications readily descend into farce, as is the case in the child sponsorship program, where US sponsors commit to a monthly contribution of US$35 to the education of a Guatemalan child. Additionally, sponsors are encouraged to enter into an exchange of letters with “their” child. These exchanges end up producing highly disparate texts, as the head of one child sponsorship NGO explained:

“It was ridiculous,” the director of child sponsorship complained. “Sponsors would write these wonderful letters. They’d write about their life and their hobbies. And then they’d get a letter back from a fourteen-year-old kid who should know how to write, and all it says is, ‘Dear sponsor. I love you. Love, your sponsor child.’” These scrawny efforts suggested ungracious subjects. (O’Neill, 2015, p. 136)

The idea behind the letter exchange is that it would help the sponsored child find god, show them they are loved, and, ultimately, prevent them from getting into drugs and crime. However, for children growing up in a Guatemalan slum keeping up a correspondence with middle-class North Americans constituted an almost impossible task. In the end, NGOs coach the children how to write letters following templates. Unsurprisingly, the content becomes entirely fictional in the process.

Ethnography of language on the move

Secure the Soul is a brilliant ethnography of Christian piety as a form of soft security. It also offers instructive glimpses into the ways in which language has become enmeshed in global circuits of crime, service work and security efforts. Highly recommended!

Full reference:

O’Neill, K. L. (2015). Secure the Soul: Christian Piety and Gang Prevention in Guatemala. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Those of you who are after recommendations for ethnographies located more centrally in sociolinguistics, here are some of my favourites:

• Codo, E. (2008). Immigration and Bureaucratic Control: Language Practices in Public Administration. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
• Duchêne, A. (2009). Ideologies across Nations: The Construction of Linguistic Minorities at the United Nations. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
• Farr, M. (2006). Rancheros in Chicagoacán: Language and Identity in a Transnational Community. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
• Heller, M. (2006). Linguistic Minorities and Modernity: A Sociolinguistic Ethnography (2nd ed.). London: Continuum.
• Hoffman, K. E. (2008). We Share Walls: Language, Land, and Gender in Berber Morocco. Oxford: Blackwell.
• Martín Rojo, L. (2010). Constructing Inequality in Multilingual Classrooms. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
• Prendergast, C. (2008). Buying into English: Language and Investment in the New Capitalist World. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
• Sabaté i Dalmau, M. (2014). Migrant Communication Enterprises: Regimentation and Resistance. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
• Zentella, A. C. (1997). Growing up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York. Oxford: Blackwell.

Happy reading! And don’t forget to share your progress. If you tweet about it and mention @lg_on_the_move, you’ll be in the running for our monthly draw of a copy of Intercultural Communication. The February winner will be announced on Twitter shortly.

The Language-on-the-Move team is conducting award-winning research

The Language on the Move team is delighted to share news of our multiple-award-winning research!

2017 Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics

The winners of the 2017 Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics have just been announced and we are delighted that our very own Alexandra Grey is one of two joint winners of the 2017 Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics. Alexandra receives the award for her thesis about the ways in which language rights affect minority languages in China. The full thesis can be downloaded here and a short overview is available here.

The second joint winner of the prize is Isabel O’Keeffe (Melbourne University), who receives the award for her thesis about “Multilingual manyardi/kun-borrk: Manifestations of multilingualism in the classical song traditions of western Arnhem Land”.

Both theses were commended for being “outstanding pieces of innovative, creative, and personal linguistic scholarship”.

The Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics is a $500 prize begun in 2013 and awarded annually to the best PhD which demonstrates methodological and theoretical innovations in Australian linguistics (e.g. studies in toponymy, language and ethnography, language and musicology, linguistic ecology, language identity and self, kinship relationships, island languages, spatial descriptions in language, Australian creoles, and language contact).

The notice for submissions for the 2018 Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics will appear in early 2018 in the newsletter of the Australian Linguistics Society.

2017 Michael Clyne Prize

For the Language on the Move team, this recognition of Alexandra’s success follows hot on the heels of the announcement that another team member, Shiva Motaghi-Tabari, is the winner of the 2017 Michael Clyne Prize. The Michael Clyne Prize is awarded annually by the Australian Linguistics Society for the best postgraduate research thesis in immigrant bilingualism and language contact. Shiva receives the prize for her thesis about “Bidirectional Language Learning in Migrant Families”. An abstract and a link to the full thesis is available here.

This is, in fact, the second time the Michael Clyne Prize award goes to a member of the Language on the Move research group. Donna Butorac won the 2012 Michael Clyne Prize for her thesis about “Imagined identity, remembered self: Settlement language learning and the negotiation of gendered subjectivity”. Furthermore, Vera Williams Tetteh’s thesis about “Language, Education and Settlement: A Sociolinguistic Ethnography on, with, and for Africans in Australia” was the runner-up for the 2016 award.

