DOCSLIB.ORG

Language and Superdiversity

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Language and Superdiversity Language and Superdiversity By Jan BLOMMAERT (University of Tilburg, the Netherlands) and Ben RAMPTON (King’s College, UK) Abstract This paper explores the scope for research on language and superdiversity.1 Following a protracted process of paradigm shift, sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology are well placed to engage with the contemporary social changes associated with superdiversity. After a brief introductory discussion of what superdiversity entails, the paper outlines key theoretical and methodological developments in language study: named languages have now been denaturalized, the linguistic is treated as just one semiotic among many, inequality and innovation are positioned together in a dynamics of pervasive normativity, and the contexts in which people orient their interactions reach far beyond the communicative event itself. From here, this paper moves to a research agenda on superdiversity and language that is strongly embedded in ethnography. The combination of linguistics and ethnography produces an exceptionally powerful and differentiated view of both activity and ideology. After a characterization of what linguistic ethnography offers social science in general, this paper sketches some priorities for research on language and communication in particular, emphasizing the need for cumulative comparison, both as an objective in theory and description and as a resource for practical intervention. 1. Superdiversity11 of motives, patterns and itineraries of migra­ There is a growing awareness that over the past tion, processes of insertion into the labour and two decades, globalization has altered the face housing markets of the host societies, and so of social, cultural and linguistic diversity in socie­ on (cf. Vertovec 2010). The predictability of the ties all over the world. Due to the diffuse nature category of ‘migrant’ and of his/her sociocultural of migration since the early 1990s, the multi­ features has disappeared. An example can start culturalism of an earlier era (captured, mostly, to show some of the communicative effects. in an ‘ethnic minorities’ paradigm) has been This small piece of text was found in the main gradually replaced by what Vertovec (2007) calls street of an inner­city area of Antwerp, Belgium ‘super­diversity’. Super­diversity is characterized (see Blommaert & Huang 2010 for details). It is by a tremendous increase in the categories of handwritten in ‘Chinese’ (though this will need migrants, not only in terms of nationality, eth­ to be qualified). In English translation, the text nicity, language, and religion, but also in terms reads “apartment for rent, first class finish­ ing, water and electricity included, 350 Yuan 1 Blommaert & Rampton drafted this text, but it is per month”, followed by a mobile phone num­ the outcome of substantial discussion and revision ber. The text is mundane, and unless one has involving Karel Arnaut, Adrian Blackledge, Jens Nor­ a particular interest in it (as sociolinguists do), mann Jørgensen, Sirpa Leppänen, Roxy Harris, Max it is easy to overlook. But when we pay closer Spotti, Lian Madsen, Martha Karrebaek, Janus Møller, David Parkin, Kasper Juffermans, Steve Vertovec, Ad attention, we discover a very complex object, Backus and Angela Creese. and here are some of the issues: (1) The text is DIVERSITIES Vol. 13, No. 2, 2011 ISSN 2079-6595, www.unesco.org/shs/diversities/vol13/issue2/art1 © UNESCO DIVERSITIES Vol. 13, No. 2, 2011 • ISSN 2079-6595 Jan Blommaert, Ben Rampton Figure 1: A notice in an Antwerp shop window Source: Jan Blommaert © Jan Blommaert written in two forms of ‘Chinese’: a mixture of traditional diaspora groups towards new émigrés the simplified script which is the norm in the from the PRC; (b) the fact that such a transition is People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the tradi­ articulated in ‘small’ and peripheral places in the tional script widespread in Hong Kong, Taiwan Chinese diaspora, such as the inner city of Ant­ and earlier generations of the Chinese dias­ werp, not only in larger and more conspi cuous pora. (2) The text articulates two different styles ‘Chinatowns’ such as London (Huang 2010). or voices, that of the producer and that of the So this text bears the traces of worldwide addressee(s), and the mixed script suggests that migration flows and their specific demographic, their styles are not identical. In all likelihood, the social and cultural dynamics. Migration makes producer is someone used to writing traditional communicative resources like language varie­ script, while the addressee is probably from the ties and scripts globally mobile, and this affects PRC. (3) The latter point is corroborated by the neighbourhoods in very different corners of the use of ‘Yuan’ rather than ‘Euro’ as the currency, world. In this Antwerp neighbourhood, Chinese and (4) the