Linguistic ethnography

In this dissertation, I examine the social and communicative lives of deaf youth in Iquitos, Peru using a language socialization approach that combines ethnographic research with interactional analysis. I illustrate this approach using the cases of three deaf boys, Luis, José, and Jeremy, whom I met while observing their regular education mainstream classroom in 2014. All three boys were similar in that they had no previous access to an established language. Their deafness precluded access to spoken Spanish, they had not received hearing assistive technology, and had not been exposed to Peruvian Sign Language.
I began my research in Iquitos under the assumption that without access to an established language that the deaf youth I would meet would be cut-off from the surrounding social world. Yet, through my ethnographic fieldwork, I found that these boys had remarkably rich social and communicative lives. They were integral members of their households, had friends whom they played with and had crushes on, were frequent customers at the family run shops in their neighborhoods, and attended school where they were busy doing the work of being students. The interactional analyses illustrate how the boys use their manual communication systems to navigate the distinct affordances provided by their home and school environments.
In this dissertation, I demonstrate how the language socialization paradigm provides an important advance to studying the communication of deaf individuals without access to an established language. The language socialization approach sheds light on how these sign systems are co-created in interaction with a community of individuals and rely on a variety of communicative resources, including manual signs, vocalizations, eye gaze, body orientation, and the manipulation of objects. Additionally, this dissertation addresses the future possibilities for deaf youth growing up in Iquitos. I advocate for providing deaf youth with access to Peruvian Sign Language, as well as grassroots community efforts to address the numerous structural barriers that deaf individuals face as they move into adulthood in Iquitos.

In this chapter I have a twofold objective: on the one hand I give a general view of the design of different types of interviews used in the field and on their functions, and on the other I aim at emphasizing the importance of a reflexive approach to interviews, therefore taking up some of the themes that have been debated in the ethnography and neighboring fields and some dilemmas about the legitimacy and utility of interviews as research tools.  I discuss some of the different aspects of the interview context that come into play in the kinds of data that an ethnographer may be able to collect: from the identity and insider/outsider status of the researcher, to the topic of research, to the conditions in which interviews take place.

(Self-)Reflection is often seen as a critical element of achieving (desired) social change as well as individual learning. As such, it figures in diverse contexts such as, e.g., professional socialization and practice, social/political movements, and research methodologies and agendas. In different professions and workplaces, reflection on one’s own work practice is given room to varying degrees and in a variety of forms. For a profession such as social work, institutionalized reflective practices (e.g. in the form of staff meetings) can be considered outright emblematic, while they are barely institutionalized in other work contexts. From a metapragmatic perspective, reflective practices are a specific form of reflexivity in communicative practice (subjects communicatively referring “back” to themselves), and as such not intrinsically conducive to emancipative change: they may entail rejecting and changing ways of doing, but also accounting for them, producing and fixating knowledge, and stabilizing hierarchies.
Solicited are hence contributions featuring ethnographic research on diverse forms of workers’ reflective practices in different professional contexts and workplaces (e.g. chat during lunch or after work, meetings, trainings, supervision and counselling at work, as well as projects outside of the workplace, as activism and unionism). The aim is to contribute to understanding (1) what ideologies (of communication/social change) are being (re)produced in situated forms of reflective practice, and (2) how they are embedded in larger processes and conditions of political economy and social inequality. Specifically, the contributions to this panel will offer ethnographic accounts relating to the following questions:
• How do workers navigate situated forms of reflective practice?
• How do they claim space for reflective practice?
• Which forms of reflective practice are enabled, institutionalized and/or demanded from workers? To which ends?
• Who can engage in certain forms of reflective practice and who is excluded?
• What forms of inequality are (re-)produced by and in situated forms of reflective practice?
• What does this mean for the relationship between reflective practice in the field and the researcher’s agenda/practice?

In this article, a mixed methods study of stories in 18 meetings of one Israeli teacher team, three analytic lenses typically used in isolation are concurrently brought to bear: identity, representation, and argumentation. Quantitative findings reveal that stories often lead to further story-telling, forming story clusters, rather than critical probing, and that a story's framing impacts its subsequent uptake. Micro-ethnographic analysis of a story cluster uncovers micro-processes whereby teachers use stories to advance arguments while socially positioning themselves and one another, framing and responding to stories in ways that often do not promote teacher learning.

This course offers an introduction to contemporary linguistic anthropology by means of a survey of some dissertations and ethnographic monographs. In our reading of each book or dissertation we will consider its theoretical foundations, analytic goals and methodological orientations thereby tracking alternative approaches to foundational questions and, at the same time, mapping some key intellectual genealogies of the field. The idea is to provide a survey of contemporary work and an overview of disciplinary foundations while at the same time providing an opportunity to read some dissertations and ethnographies that might inspire students in their own PhD or MA research.

This course offers an advanced introduction to contemporary linguistic anthropology by means of a survey of three linguistic ethnographies. In discussions and readings, we will consider the theoretical foundations, analytic goals and methodological orientations of each ethnography thereby tracking alternative approaches to foundational questions and, at the same time, sketching out some key intellectual genealogies of the field.

In this paper, I reflect on my research trajectory, where I examined ideologies of code choice between Jejuan and Standard Korean on Jeju Island, South Korea, for my MA work, and then embarked on PhD research that involved the documentation of Jejuan conversations. For this, I first discuss the details of my qualitative interview study analysing Jejuan code choice ideologies through a grounded theory method, and subsequently identify thought processes and practical decisions I made while on fieldwork, which I see closely related to the insights gained from taking into account anthropological perspectives. Essentially, this reflection bears witness to my personal transformation from ‘data-focused’ research planning and initiation into ‘human-being-focused’ research implementation. Thus, I conclude that this process has resulted in developing greater ethical awareness for the emotional well-being of participants, as well as the reproduction of ideologies which support dynamics of fostering power differentials through my code choice as the researcher.