These and all our PhD theses are available from our PhD Hall of Fame.

Alexandra Grey proudly holding the physical product of her PhD research

My university will shortly require only a digital copy of each PhD after it has been examined and awarded, but luckily I snuck into the tail-end of the hard copy era. I say ‘lucky’ because my hard copy of my own hard work is a lovely, and hefty, thing to hold. And I’m not the only one who wants to hold it; having a physical final product has been meaningful to friends and family who buoyed me through the last four years.

When I collected the hard-bound copies I thought, ‘my work is complete’. Complete enough to celebrate, at any rate! My Language on the Move colleagues have warmly marked the milestone. But while the PhD is over the research doesn’t feel finished. I am still drawn to the subject of my thesis – how China’s minority languages policies operate today – because of (rather than despite) my years researching it. For the thesis, I chose a quote from Heller as my opening epigraph:

The globalised new economy is bound up with transformations of language and identity in many different ways … Ethnolinguistic minorities provide a particularly revealing window into these processes. (Heller, 2003, p. 473)

These different transformations are ongoing; this window remains. So, I remain curious about sociolinguistics in the Sinosphere (and much else in the Sinosphere besides). Every time I write up a paper from the thesis I think up further questions to investigate. I’m working out how to share the findings with my generous participants and collaborators. And I’m preparing to return to China later in 2017 for a different project (on English and the globalisation of university education).

The thesis is not only relevant to linguists but also to Sinologists and political scientists. It’s an ethnography of language policy; that is, it’s about the lived experiences of state practices regarding a minority language. Rather than merely analysing what the minority language polices say, or what language practices everyday people have, it combines these angles. This makes for a lot of ground to cover, so I took a case study of just one language, Zhuang, the language of China’s largest official minority group, a group who have autonomous sub-national government over the Guangxi Zhuangzu Autonomous Region. The thesis investigates what language ideologies are produced and reproduced in official language rights discourses and policies, and how social actors receive, resist or reproduce these.

Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region (Source: Encyclopedia Britannica)

The research takes an ethnographic approach and draws on interviews with over sixty participants, texts collected from public linguistic landscapes, fieldwork observations and a corpus of Chinese laws, policies and official policy commentaries.

The analysis commences with a critical examination of the procedures of Zhuang language governance, finding that the language policy framework neither empowers Zhuang speakers nor the institutions tasked with governing Zhuang because authority for language governance is fractured and responsiveness to changing conditions is limited. Furthermore, the Zhuang language governance framework entrenches the normative position of a ‘developmentalist’ ideology under which Zhuang is constructed as of low value. Next, the analysis follows Zhuang language policy along its trajectory into practice. The thesis examines how language policy is implemented at different levels of government, and how Zhuang language governance is understood and experienced by social actors, concentrating on two key mechanisms of language policy: first, the regulation of language displayed in public space; and, second, the regulation of language in education.

With regard to public space, the thesis examines a municipal legislative intervention under which Zhuang has been added to public signage. It finds that Zhuang language is rarely displayed outside areas under Zhuang autonomous regional government, and that even within these areas Zhuang is almost exclusively displayed on government signage. The thesis then extends the linguistic landscape approach, analysing the various ‘readings’ of Zhuang landscape texts by viewers, including some who negatively evaluate the signage as tokenistic and many who simply do not ‘see’ the displays of Zhuang. This is one of the more surprising findings: it’s so easy to assume (as a policy-maker, an academic or a passer-by) that a bilingual street sign will be read and used by bilingual viewers who speak that language, that it will be seen as bilingual, that it will be seen at all. As my research discovered, these are not well founded assumptions.

Bilingual and triscriptual street sign in Nanning, GZAR

Finally, the thesis examines education policy under which Zhuang is introduced as a study subject at a limited number of universities after its near-total exclusion from primary and particularly secondary schooling. It finds that students who – against social norms and values – choose to study Zhuang at university nevertheless largely adopt the language ideologies of the pre-tertiary schooling system, namely the belief that Zhuang is not an educated person’s language and not useful for socio-economic mobility.

Overall, the study finds that Zhuang language rights and policies, despite being powerful official discourses, do not challenge the ascendant marketised and mobility-focused language ideologies which ascribe low value to Zhuang. Moreover, although language rights and policies create an ethno-linguistically divided and hierarchic social order seemingly against the interests of Zhuang speakers, Zhuang speakers may nevertheless value the Zhuang identity discursively created and invested with authority by this framework.

I’m now looking forward to reworking my doctoral research for publication, touching base with Zhuang participants, and getting started on my post-doctoral journey.

Alexandra Grey’s PhD thesis, “How do language rights affect minority languages in China? An ethnographic investigation of the Zhuang minority language under conditions of rapid social change” (Macquarie University, 2017) can be accessed through our PhD Hall of Fame.

Reference

Heller, M. (2003). Globalization, the new economy, and the commodification of language and identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7(4), 473-492.

But what if you are also Deaf or Hard of Hearing? You don’t fit in the ‘Hearing’ world or the ‘Deaf’ world. You can’t quite fit into your own family or community, either, because of your hearing loss and in the wider world you face multiple communication and language barriers. Where do you fit then? How do you manage your multiple identities?

This is what I sought to find out.

My name is Ayah and I am an Australian Lebanese-Muslim woman with a hearing impairment. I was born and raised in Australia, and growing up I have faced many challenges due to both my ethnicity and my hearing loss. My hearing loss added another barrier I have had to face, not only in the wider Australian community but in the Lebanese-Muslim community as well. There is a lack of support, understanding and awareness about hearing loss, and other disabilities, in the Lebanese-Muslim community, and a lack of understanding and acceptance of Islam, and other ethnic minority backgrounds, in Australia, including in the Deaf community.

I want to close that gap.

The intersection of fitting into these different categories related to gender, culture, religion and disability meant I have faced a unique, complex and silent experience of trying to find out who I am and where I fit. My journey of self-discovery and passion to understand the world around me led me to pursue a degree and career as a Social Researcher.

Last year, as a requirement of my Social Research and Policy Degree at the University of New South Wales, I devoted my honours research to this topic. My thesis explored the identities and lived experiences of Australian Lebanese-Muslim women with hearing impairment and investigated if they perceive their hearing loss as a ‘blessing’ or a ‘curse’. This thesis also aimed to raise awareness and break the strong cultural stigma associated with hearing loss in the Lebanese-Muslim community, as well as contribute to the wider discourse about diversity in the Deaf community.

As a researcher with these multiple identities myself, I used auto-ethnography to incorporate my own reflections and insights into the study. Auto-ethnography is a theoretical and methodological approach where ‘researchers use themselves as their own primary research subject’ (Butz & Besio 2009, p. 1665). Within this framework, I also used data from my Facebook page Silent Signs, where I share my experiences and observations in different community settings.

Additionally, I conducted semi-structured interviews with eight women living in Sydney, who also identified as Australian, Lebanese and Muslim women with a hearing impairment. Recruitment, preparing and conducting the interviews were a fundamental part of my research. Numerous challenges emerged due to language and communication barriers; reflecting the lived experiences of these women. For example, consent forms were offered in English and Arabic, a sign language interpreter was hired for three of the interviews and, due to my own hearing loss, assistance was needed with transcribing the interviews. I even made a video in Auslan (Australian sign language) to recruit participants and this proved to be a successful way of approaching and connecting with these women. You can view the video here.

Numerous themes and results emerged from my research and the key findings can be summarized as follows:

• Most of the women regard Auslan as their primary language.
• The majority of participants identified themselves by their hearing-loss identity first, followed by their identity as a ‘Muslim’ which was in the top two responses. Most of the women who chose the ‘Muslim’ identity stressed that religion allowed them to cope with all the different challenges they faced and to even perceive their hearing loss as a blessing from God. Many gave thanks and the Arabic phrase ‘Alhamdulillah’ (which translates as ‘All praise belongs to God’) was used numerous times by different women.
• All women in the study faced different identity challenges such as conflicts between their ‘Muslim’, ‘Deaf’ and other identities. Navigating their ‘Lebanese’, ‘Australian’ and ‘Woman’ identities also included other identities such as being a ‘Mother’, ‘Wife’ or ‘Student’.
• The women’s experiences and stories also showed that strong cultural stigma, barriers to communication, isolation in the family and a lack of accessibility in the community served to produce hearing loss as a ‘curse’.

Of course, my thesis has obvious limitations, including a very narrow sample. More expansive research will be needed not only to highlight diversity in deaf discourse but to also close the anecdotal gap between Islam and disability. I look forward to expanding on my honours thesis and conducting further research to meet these research desiderata.

At the moment, I am working at Advance Diversity Services on a research project about the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) and accessibility for people from different ethnic backgrounds. I also volunteer with MuslimCare Australia where I run a “Muslim Deaf Group” to raise awareness and provide support for other people like myself.

I recently collaborated with the Muslim Deaf Association Sydney on a Ramadan project where we encouraged people to sign “Ramadan Mubarak” in Auslan and send in their videos. You can see the final video here.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions at Silent Signs.