mixed character of the text suggests people are not a very visible group, and in fact, a process of transition. More specifically, it sug­ this handwritten notice was the very first piece gests that the producer (probably an ‘older’ dias­ of vernacular Chinese writing observed here (the pora Chinese person) is learning the script of the two Chinese restaurants in the area have profes­ PRC, the unfinished learning process leading to sionally manufactured shop signs in Cantonese, the mixing of the scripts. Thus (5) this text points written in traditional calligraphic script). Still, the towards two very large­scale phenomena: (a) a notice shows that the neighbourhood probably gradual change in the Chinese diaspora, in which includes a non­uniform and perhaps small com­ the balance of demographic, political and mate­ munity of Chinese émigrés, and the marks of his­ rial predominance gradually shifts away from the torical struggles over real and symbolic power are 2 Language and Superdiversity DIVERSITIES Vol. 13, No. 2, 2011 • ISSN 2079-6595 being transplanted into the Antwerp inner city. vocabulary of linguistic analysis is no longer suffi­ Plainly, there are distinctive communicative pro­ cient. In fact, the study of language in society has cesses and outcomes involved in migration, and itself participated in the major intellectual shifts this paper argues that the detailed study of these in the humanities and social sciences loosely can make a substantial contribution to debates identified with ‘post­structuralism’ and ‘post­ about the nature and structure of super­diversifi­- modernism’ (see e.g. Bauman 1992). It is worth cation. now turning to this refurbished apparatus, perio­ In fact, these demographic and social changes dically aligning it with questions that the notion are complicated by the emergence of new media of superdiversity raises. and technologies of communication and infor­ mation circulation – and here an orientation to 2. Paradigm shifts in the study of language in communication necessarily introduces further society uncharted dimensions to the idea of superdiver­ Over a period of several decades – and often sity. Historically, migration movements from the emerging in response to issues predating su­ 1990s onwards have coincided with the devel­ perdiversity – there has been ongoing revision opment of the Internet and mobile phones, and of fundamental ideas (a) about languages, (b) these have affected the cultural life of diaspora about language groups and speakers, and (c) communities of all kinds (old and new, black about communication. Rather than working with and white, imperial, trade, labour etc [cf. Cohen homogeneity, stability and boundedness as the 1997]). While emigration used to mean real sepa­ starting assumptions, mobility, mixing, politi­ ration between the emigré and his/her home cal dynamics and historical embedding are now society, involving the loss or dramatic reduction central concerns in the study of languages, lan­ of social, cultural and political roles and impact guage groups and communication. These shifts there, emigrants and dispersed communities have been influenced by the pioneering work now have the potential to retain an active con­ of linguistic anthropologists like John Gumperz, nection by means of an elaborate set of long­dis­ Dell Hymes and Michael Silverstein, the founda­ tance communication technologies.2 These tech­ tional rethinking of social and cultural theorists nologies impact on sedentary ‘host’ communi­ like Bakhtin, Bourdieu, Foucault, Goffman, Hall ties as well, with people getting involved in trans­ and Williams, as well, no doubt, as substantial national networks that offer potentially altered changes in the linguascape in many parts of the forms of identity, community formation and world. In fact with this kind of pedigree, ‘robust cooperation (Baron 2008). In the first instance, and well­established orthodoxy’ might seem these developments are changes in the material more apt as a characterization of these ideas world – new technologies of communication and than ‘paradigm shift’ or ‘developments’. Never­ knowledge as well as new demographies – but theless, superdiversity intensifies the relevance for large numbers of people across the world, of these ideas, and if the exposition below some­ they are also lived experiences and sociocultural times sounds a little gratuitously alternative or modes of life that may be changing in ways and oppositional, this is because the notions they degrees that we have yet to understand. seek to displace continue with such hegemonic If we are to grasp the insight into social trans­ force in public discourse, in bureaucratic and formation that communicative
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Ethnography and Democracy: Hymes's Political Theory of Language
