Navigating the London-French Transnational Space: The Losses and Gains of Language as Embodied and Embedded Symbolic Capital

In this article, an interdisciplinary lens is applied to French migrants’ reflections on their everyday language practices, investigating how embodied and embedded language, such as accent and London-French translanguaging, serve as both in-group and out-group symbolic markers in different transnational spaces. Key sociological concepts developed by Pierre Bourdieu are deployed, including field, habitus, hysteresis and symbolic capital, to assess the varying symbolic conversion rates of the migrants’ languaging practices across transnational spaces. A mixed-methodological and analytical approach is taken, combining narratives from ethnographic interviews and autobiography. Based on the data gathered, the article posits that the French accent is an embodied symbolic marker, experienced as an internalised dialectic: a barrier to inclusion/belonging in London and an escape from the symbolic weight of the originary accent in France. Subsequently, it argues that the migrants’ translanguaging functions as a spontaneous insider vernacular conducive to community identity construction in the postmigration space, but (mis)interpreted as an exclusionary articulation of symbolic distinction in the premigration context. Finally, the article asks whether participants’ linguistic repertoires, self-identifications and spatialities go beyond the notion of the ‘cleft habitus’, or even hybridity, to a post-structural, translanguaging third space that transcends borders

The Material Dynamics of a London-French Blog: A Multimodal Reading of Migrant Habitus

Through a fine-grained reading of a London-French blog, this article aims to shed light on the lived experience of the French community in London. The ethnosemiotic conceptual framework brings together ethnographic and semiotic schools of thought, focusing in particular on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and Gunther Kress’s multimodal social semiotic analytical model. Habitus is broken down into its material manifestations of habitat, habit and habituation, all displayed in the blog and revealing of the blogger’s identity and positioning within the migration setting. As all modes are considered to be of equal semiotic potential, equivalent emphasis is placed on the multiple modes of meaning-making present in the blog, such as layout, colour, typography and language. By examining the dynamic relationships between blogger and audience, subjectivity and objectivity, on-line and on-land habitus, and intermodal dynamics themselves, through the prism of multimodality, hidden facets of the blogger’s cultural identity and sense of community belonging within the diasporic context begin to materialise

The French in London on-land and on-line: an ethnosemiotic analysis

This thesis challenges traditional international migration studies which focus on macro-level drivers or the end-point of the migration trajectory, and instead investigates the subtle forces within the “third-space” (Ingram & Abrahams, 2016:140, citing Bhabha, 1994), which here encompasses both the physical and virtual transnational environments inhabited by the French community in London. By combining innovative digital methods with ethnographically oriented data collection techniques, such as immersion, in-depth interviews and focus groups, the thesis reveals the inherently “messy” sociocultural complexities of being an EU migrant in London at the beginning of the 21st century. Taking Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus (1972 [2000]; 1994; 1996; 2005) as its principal theoretical underpinning and drawing on his ethnographic and sociological works, the study scrutinises the narratives of a diverse group of French Londoners between 2010 and 2015. The overarching research question posed is how, holistically, participants experience France-London mobility, and spans three main areas: 1) France, or the originary social field; 2) the London home/habitus; and 3) the on-line French “diasberspace”. Beginning with the first of these, the thesis seeks to ascertain, through Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic violence (1993; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992), which social forces lie hidden beneath the veneer of reasoned migration decision-making and serve as tacit, yet potent, mobility drivers. Secondly, based on the hypothesis that habitus overlaps with the definition of “home” in English, the thesis asks how home is (re)constructed by the London-French research participants within the diasporic field. By sub-dividing the conception into its component parts of habitat (spatial mapping and material culture), habits (quotidian practices) and habituation (unsuspecting attitudinal change), questions pertaining to how, where and the extent to which participants identify with London as “home”, or conversely remain embedded in the “homeland”, are addressed. In addition, the thesis investigates the reasons behind the privileged position occupied by the French community in the London social space. It therefore draws connections between past and present forms and functionalities of symbolic/cultural capital (Bourdieu, (1979a, 1980b), together with linguistic capital/habitus (Bourdieu, 1982 [2001]), examining the differing symbolic value of embodied and articulated language in France and London. Finally, recognising that migration today involves less acute separation from the homeland than in previous generations due to the virtual proximity afforded by the Internet, this third part of the thesis assesses how home, belonging, identity, positioning and symbolic violence are depicted in the on-line “diasberspace”. In order to provide a stable analytical platform conducive to iterative consultation, the author has curated a Special Collection of community Web resources in the UK Web Archive, laying the foundations for a theory of selective thematic Web archiving. An innovative “ethnosemiotic” paradigm, combining Bourdieu’s ethnographic principles and the multimodal social semiotic approach advocated by Gunther Kress (2010), is thus given practical application. Furthermore, the ensuing fine-grained reading of the London-French digital objects serves as a convincing on-line/on-land triangulation mechanism for the doctoral research project as a whole, and contributes to the rich, multi-layered analysis of London’s contemporary French population