Ramadan Mubarak!

Language Lovers Blogging Competition 2017

If you liked this post, don’t forget to vote for Language on the Move in the 2017 Language Lovers blogging competition over at the ba.bla voting page! Voting closes on June 06.

References

Butz, D., & Besio, K. (2009). Autoethnography Geography Compass, 3 (5), 1660-1674 DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2009.00279.x

Wehbe, A., (2016), ‘Blessing or a Curse? Exploring the Identity and Lived Experiences of Australian, Lebanese, Muslim Women with a Hearing Impairment’, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

The Linguistic Ethnography Forum will host a free e-seminar devoted to Ingrid Piller’s new book Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics. Please join us for this opportunity to discuss the book with the author and a group of leading international scholars.

What: An email-based presentation and discussion of Chapters 1 and 2 of Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice
When: May 25: Distribution of reading materials; June 01: E-Seminar opens; June 21: E-Seminar closes
Where: The Linguistic Ethnography Forum mailing list
How: Simply sign up to the Linguistic Ethnography Forum mailing list at https://goo.gl/Xv7113 in order to participate
Who: Professor Ingrid Piller as speaker; Dr Huamei Han as discussant; Livia Gerber as moderator; and the list members, including leading international experts in Linguistic Ethnography

Ingrid Piller, Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice, Oxford University Press, March 2016

Linguistic Ethnography Forum

• The Linguistic Ethnography Forum (LEF) brings together researchers conducting linguistic ethnography in the UK and elsewhere. It seeks to explore a range of past and current work, to identify key issues, and to engage in methodologically and theoretically well-tuned debate.
• Linguistic Ethnography holds that language and social life are mutually shaping, and that close analysis of situated language use can provide both fundamental and distinctive insights into the mechanisms and dynamics of social and cultural production in everyday activity.
• LEF is a Special Interest Group of the British Association of Applied Linguistics (BAAL).
• LEF hosts a free annual e-seminar open to all list members at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/LING-ETHNOG

Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice

Linguistic diversity is a universal characteristic of human language but linguistic diversity is rarely neutral; rather it is accompanied by linguistic stratification and linguistic subordination. Ingrid Piller’s new book Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice employs a case-study approach to real-world instances of linguistic injustice in liberal democracies undergoing rapid change due to high levels of migration and economic globalization. Focusing on the linguistic dimensions of economic inequality, cultural domination and imparity of political participation, this book offers a detailed examination of the connection between linguistic diversity and inequality in domains critical to social justice such as employment, education, and community participation.

The e-seminar will use Chapter 1 (“Introduction”) and Chapter 2 (“Linguistic Diversity and Stratification”) as a starting point for the discussion.

Special features of the book

• Prompts thinking about linguistic disadvantage as a form of structural disadvantage that needs to be recognized and taken seriously, and that warrants a serious public debate as to how it can best be mitigated
• Includes case studies from around the world
• Offers a conversational approach inviting readers to engage with linguistic diversity and social justice through the online forum Language on the Move

Advance praise

“This is a serious book on a serious subject. In a globalized world whose rhetoric celebrates linguistic diversity, Ingrid Piller shows that the reality is one of systemic inequality and disadvantage—and makes a strong argument that linguistic questions should figure prominently on the social justice agenda in the twenty-first century.” (Deborah Cameron, Professor of Language and Communication, University of Oxford)

“A vivid, powerful, and sober analysis of how language serves to entrench injustice and create indefensible discrimination. Piller’s wide-ranging book should inspire and shock both the general reader and the research world.” (Robert Phillipson, Professor Emeritus, Copenhagen Business School)

Preview

A Google preview of Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice is available here.

Discount for e-seminar participants

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Ingrid Piller

Ingrid Piller is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Her research expertise is in Intercultural Communication, the Sociolinguistics of Language Learning and Multilingualism, and Bilingual Education. She serves as editor-in-chief of the international sociolinguistics journal Multilingua and curates the sociolinguistics portal Language on the Move.

Huamei Han

Huamei Han is Associate Professor of Education at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. Her research centres on language learning, multilingualism, and socioeconomic inclusion of linguistically marginalized individuals and groups in globalization. She has researched language learning among adult immigrants in east Canada, multilingual practices among youths at minority churches in west Canada, and grassroots multilingualism emerging in the context of China-Africa trade migration.

Livia Gerber

Livia Gerber is a PhD student in the Linguistics Department at Macquarie University. Her research interests are in bilingual education, intercultural communication, and the relationship between language practices and language policies. Her PhD project examines the language learning experiences of German working-holiday makers in Australia.