    Ethnography and democracy: Hymes’s political theory of language JAN BLOMMAERT Abstract Dell Hymes’s oeuvre was explicitly political, and this paper addresses this often overlooked dimension of his work. The project of ethnography was intended by Hymes to be a counterhegemonic and democratic science, which o¤ered voice to the subjects it studied and so created a critical social-scientific paradigm that destabilized and negated established truths by dialogically engaging with reality. This critical and counterhegemonic paradigmatic dimension of ethnography is first sketched and discussed at some length. Next, we discuss Hymes’s ethnopoetic work. In his ethnopoetic work, Hymes’s critical concern with voice, democracy, and inequality is articulated most clearly and persuasively. It is by looking at ethnopoetics that we see the blending of a methodological and a political project. Keywords: Hymes; ethnography; ethnopoetics; critique; democracy. 1. Introduction Dell Hymes’s work is, like that of Bourdieu and Bernstein, but also that of Gumperz and Go¤man, highly political. Texts such as the essay ‘‘Speech and language’’ (Hymes 1996: ch. 3), or the introductory essay to his Reinventing Anthropology (2002 [1969]) explicitly testify to that; most of his oeuvre, however, can be read as a political statement, an at- tempt toward a critical science of language in social life, toward ‘‘a union of knowledge and social values’’ (2002 [1969]: 51). Hymes would often mention his own background as an explanation for this, especially his ex- periences as a GI enlisted so as to gain access to college education under the GI Bill, and stationed in the Far East.
    [Show full text]
  • Linguistic Anthropology in 2013: Super-New-Big
    AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST Linguistic Anthropology Linguistic Anthropology in 2013: Super-New-Big Angela Reyes ABSTRACT In this essay, I discuss how linguistic anthropological scholarship in 2013 has been increasingly con- fronted by the concepts of “superdiversity,” “new media,” and “big data.” As the “super-new-big” purports to identify a contemporary moment in which we are witnessing unprecedented change, I interrogate the degree to which these concepts rely on assumptions about “reality” as natural state versus ideological production. I consider how the super-new-big invites us to scrutinize various reconceptualizations of diversity (is it super?), media (is it new?), and data (is it big?), leaving us to inevitably contemplate each concept’s implicitly invoked opposite: “regular diversity,” “old media,” and “small data.” In the section on “diversity,” I explore linguistic anthropological scholarship that examines how notions of difference continue to be entangled in projects of the nation-state, the market economy, and social inequality. In the sections on “media” and “data,” I consider how questions about what constitutes lin- guistic anthropological data and methodology are being raised and addressed by research that analyzes new and old technologies, ethnographic material, semiotic forms, scale, and ontology. I conclude by questioning the extent to which it is the super-new-big itself or the contemplation about the super-new-big that produces perceived change in the world. [linguistic anthropology, superdiversity, new media, big data,
    [Show full text]
  • Review of Jan Blommaert's (2005) Discourse: a Critical Introduction Adam Hodges, University of Colorado at Boulder
    Carnegie Mellon University From the SelectedWorks of Adam Hodges 2007 Review of Jan Blommaert's (2005) Discourse: A Critical Introduction Adam Hodges, University of Colorado at Boulder Available at: https://works.bepress.com/adamhodges/15/ Book reviews 115 Kintsch, W. (2005) ‘An Overview of Top-Down and Bottom-up Effects in Comprehension: The CI Perspective’, Discourse Processes 39(2&3): 125–8. Thibault, P.J. (2000) ‘The Dialogical Integration of the Brain in Social Semiosis: Edelman and the Case for Downward Causation’, Mind Culture, and Activity 7(4): 291–311. Van Dijk, T.A. (1999) Ideología: una aproximación multidisciplinaria. Barcelona: Editorial Gedisa. Van Dijk, T.A. (2003) ‘The Discourse-Knowledge Interface’, in G. Weiss and R. Wodak (eds) Critical Discourse Analysis: Theory and Interdisciplinarity, pp. 85–109. London: Palgrave. Mariana Achugar Department of Modern Languages, Carnegie Mellon University, USA BLOMMAERT, JAN, Discourse: A Critical Introduction Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 2005. 299 pp. ISBN 0–521–82817–1 (hbk), 0–521–53531–X (pbk) DOI: 10.1177/0957926507069563 In Discourse: A Critical Introduction, Jan Blommaert attempts to transcend the textual bias of discourse analysis and shift its emphasis to an explanation of so- ciety. The strands of social thought woven together in the book speak to a broad audience of researchers and lay the groundwork for a truly interdisciplinary ‘so- cial science of language-in-society’ (p. 235). The critical focus in the book targets the discursive production of inequality; but the critical focus also recognizes the need ‘to reconfigure our own discipline in a permanent process of self-critique’ (p.
