Interaction ritual and the body in a city meat market

Service encounters are often fleeting interactions between strangers, which are beset with trip wires and obstacles. The potential for instability in such encounters is often countered by ritual interaction – small ceremonies in which civility is freely given, and transgression is accounted for and forgiven. Service encounters are not conducted through speech alone, but through embodied communication, in which interactants do not only speak, but point, smile, shrug, nod, gesture, grimace, and so on. In this paper, we consider the deployment of embodied communication, including but not limited to speech, as supportive and remedial interaction in a service encounter between a team of city centre butchers and a customer. The example is from extensive field work conducted in a four-year ethnographic research project across four cities in the UK. The analysis finds that in seeking to understand how people communicate in encounters with strangers, we must pay close attention not only to speech, but also to the ritual deployment of the body as a resource for communication

The 'other woman' in a mother and daughter relationship: The case of Mami Ji

This article describes the range of discursive strategies in the socializing messages of a mother and daughter interaction. The analysis draws on the work of Bakhtin (1981) and Tannen (2007) to interrogate the role of a physically absent but discursively present sister-in-law, 'Mami Ji', across three speech events. Following Tannen, we show how the characterisation of the sister-in-law, Mami Ji, has chronotopic value that connects mother and daughter in the present and makes links across family histories. Through the discursive strategies of repetition, dialogue, detail, and translanguaging, 'Mami Ji' becomes an iconic benchmark of how not to speak, how not to dress, and how not to behave. Drawing on material from a linguistic ethnography approach, we present three discourse analyses from a much larger international project that also looked at classroom interaction and break-time conversations. The article contributes to the under-researched topic of the representation of sisters-in-law in discourse, theorises the chronotope in everyday conversation, and demonstrates how mother and daughter solidarity is achieved through opposition to another female family member. (Chronotope, linguistic involvement strategies, translanguaging, socialisation, sister-in-laws, mothers and daughters

The Humanism of the Other in Sociolinguistic Ethnography

This article describes the social and ethical responsibility researchers experience in undertaking ethnographic research under conditions of neoliberalism. It acknowledges the hierarchical nature of working in large ethnographic teams in which a mixture of employment contracts and statuses exist. Drawing on relational ethics (Levinas 2003), and its attention to the humanizing potential of difference, the paper describes researchers’ propensity for relationality in the face of competitive neoliberalism. It presents a case study of a large research team and investigates the use of research vignettes to represent and relate in difference. Subjectivity is theorized not in terms of identity but rather through alterity and opacity arguing this direction opens up social and political alliances (Butler 2005). Specifically, the paper suggests the research vignette is a genre well suited to documenting the way humans live in difference, illustrating how the researcher yields to the face of the Other in field work encounters. As a form the research vignette is said to bridge the aesthetic and the scientific, demanding of its reader an engagement with a variety of interpretations. Further, the vignette is considered for its methodological potential in creating a dialogic relational space for research teams within the neoliberal university

The ideal 'Native Speaker' teacher: Negotiating authenticity and legitimacy in the language classroom

This article presents a linguistic ethnographic study of a Panjabi complementary school in Birmingham, UK. Researchers observed classes for one academic year, writing field notes, conducting interviews, and making digital audio recordings of linguistic interactions. Sets of beliefs about the production and deployment of certain linguistic signs were powerfully in play in the language learning classroom, as teachers and students negotiated what counts as the authenticity and legitimacy of the ‘native speaker’ teacher. Analysis of examples from empirical linguistic material focuses on the ways in which local practices constitute, and are related to, orders of indexicality and language ideologies. Analytical discussion offers an understanding of complex, situated, and nuanced negotiations of power in claiming and assigning authenticity and legitimacy in language learning contexts. The article considers the construction of the ‘native speaker’ heritage language teacher, and asks what counts as authentic and legitimate in teaching the community language, Panjabi, to a group of English‐born young people who share Panjabi as a cultural and linguistic heritage