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Condemned to consume

My migration newsfeed in the past few weeks has been dominated by news about the Syrian refugee crisis and the various European and international responses. But there have also been two other noteworthy migration news: one relates to the changing face of immigration to Canada as increasingly highly educated migrants are admitted and the other relates to revelations that the Australian 7-Eleven convenience stores systematically exploit international students and other temporary visa holders.

How do these various news hang together?

“Traditional” immigration countries such as Australia and Canada have a relatively small refugee intake in comparison to their various work migration schemes. While the former dominate the news, the latter dominate the numbers. According to ABS data, the net immigration to Australia, in the financial year 2013-14, for instance, was over 212,000 people; humanitarian entrants accounted for only around six percent of these. So, maybe unusually internationally, Australia accepts far more “economic migrants” than “refugees.”

The rationale for this selection is that skilled and well-educated migrants, who fill labour shortages, are good for the economy; while refugees are a “burden” on the economy. One of the many complexities that this dichotomy overlooks is, of course, that refugees are often likely to be skilled and well-educated, too.

Let’s ignore that detail for the moment and ask whether migrants’ skills and education necessarily lead to social inclusion.

Social inclusion is a notoriously difficult concept to define. Despite frequent references to social inclusion in contemporary national and international policies, there is actually a notable lack of consensus as to what constitutes social inclusion. Most commentators see the promotion of economic well-being as constituting the core of social inclusion. However, the contributors to two recent collections devoted to “Linguistic Diversity and Social Inclusion” that I (co)edited for the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism and the Australian Review of Applied Linguistics found it necessary to go beyond the economic core meaning of social inclusion to also include a wider meaning of social inclusion as a sense of community participation and belonging. The contributors showed that inclusion is a multifaceted phenomenon and linguistically diverse populations may well be included on one level but excluded on another.

Recent research with Soviet Jewish migrants to Germany offers a highly pertinent discussion. The researcher, Sveta Roberman, undertook a year-long ethnographic project to examine the migration and settlement experiences of this group. She developed the concept of “inclusive exclusion” in response to the following observation:

I kept sensing a peculiar atmosphere, intangible and hard to describe, that pervades the lives of many, an aura of dissatisfaction and restlessness that borders on—or has become—apathy and resignation, articulated in an often-expressed sentiment: “We are kind of existing here, not really living.” (Roberman 2015, p. 744)

It’s an observation that resonates with a lot of the research into the language learning and settlement experiences of adult migrants conducted with very different origin groups by my students and myself here in Australia.

The people Roberman conducted her research with are Jewish migrants from the former Soviet Union, mostly from Russia and Ukraine, who settled in Germany in the 1990s and early 2000s. About 220,000 Soviet Jews were admitted during that period. For the re-unified Germany, accepting substantial numbers of Jewish migrants was yet another step on the long road of atonement for the Holocaust. It was hoped that these migrants would contribute to a revival of Jewish cultural and religious life in Germany.

“Germany of all places?!” (Source: Jewish Museum Frankfurt)

Around 80% of these migrants were tertiary-educated and had established professional careers in the Soviet Union. Most of them were secular and, because “Jew” was an ethnic and not a religious category in the Soviet Union, only about a third of these migrants ended up joining Jewish religious communities in Germany. In fact, in contrast to Soviet Jews migrating to Israel or the USA, those coming to Germany were probably least motivated by ideological reasons. Roberman’s participants did not hesitate to explain that they had migrated for economic reasons, in search of a better life.

This context seems ideal to examine the social inclusion of migrants: a highly-educated migrant group, a high degree of cultural similarity between migrants and hosts, and public desire on the part of the destination society to embrace this particular migrant group.

A migration fairy-tale? Not quite.

In the way social inclusion is usually conceived as economic participation and cultural recognition, Roberman’s participants had little to complain:

When speaking about their encounters with the host country, my interviewees were not troubled by their economic situation; they felt secure and protected in that sphere of their lives. Neither did they complain about the lack of possibilities for the articulation of their Russian or Jewish identities: the former could be practiced at the range of Russian cultural centers, clubs, and libraries, while the latter could be actualized and maintained within Jewish communal centers and organizations. Even the constraint they faced in political participation, because many immigrants lacked full citizenship, was hardly an issue for my interviewees. (Roberman 2015, p. 747)

Migration had enabled the participants to partake of Western economic affluence, they had received significant, though not always full, legal and political citizenship rights, and, as a group, cultural recognition.

So what was missing? Access to regular, stable and meaningful employment.

