Recruiting frontstage entextualisation: drafting, artefactuality and written-ness as resources in police-witness interviews

This paper examines the complex literacy event through which police witness statements are produced in England and Wales. Witness statements are constructed through interviews which archetypally consist of a trajectory from the witness of the crime, through a police officer and onto a written page with the officer taking most control of the writing. This paper examines how this ostensibly inevitable trajectory materializes in practice. It identifies a distinctive way of traversing the trajectory through which the inner workings of the trajectory itself are put on display by the interviewing officer and through this display recursively influence the trajectory. This display of the trajectory draws on four discursive means: writing aloud, proposing wordings, reading back text just written and referring explicitly to the artifactuality of writing, which I label, collectively, “Frontstage Entextualization.” Through Frontstage Entextualization, the writing process comes to be used as a resource for both producing text and involving the witness in text production. The paper identifies three forms of activity which are accomplished through Frontstage Entextualization: First, frontstage drafting which allows words and phrases for possible inclusion to be weighed-up; secondly, frontstage scribing which foregrounds the technology of pen and paper which allows the witness to be appraised of writing processes; and finally, frontstaging the sequentiality of written-ness to textually resolve difficulties of witness memory. The paper concludes by suggesting that the analysis has shown how text trajectories can be made accessible to lay participants by institutional actors

Shifting ground: exploring the backdrop to translating and interpreting in contemporary societies

Previous scholarship has assumed a monolingual norm. This norm has been noted across disciplines and societies, where it demands assimilation and language shift. However, socially responsible language scholars have increasingly rejected this norm in favour of renewed interest in language contact, and associated complexity. Many social institutions in which interpreters and translators work in modernist nation states view languages as separate, separable units which come into contact in highly regularised ways and can therefore be highly regulated. I argue instead that a renewed focus on ethics in the study and practice of translation and interpreting involves recognising forms of communication which are increasingly common and diversified due to superdiversity. This paper describes an investigation into multilingual language practices in four changing UK cities, using Linguistic Ethnography. The study’s own approach to ethical practice is first evaluated. I then ask how increased study of multilingualism can contribute to interpreters’ and translators’ work and how this work fits with contemporary patterns of language use, drawing on Brecher’s (2010) distinction between the ethical and moral. I suggest that, whilst translating and interpreting can offer an ethicised approach to language contact, a truly moral approach may require rich understands of contemporary superdiverse societies

'Apparently the chap is a bit of a rogue': upgrading risk in non-emergency telephone calls to the police

This paper examines how risk communication features in telephone calls to one British non-emergency police number. Using a collection of naturally occurring telephone calls to a police non-emergency line the paper takes an approach grounded in qualitative discourse analysis. The work illustrates that callers discursively construct risk through categories which enable them to make sense of, and meaning around, the dangers they perceive. Through this discursively constructed risk, callers warrant their calls. In doing so, they draw on categorisations of crime types, then upgrade their categorical alignments which serves to connect the incidents they are reporting to increasingly serious crime type categories. The paper shows how this process of construction and categorisation of risk is bound into wider discursive strategies. The work has applications in call handling contexts where an understanding of ways that risk can be appropriated has diagnostic potential

The ethics of digital ethnography in a team project

This article draws on researcher vignettes to explore ethical decisions made in the process of collecting and analysing mobile messaging data as part of a team ethnographic project exploring multilingualism in superdiverse UK cities. The research involves observing key participants at work as well as recording them at home and collecting their digitally-mediated interactions. The nature of ethnographic research raises ethical issues which highlight the impossibility of divorcing ethics from project decision-making. We therefore take on board a re-conceptualisation of research ethics not as an external set of guidelines but as the core of research, driving decision-making at all steps of the process. The researcher vignettes on which we draw in exploring this process facilitate a reflective approach and enable us to identify and address ethical issues in our research. In this article, we focus on the potential impact that digital communications technologies can have on the kinds of relationships that are possible between researchers and research participants, and on the roles they can carry out within the project. In doing so, we explore the part that digitally-mediated communications play in the co-construction of social distance and closeness in research relationships. Our discussions around these issues highlight the need for an awareness not only of how our participants’ media ideologies shape their use and perceptions of digital technologies, but also how our own assumptions inform our handling of the digital data

Speeding up or reaching out? : efficiency and unmet need as policy priorities in Wales

The Welsh Assembly, a devolved legislature in the UK, and its executive the Welsh Government, have a distinctly intensive commitment to equality – emphasising universality with weighty obligations on public services. This article uses the ‘discourse-historical approach’ (DHA) to critically review an eleven-year social service reform strategy (produced in 2007), and to weigh up the priorities of fiscal efficiency and universal equality. We refer to these competing priorities as ‘speeding up’ and ‘reaching out’, respectively. Our findings show an imbalance towards the former, largely sidelining the possible value of services to those currently under-served. The article discusses this mismatch in respect of the dominant policymaking framework of ‘New Public Management’ and its emphases on productivity, efficiency, and quantifiable accountability. We also show the value of DHA in analysing ‘fights for dominance’ – in this case between competing discourses within a flagship policy document. Keywords: Discourse-historical approach, social exclusion, social policy, social services, Wales, Welsh Governmen

The ethics of digital ethnography in a team project

This article draws on researcher vignettes to explore ethical decisions made in the process of collecting and analysing mobile messaging data as part of a team ethnographic project exploring multilingualism in superdiverse UK cities. The research involves observing key participants at work as well as recording them at home and collecting their digital interactions. The nature of ethnographic research raises ethical issues which highlight the impossibility of divorcing ethics from project decision-making. We therefore take on board a reconceptualisation of research ethics not as an external set of guidelines but as being at the core of research, driving decision-making at all steps of the process. The researcher vignettes on which we draw in exploring this process facilitate a reflexive approach and enable us to identify and address ethical issues in our research. In this article, we focus on the potential impact that digital communication technologies can have on the kinds of relationships that are possible between researchers and research participants, and on the roles that both carry out within the project. In doing so, we explore the part that digital communications play in the co-construction of social distance and closeness in research relationships. Our discussions around these issues highlight the need for an awareness not only of how our participants’ media ideologies shape their use and perceptions of digital technologies, but also how our own assumptions inform our handling of the digital data

Mother, Monster, Mrs, I:A critical evaluation of gendered naming strategies in English sentencing remarks of women who kill

In this article, we take a novel approach to analysing English sentencing remarks in cases of women who kill. We apply computational, quantitative, and qualitative methods from corpus linguistics to analyse recurrent patterns in a collection of English Crown Court sentencing remarks from 2012 to 2015, where a female defendant was convicted of a homicide offence. We detail the ways in which women who kill are referred to by judges in the sentencing remarks, providing frequency information on pronominal, nominative, and categorising naming strategies. In discussion of the various patterns of preference both across and within these categories (e.g. pronoun vs. nomination, title + surname vs. forename + surname), we remark upon the identities constructed through the references provided. In so doing, we: (1) quantify the extent to which members of the judiciary invoke patriarchal values and gender stereotypes within their sentencing remarks to construct female defendants, and (2) identify particular identities and narratives that emerge within sentencing remarks for women who kill. We find that judges refer to women who kill in a number of ways that systematically create dichotomous narratives of degraded victims or dehumanised monsters. We also identify marked absences in naming strategies, notably: physical identification normally associated with narrativization of women’s experiences; and the first person pronoun, reflecting omissions of women’s own voices and narratives of their lived experiences in the courtroom

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead