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

Language, Marriage Migration, and the Law

In recent decades one of the most consistent migration routes has been through marriage; that is, where the marriage relationship is the basis of entry rights. From the perspective of government, marriage migration permits the entry of migrants who would not otherwise be admitted. Marriage can pose a fundamental challenge to governments’ attempts to manage migration. This article considers how successive British governments have introduced legislation to limit or prevent marriage migration to the UK. A recent dimension of this legislation has been the introduction of a requirement for candidates for entry, settlement and naturalisation to demonstrate a certain level of proficiency in the English language. The article particularly focuses on the introduction of pre-entry English language tests for applicants for marriage visas. The analysis examines the judgment of the High Court in a test case which engaged with the legislation to introduce the pre-entry language requirement.</jats:p

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

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

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

GCRF Development Award: Languaging in post-conflict zones: Educating for success in Colombia, Lebanon and South Africa Final Report

This Development Award was directly and primarily relevant to current educational needs in Colombia, Lebanon, and South Africa. United Nations Strategic Development Goal 4 affirms that inclusive and quality education for all is one of the most powerful and proven vehicles for sustainable development. It ensures that all girls and boys complete free primary and secondary schooling. It also aims to provide equal access to affordable vocational training, to eliminate gender and wealth disparities, and achieve universal access to a quality higher education. In 2013 the World Economic Forum ranked South Africa 121st (of 122) for the ‘quality of the education system’. Colombia was ranked 72nd for the quality of its education system. Lebanon faces specific challenges in the education of more than half a million school-aged refugees from Syria, many of them living with trauma and the effects of long-term disruption to learning. This Development Award played a role in furthering the enhancement of language policy in education in Colombia, Lebanon, and South Africa. In doing so it contributed to meeting the SDG4 objective to ensure equal access for all to high quality education, and will meet key development challenges in these three countries. Outcomes of the Development Award promoted the economic development and welfare of Colombia, Lebanon, and South Africa. It organised a range of activities which aided the investigation of effective pedagogies for the education of minoritised groups in Colombia, Lebanon, and South Africa. A broad range of activities were organised across the three country contexts. These included network for research and educational practice, the development of websites for community and student groups and the design of new materials for marginalized students

GCRF Development Award: Languaging in post-conflict zones: Educating for success in Colombia, Lebanon and South Africa Final Report

This Development Award was directly and primarily relevant to current educational needs in Colombia, Lebanon, and South Africa. United Nations Strategic Development Goal 4 affirms that inclusive and quality education for all is one of the most powerful and proven vehicles for sustainable development. It ensures that all girls and boys complete free primary and secondary schooling. It also aims to provide equal access to affordable vocational training, to eliminate gender and wealth disparities, and achieve universal access to a quality higher education. In 2013 the World Economic Forum ranked South Africa 121st (of 122) for the ‘quality of the education system’. Colombia was ranked 72nd for the quality of its education system. Lebanon faces specific challenges in the education of more than half a million school-aged refugees from Syria, many of them living with trauma and the effects of long-term disruption to learning. This Development Award played a role in furthering the enhancement of language policy in education in Colombia, Lebanon, and South Africa. In doing so it contributed to meeting the SDG4 objective to ensure equal access for all to high quality education, and will meet key development challenges in these three countries. Outcomes of the Development Award promoted the economic development and welfare of Colombia, Lebanon, and South Africa. It organised a range of activities which aided the investigation of effective pedagogies for the education of minoritised groups in Colombia, Lebanon, and South Africa. A broad range of activities were organised across the three country contexts. These included network for research and educational practice, the development of websites for community and student groups and the design of new materials for marginalized students

Stereotypes and chronotopes: The peasant and the cosmopolitan in narratives about migration

Stereotypes are chronotopic (Bakhtin, 1994) in the sense that they make good use of character types in time and space to utter identifiable speech forms and make evident other semiotic displays. This paper argues for sociolinguistics to expand its interpretation of the chronotope to encompass the relationship between “character” and “author” in identity texts. It suggests that conflating author and character in identity scholarship, as is the case in much sociolinguistic research, risks losing an opportunity to understand how people author characters in their narratives to project sets of values and beliefs. Using linguistic ethnography, we report on two migrant women and their interactions among colleagues to illustrate their authoring of two characters, namely the peasant and the cosmopolitan. We show how these specific women mobilize these characters in narrative production to refute harmful traditions and ethnolinguistic stereotypes in favour of cosmopolitan identities which draw on broader geographical and social scales associated with the city