New Directions in Digital Modern Languages: Introduction

In this article, the editors introduce the Digital Modern Languages Special Collection that results from an open call that sought out new and emerging research at the intersection of Modern Languages and digital culture, media and technologies. They explain the intentionally wide-ranging and transdisciplinary scope of the Collection, which reflects an openness to the many ways Digital Modern Languages research is practised. The Collection also includes research on a wide range of geographical and linguistic contexts, reflecting wider calls to move beyond the limited range of languages traditionally associated with “Modern Languages”. Through this combined transdisciplinary and cross-languages focus, the Collection seeks to contribute to the broader strategic identity transformation of the wider field

Ethnography and Modern Languages

While rarely explicitly recognized in our disciplinary frameworks, the openness and curiosity on which Modern Languages in the UK is founded are, in many ways, ethnographic impulses. Ethnographic theories and practices can be transformative in relation to the undergraduate curriculum, providing an unparalleled model for experiential and holistic approaches to language and cultural learning. As a form of emplaced and embodied knowledge production, ethnography promotes greater reflexivity on our geographical and historical locations as researchers, and on the languages and cultures through which we engage. An ethnographic sensitivity encourages an openness to less hierarchical and hegemonic forms of knowledge, particularly when consciously seeking to invert the traditional colonial ethnographic project and envision instead more participatory and collaborative models of engagement. Modern Languages scholars are at the same time ideally placed to challenge a monolingual mindset and an insensitivity to language-related questions in existing ethnographic research located in cognate disciplines. For Modern Languages to embrace ethnography with credibility, we propose a series of recommendations to mobilize these new research and professional agendas

‘Sometimes there’s racism towards the French here’: xenophobic microaggressions in pre-2016 London as articulations of symbolic violence

This article discusses xenophobic microaggressions (Pierce, 1970) experienced by members of the French community in London prior to the EU-Membership Referendum in 2016. Acting at the interface of agency and passivity, implicitness and complicity, they go unseen in the social space despite their omnipresence. Through a close reading of empirical data collected as part of an ethnographic study, the article posits that these microaggressions are articulations of historically embedded anti-French ‘symbolic violence’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992; Bourdieu, 1993). The three main areas addressed are humour, intersectionality and the reproductive nature of the phenomenon (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1970; Bourdieu, 1972)

Big Web data, small focus: an ethnosemiotic approach to culturally themed selective Web archiving

This paper proposes a multimodal ethnosemiotic conceptual framework for culturally themed selective Web archiving, taking as a practical example the curation of the London French Special Collection (LFSC) in the UK Web Archive. Its focus on a particular ‘community’ is presented as advantageous in overcoming the sheer scale of data available on the Web; yet, it is argued that these ethnographic boundaries may be flawed if they do not map onto the collective self-perception of the London French. The approach establishes several theoretical meeting points between Pierre Bourdieu’s ethnography and Gunther Kress’s multimodal social semiotics, notably, the foregrounding of practice and the meaning-making potentialities of the everyday; the implications of language and categorisation; the interplay between (curating/researcher) subject and (curated/research) object; evolving notions of agency, authorship and audience; together with social engagement, and the archive as dynamic process and product. The curation rationale proposed stems from Bourdieu’s three-stage field analysis model, which places a strong emphasis on habitus, considered to be most accurately (re)presented through blogs, yet necessitates its contextualisation within the broader (diasporic) field(s), through institutional websites, for example, whilst advocating a reflexive awareness of the researcher/curator’s (subjective) role. This, alongside the Kressian acknowledgement of the inherent multimodality of on-line resources, lends itself convincingly to selection and valuation strategies, whilst the discussion of language, genre, authorship and audience is relevant to the potential cataloguing of Web objects. By conceptualising the culturally themed selective Web-archiving process within the ethnosemiotic framework constructed, concrete recommendations emerge regarding curation, classification and crowd-sourcing

London French Special Collection

This collection of websites was curated inbetween 2012 and 2014 by Dr. Saskia Huc-Hepher, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Westminster, on the subject of the French community in London. The Collection was a fundamental component of Dr. Huc-Hepher's thesis on the French community in London. It is hoped that the collection will serve both as an innovative dataset and as a means of reaching out to a diverse range of audiences