The potential of ethnographic drama in the representation, interpretation, and democratization of sociolinguistic research

In this paper, we discuss the affordances of an approach to the representation, interpretation, and democratization of sociolinguistic research, which utilizes the tools and methods of the theatre. Taking as an example a team ethnographic research project conducted across four cities in the UK, we discuss the process of creating drama from material observed as social practice. Drawing on observations in a welfare advice centre in a Chinese community centre, and a city-based volleyball team, we propose that theatre techniques enable audiences and academic researchers to see communicative encounters in a new light. We propose that ethnographic drama offers three opportunities in particular: (i) it has the potential to make available outcomes of research beyond the academy; (ii) it has the potential to discover understandings of ethnographic material which remain latent in accounts that do not involve performance; and (iii) it has the capacity to democratize voice, privileging the voices of research participants rather than those of academic researchers. Ethnographic drama thus offers considerable potential in the representation, interpretation, and democratization of sociolinguistic research.Output Status: Forthcoming/Available Onlin

Recontextualisation and advocacy in the translation zone

This paper reports an element of a team linguistic ethnography which investigated the ways people communicate with each other in the changing, dynamic environments of superdiverse cities in the UK. The particular example examined here is that of a ‘translation zone’ between an advice worker and her Chinese clients in a community centre with a remit to support Chinese people in the city. In the interaction the advice worker, herself a migrant from China, translates relevant aspects of the complex, bureaucratic welfare benefits system, deploying interlingual, intralingual, and intersemiotic translation. More than this, however, the advice worker engages in recontextualisation, co-constructing and re-shaping the client’s narrative so that it meets the criteria of the government welfare benefits office. Recontextualisation is a consistent feature of the discourse practice of the advice worker as she seeks to support her clients. We propose that it may well be a salient feature of interactional encounters as people seek help and advocacy to negotiate complex bureaucratic systems

Translanguaging and the body

This article reports communicative interactions with a focus on the body as a dimension of the semiotic repertoire. The research context is a four-year, multi-site linguistic ethnography which investigates how people communicate in superdiverse cities in the UK. In the setting of a butcher’s stall in a city market we consider three interactions at a particular market stall between butchers and their customers. In the first, gesture is deployed as a resource by both an English butcher’s assistant and his customer. In the second, we examine the body as a resource in the semiotic repertoire of a Chinese butcher as he negotiates a faux haggling interaction with East European customers. In the third example, also recorded as field notes, a Chinese woman employs a ‘Chinese’ gesture to represent the number of pieces of offal she wishes to purchase from an English butcher’s assistant. Each of the examples was recorded during an extended period of ethnographic field work in Birmingham Bull Ring market. Through detailed analysis of these interactions we argue that when people’s biographical and linguistic histories barely overlap, they translanguage through the deployment of wide-ranging semiotic repertoires

Multicultural, Heritage and Learner Identities in Complementary Schools

In this paper we look at three identity positions salient in research of young people studying in complementary schools in Leicester, a large linguistically and ethnically diverse city in the East Midlands, England. Our discussion of identity focuses on three identity positions: multicultural, heritage and learner. The first two of these are linked to discussions on ethnicity as a social category. We explore the fluidity and stability of ethnicity as a social description in interview transcripts of young people at complementary schools. In addition, the paper explores another, more emergent identity salient in the two schools, that of ‘learner identity’. The research can be characterised as adopting a linguistic ethnographic approach using a team of ethnographers. Data was collected for 20 weeks by four researchers and consists of fieldnotes, interviews and audio recordings of classroom interactions. We consider the importance of ambiguity and certainty in students’ conceptualisation of themselves around ethnicity and linguistic diversity and look at the institutional role complementary schools play in the production of these and successful learner identities. We explore how complementary schools privilege and encourage these particular identity positionings in their endorsement of flexible bilingualism. Overall, we argue that complementary schools allowed the children a safe haven for exploring ethnic and linguistic identities while producing opportunities for performing successful learner identity