Participants who, at the time of migration, were in their mid-30s or older found it extremely difficult to find employment commensurate with their education, skills and experience. This was not for lack of trying. Participants were deeply influenced by the Soviet work ethos and extremely resourceful in their attempts to find work. The German state also helped with the provision of language and training courses and a suite of short-term work and internship programs designed to help migrants transition into full-time regular employment.

Except they didn’t.

The usual intangible barriers of accent, non-recognition of overseas qualifications, lack of local experience, etc. that we have often discussed here on Language on the Move applied in this case, too. Age discrimination was another factor. Middle-aged participants in the study ended up trying to secure stable employment for years. During that time they were supported by welfare and a range of casual short-term jobs, including state-sponsored employment schemes.

Olga, a qualified and experienced teacher, for instance, arrived in Germany when she was 40 years old. Her qualifications were not recognized and she was involved in various re-training schemes. She also held various casual jobs as an attendant in an aged-care home and as a social worker. When she turned 50 without having achieved regular standard employment, she was officially “removed” from the labour market and declared an “early retiree.”

Being unable to find regular employment meant that the participants struggled to construct a coherent life-story and to see meaning in their migration, as was the case for Olga:

I was sitting in her apartment as she tried to compose a coherent narrative of the 10-year period of her life in Germany. But that seemed to be an unachievable task: the flow of her life narrative stopped at the point of emigration. What followed were fragmented facts that she resisted bringing together into a meaningful story, seeing little achievement or sense in her 10-year migration experience. (Roberman 2015, p. 752)

Another participant, Mark, who had been a cameraman in Kiev and was 53 years old when he arrived in Germany had given up looking for work after six years and lived on welfare. He said, “Once I had some objectives in life, I aspired to something, I had some plans, […] Today, I wake up in the morning, and I have one and the same question to ask myself: what do I do today?” (quoted in Roberman 2015, p. 754).

Sveta Roberman, Sweet Burdens (SUNY Press, 2015)

Like others in his situation, he filled his life with surfing the internet, watching TV, attending doctor’s appointments and, above all, shopping. Some developed elaborate routes to stretch out daily grocery shopping, others threw themselves into the pursuit of specials and sales. While these activities fill time, in the long run they breed a deep sense of isolation and loneliness. Being an anonymous shopper trapped them in the position of social strangers.

At one level, consumption spaces are some of the least discriminatory spaces imaginable; one participant made this point with regard to language proficiency:

One does not need language in the supermarket. The system is itself interested to sell you the thing, and the system finds its way to do it; they succeed in selling it to you in any way. It does not matter what language you speak. (quoted in Roberman 2015, p. 756)

At the same time, this participant makes the point that consumption spaces are spaces of extreme dislocation. In the supermarket or shopping mall it does not matter who you are. In fact, it does not even matter that you are there. Being reduced to filling their time with consumption resulted in a sharp feeling of невостребованность: “uselessness,” “redundancy,” like unclaimed luggage. One participant compared her situation to that of cows who are allowed to graze on lush green pastures but nobody bothers to come and milk them.

In short, participants were free to consume: they had achieved a comfortable and economically secure existence through their migration. However, their access to resources of real value – stable and meaningful work – was constrained. In this context, the freedom to consume condemned them to consume. Consumption did not result in a sense of dignity and self-worth, it did not allow them to forge coherent positive life-stories and it did not provide them with a sense of belonging. While included economically, legally and culturally, their participation is ultimately constrained – a condition Roberman calls “exclusive inclusion.”

Our economic system is characterised by overproduction and there is the regular need to dispose of surplus goods. Consequently, even relatively poor members of affluent consumer societies, such as Roberman’s irregularly employed and/or welfare-dependent interviewees, are readily included in the sphere of consumption. By contrast, stable and regular employment is in short supply. Exclusion from this scare and valuable resource continues to be a powerful way to reproduce social hierarchies. Disadvantaged groups of local people may be similarly excluded but migrants are particularly vulnerable on post-industrial labour markets and to the unemployment, underemployment and exploitation that go for “flexibility.” As Roberman (2015, p. 759f.) concludes:

Exclusive inclusion is a much more civilized, camouflaged form of exclusion. It seems to be mild. But, in spite of its apparent mildness, exclusive inclusion, which limits access to social resources of real value and to participation in the arenas of social recognition and belonging, is no less destructive in the ways it undermines the excluded individual’s world, threatens humanness, and strains the social fabric as a whole.

References

Piller, I. (2014). Linguistic Diversity and Social Inclusion in Australia. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 37(3), 190-197.

Piller, I., & Takahashi, K. (2011). Linguistic Diversity and Social Inclusion. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 14(4), 371 – 381.