The present study investigates the language attitudes towards the appropriateness of code choice on Jeju Island, South Korea. The findings stem from an analysis of qualitative interviews conducted during a field study in May 2013, and will show that interviewees present their attitudes as being related to the feelings of distance and closeness regarding the usage of Standard Korean and the Jeju variety.

In interview conversations with self-identifying members of Georgia’s shrinking Greek community, consultants regularly contrast aspects of their life that have changed profoundly since the end of the Soviet Union, thereby establishing the end of the Soviet Union as a temporal threshold relating today to a very different yesterday. Based on an ethnographically informed conversation analysis of 49 semi-structured interview conversations, this article aims to further our understanding of what the end of the Soviet Union means to my consultants, contributing  a  sociolinguistic  perspective  to  current  debates  in  the  field  of  Border  and Boundary Studies. I will take two analytical perspectives, both of which highlight different important aspects. Firstly, I follow the metaphor of family breakdown that emerged in the interviews as having occurred on two levels. On a community level, this breakdown of the Soviet “family of nations”  is narrated for instance in terms of rising Georgian nationalism. This is perceived as challenging consultants’ belonging to the Georgian nation state and as drawing new boundaries.
On an individual and very tangible level, consultants communicatively have to come to terms with their own families being put under strain through family members’ migration to Greece. Secondly, I follow the tidemarks left by the Soviet yesterday in independent Georgia’s today and how consultants use them to position themselves and their community.

Fifty years after May 68, spring 2018 in France was marked by mass student protest against the Parcoursup/ORE reform of university entry. After a riot police intervention on campus, Nanterre University was blocked and occupied. It was profoundly affected, both as a community and as a physical site. This linguistic ethnographic study proposes a systematic analysis of more than 500 physical interventions (political graffiti, tags and posters) on the campus during that period, to identify the functions of graffiti as political discourse. The graffiti (1) expressed resistance, reclaimed the university’s identity and manifested presence on site; (2) established dialogue with local and national authorities and (3) anchored the movement in a larger web of historical references and sites of political resistance. A striking feature was the complex indexicality of the graffiti. Each item was relevant at multiple scales beyond the here and now, anchoring graffiti in larger networks of relations, which endowed them with political power.

This special issue addresses the organization of teaching and learning in a variety of multilingual schooling contexts from different critical ethnographic perspectives (i.e.: critical sociolinguistic ethnography, linguistic anthropology, and language socialization). By analyzing a range of educational settings in Spain, the U.S., the U.K., Argentina, and Guatemala, the articles establish a dialogue with different ethnographically-oriented studies to understand the relationship between situated communicative practices, language policies, language ideologies, dominant discourses about bi-multilingualism, and wider social, cultural and economic processes.

An analysis of one narrative shows how loudness of voice acquires indexical meaning in interaction and becomes a resource for the narrator to position himself along an axis of social differentiation defined in terms of morality. The narrative was collected among young, male, migrant hip hop artists in Delhi who experienced ethnic othering. In the narrative, loudness registers are used to establish voice contrasts between two antagonistic characters: the racist people of Delhi and the cosmopolitan hip hop self. The racist people speak in soft (piano) and loud (forte) registers, while the cosmopolitan self speaks in normal‐volume registers. The prosodic normalization of the self allows the narrator to differentiate himself from racist others, take moral stances on global solidarity, and construct his cosmopolitan identity.

Against a background of the ongoing crisis of global capitalism and the fracturing of the neoliberal project, this book provides a detailed account of the ways in which language is profoundly imbricated in the neoliberalising of the fabric of social life.
With chapters from a cast list of international scholars covering topics such as the commodifi cation of education and language, unemployment, and the governmentality of the self, and discussion chapters from Monica Heller and Jackie Urla bringing the various strands together, the book ultimately helps us to understand how language is part of political economy and the everyday making and remaking of society and individuals.
It provides both a theoretical framework and a signifi cant methodological
“tool- box” to critically detect, understand, and resist the impact of neoliberalism on everyday social spheres, particularly in relation to language.
Presenting richly empirical studies that expand our understanding of how neoliberalism as a regime of truth and as a practice of governance performs within the terrain of language, this book is an essential resource for researchers and graduate students in English language, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology, and related areas.

This paper explores a key dilemma of the Chi-nese middle class as it appears in their apparent adherence to official language policy despite their lack of direct knowledge of that policy. Using fieldwork data from Hangzhou, I show that a group of middle-class parents worked together to build an ''Ancient Way Academy'' for their children to chant the ancient Chinese classics. In this, although they were unaware of the official policy of ''Chanting the Chinese Classics'' (CCC), they effectively reproduced it in their actions. Some parents, however, soon drifted away from the traditionalism of CCC and toward a much stronger emphasis on the learning of English as the gateway to modernization. In facing the dilemma of choice between these two educational pathways, the parents thus unwittingly reenacted the state's ceaseless oscillation between nationalistic and international visions of the country's needs.

This paper explores a key dilemma of the Chi-nese middle class as it appears in their apparent adherence to official language policy despite their lack of direct knowledge of that policy. Using fieldwork data from Hangzhou, I show that a group of middle-class parents worked together to build an ''Ancient Way Academy'' for their children to chant the ancient Chinese classics. In this, although they were unaware of the official policy of ''Chanting the Chinese Classics'' (CCC), they effectively reproduced it in their actions. Some parents, however, soon drifted away from the traditionalism of CCC and toward a much stronger emphasis on the learning of English as the gateway to modernization. In facing the dilemma of choice between these two educational pathways, the parents thus unwittingly reenacted the state's ceaseless oscillation between nationalistic and international visions of the country's needs.