Roberman, S. (2015). Not to Be Hungry Is Not Enough: An Insight Into Contours of Inclusion and Exclusion in Affluent Western Societies Sociological Forum, 30 (3), 743-763 DOI: 10.1111/socf.12190

Further reading

Zwanzig Jahre Jüdische Zuwanderung nach Deutschland. (2009, 2009-09-22). Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland.

Ferguson, A., & Toft, K. (2015, 2015-09-02). 7-Eleven: The Price of Convenience. ABC Four Corners.

Goldmann, A., & Krauss, M. (2015, 2015-01-21). Weniger Jüdische Zuwanderer im Jahr 2013. Jüdische Allgemeine.

Ortiz, A. (2015, 2015-09-08). Increasingly Mobile and Educated: The Future of Canadian Immigration. World Education News and Reviews.

Shcherbatova, S., & Plessentin, U. (2013, 2013-11-18). Zuwanderung und Selbstfindung: Die Jüdischen Gemeinden im Wiedervereinten Deutschland. Heinrich Böll Stiftung: Migrationspolitisches Portal.

Sveta Roberman recently also published a book about the larger study, which, if the Google preview is anything to go by, is even more fascinating:

Roberman, S. (2015). Sweet Burdens: Welfare and Communality among Russian Jews in Germany. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

A locutorio shop front in Barcelona (Source: El Periodico)

There is now a well-established body of work exploring the language work provided by service workers in call centres and tourist businesses. By contrast, the multilingual language work provided by migrants for migrants in multiethnic service enterprises has rarely been the focus of sociolinguistic attention. A recent book by Maria Sabaté i Dalmau, Migrant Communication Enterprises published by Multilingual Matters, fills this gap with an ethnographic inquiry into the language practices in a locutorio, a call shop, in Barcelona. A locutorio offers all kinds of telecommunication services such as billed calls in booths, the sale of top-ups for mobiles, fax services, internet access and international money transfers.

The locutorio the research is based on also served as meeting point for working class Spaniards and migrants, both documented and undocumented, from a variety of countries of origin. Beyond the sale of telecommunication services, the locutorio thus provided access to information, a place to hang out and it even served as the ‘public’ toilet for homeless people in the neighbourhood, mostly undocumented men from West Africa.

The locutorio was part of a chain of similar call shops owned by a Pakistani venture capitalist whose aim was to make a profit rather than provide social services for Barcelona’s marginalized. It was his employee Naeem, who was in charge of running the locutorio, who ended up caught between more than one rock and more than one hard place. Naeem was a fellow Pakistani hired by the owner in Pakistan two years before the fieldwork began. Naeem’s position was legal as a temporary resident but in order to achieve permanent residency in Spain he needed another two years of proven work, which left him vulnerable to exploitation by the owner. He worked twelve hours per day, seven days a week, for a meagre salary of less than Euro 800 per month. Naeem’s job consisted of opening the locutorio in the morning and closing it at night. He would start with booting up the computers and getting all the equipment to run. During the day, his duties consisted of assisting and charging customers, and making various phone calls (to his boss; to call card distributors; to the money transfer agency etc.). Additionally, he was in charge of maintaining the premises, including sweeping the floors, removing garbage and cleaning the toilets.

Much of this work is obviously language work and Naeem had to operate in a complex sociolinguistic environment. In addition to a range of varieties of Spanish – from Standard Peninsular Spanish via various Latin American varieties to a range of second language varieties – this included Catalan, English, Urdu, Punjabi, and Moroccan Arabic in various spoken and written constellations and used by clients with variable levels of proficiencies, including proficiencies in the use of telecommunication services. In this highly diverse environment, communication was rigidly regimented by the meters on the machine where communication was paid for by the minute.

Unsurprisingly, misunderstandings and communication break-downs were common. On top of all that, Naeem had to deal with customers who tried to cheat him (the balance of each financial irregularity was deducted from his meagre salary) and who abused and insulted him. Working in a highly constrained yet super-diverse environment left little room for personal autonomy and, only in his late twenties, Naeem was suffering from eating disorders, compulsive smoking, chronic fatigue and anxiety attacks.

The researcher concludes that locutorio language workers constitute “a voiceless army of multilingual mediators” (p. 170) whose multilingualism is not only a site of language work but also a site of linguistic exploitation.

Migrant Communication Enterprises offers a rich migrant-centred ethnographic account of a prototypical enterprise of the 21^st century. If this blog post has piqued your interest and this is your area of research expertise, you might want to review the book for Multilingua. If so, please get in touch with a short description of your expertise.

Maria Sabaté i Dalmau (2014). Migrant Communication Enterprises: Regimentation and Resistance Multilingual Matters

Schneider, Britta. 2014. Salsa, Language and Transnationalism. Multilingual Matters.

In my post on English in Berlin, I wondered what is required for a language to become ‘local’, and about the perhaps problematic tradition of defining languages on the basis of territory. Although it has been quite some time since English was primarily the language of the English people in England, the language is still called ‘English’. (Interestingly, the etymology of the term is also from ‘somewhere else’, deriving from northern Germany, and thus already has a history of being on the move.) When do Englishes become ‘native’? And if we continue to tacitly invoke concepts based on confined spaces (‘England’), whose interests remain veiled under national frameworks and are therefore invisible?

My own interest in what happens to moving languages in a world where rootedness in territory and local community cannot be taken for granted not only made me wonder about the status of English in Berlin, but brought me to places where movement literally takes centre stage. Concerned that essentialist conceptions of language and identity may represent a form of symbolic violence – telling people what they are supposed to speak and identify with on the grounds of their ethnic heritage – I became interested in communities where people identify with a language that is not ‘theirs’. The example I chose was communities of practice constituted by salsa dance in countries outside of Latin America. Depending on the particular salsa style, many salsa dancers in these multi-ethnic communities, irrespective of their ethnic origin, learn and/or use Spanish. The number of Spanish speakers, non-native and native, and the competence of language learners can be quite astonishing. Wondering about the reasons for this, I conducted ethnographic field-work in salsa communities in Frankfurt, Germany, and Sydney, Australia, studying the role of the Spanish language and ethnicity as boundary markers, and the symbolic functions of language and bilingualism in these transnational contexts (you can read more about the study in my new book Salsa, Language and Transnationalism).

What I wanted to know was why people engage in such a time-consuming activity as learning a language, and what this has to do with a passion for Latin dance. It is certainly not because they are striving to become ethnically Latin that German, Australian and other Salsa dancers speak Spanish. Instead of applying a national framework of thought that takes nations, ethnic groups and ‘their’ languages as a starting point, I wanted to find out which other concepts and discourses have the potential to inform language choice and linguistic identification. This generated the idea that language may be constituted differently in non-national, non-ethnic contexts.

To summarise my research conclusions in a nutshell, the existing discourses on language (or language ideologies) are often characterised by what I would call ‘cosmopolitan’ forms of identity. Being able to speak several languages – in this case English or German and Spanish – can index membership to an economically and socially advantaged, mobile and educated group that is oriented towards transnational spheres. At the same time, stereotypical discourses on what it means to be ‘Latin’ – being ‘open-minded’, being ‘passionate’, ‘preferring friendship to money’ – are also important in understanding what makes people use their Salsa classes to practise Spanish at the same time. Interestingly, therefore, while a transnational discourse does exist in an orientation beyond local/national confines, national concepts of ethnicity and language are reproduced and are somehow also necessary for constructing the ‘transnational’ (Hannerz (1996) makes similar observations). I concluded that, at the end of the day, languages still signify ethnic or national groups, but this relationship can be appropriated differently and symbolically exploited in multiple fashions in transnational contexts.

Many of the questions I had remain unanswered. For example, I am still not sure on what grounds we are entitled to make languages our own, or at what point we begin to consider someone to be an acceptable – ‘real’ – member of a speech community. It seems that ethnic heritage still plays a crucial role here. Also, what happens to the systemic notion of ‘a language’ if verbal practices do not index a particular group? Is the idea of language as a system brought into question if groups that are fluid and not tied to particular territories are established? In other words, being aware of the sociolinguistic commonplace that ‘a language’ is ‘a dialect with an army and a navy’ (Weinreich 1945), and cannot be established on linguistic grounds alone, what happens if we are not so sure whose ‘army’ and whose ‘navy’ we are talking about as people start to develop social relationships and patterns of identification that go beyond their territorial confines?

National armies and navies continue to be important. At the same time, cultural and discursive norms are increasingly shaped by non-national structures (see also Sennet 2006), which, however, make use of, are co-constructed by and are dialectically interwoven with national languages, discourses, bureaucracies, armies and navies. It is certainly not easy to grasp these intricacies, but it is a worthwhile assumption that moving languages, identities and bodies do not simply carry with them their national symbolic load but are part of a global world order that will require new linguistic theories and methodologies.

References

Hannerz, Ulf. 1996. “Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture.” In: Hannerz, Ulf, Transnational Connections. Culture, People, Places. London: Routledge. 102-111.

Schneider, Britta (2014). Salsa, Language and Transnationalism Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Sennett, Richard. 2006. The Culture of the New Capitalism. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Weinreich, Max 1945. “Yivo and the Problems of Our Time.” YIVO Bletter 25: 3-18.