    [Show full text]
  • Tilburg University Commentary Blommaert
    Tilburg University Commentary Blommaert, Jan Publication date: 2014 Document Version Peer reviewed version Link to publication in Tilburg University Research Portal Citation for published version (APA): Blommaert, J. (2014). Commentary: Superdiversity old and new. (Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies; No. 105). General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 02. okt. 2021 Paper Commentary: Superdiversity old and new by Jan Blommaert © [email protected] © September 2014 Language & Communication (ftc 2015), special issue on Superdiversity. Becky Schulties & Paja Faudree (eds.) Commentary: Superdiversity old and new Jan Blommaert Tilburg University & Ghent University Abstract This commentary reviews the papers in this volume as successful attempts at unthinking a legacy of nation-state sociolinguistics, enabled by developments in Europe-based sociolinguistics and US-based linguistic anthropology. After offering arguments on why superdiversity should best be seen as an advanced and synthetic perspective on language and society and pointing out its fundamentally critical nature, two key issues articulated in the papers in this volume are isolated for discussion.
    [Show full text]
  • Tilburg University Chronicles of Complexity Blommaert
    Tilburg University Chronicles of complexity Blommaert, Jan Publication date: 2012 Document Version Peer reviewed version Link to publication in Tilburg University Research Portal Citation for published version (APA): Blommaert, J. (2012). Chronicles of complexity: Ethnography, superdiversity, and linguistic landscapes. (Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies; No. 29). General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 27. sep. 2021 Paper Chronicles of complexity Ethnography, superdiversity, and linguistic landscapes by Jan Blommaert [email protected] April 2012 Chronicles of complexity Ethnography, superdiversity, and linguistic landscapes Jan Blommaert Tilburg University Ghent University 1 Contents 1. Introduction: New sociolinguistic landscapes Superdiversity Complexity Chronicles of complexity Introducing Berchem 2. Historical bodies and historical space The problem of synchrony Historical bodies in historical space The zebra crossing 3. Semiotic and spatial scope Signs in publiuc Scope and demarcation High-octane LLS 4. Signs, practices, people Who lives here? Forms of organization The synchronic picture 5.
    [Show full text]
  • Tilburg University Durkheim and the Internet Blommaert
    Tilburg University Durkheim and the Internet Blommaert, Jan Publication date: 2018 Document Version Version created as part of publication process; publisher's layout; not normally made publicly available Link to publication in Tilburg University Research Portal Citation for published version (APA): Blommaert, J. (2018). Durkheim and the Internet: Sociolinguistics and the Sociological Imagination. Bloomsbury Academic. General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 01. okt. 2021 Durkheim and the Internet Durkheim and the Internet.indb 1 12/1/2017 1:23:33 PM ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY Technolingualism: The Mind and the Machine by James Pfrehm Linguanomics: What is the Market Potential of Multilingualism? by Gabrielle Hogan-Brun Wordcrime: Solving Crime Through Forensic Linguistics by
    [Show full text]
  • Tilburg University Language and Superdiversity Blommaert
    Tilburg University Language and Superdiversity Blommaert, J.M.E.; Rampton, B. Publication date: 2012 Link to publication in Tilburg University Research Portal Citation for published version (APA): Blommaert, J. M. E., & Rampton, B. (2012). Language and Superdiversity. (pp. 1-36). General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 29. sep. 2021 Working Papers www.mmg.mpg.de/workingpapers MMG Working Paper 12-05 ISSN 2192-2357 JAN BLOMMAERT / BEN RAMPTON Language and Superdiversity Max Planck Institute for the StudyReligious and Ethnic Diversity of Max-Planck-Institut zur Erforschungund multiethnischer Gesellschaften multireligiöser Jan Blommaert / Ben Rampton Language and Superdiversity MMG Working Paper 12-05 Max-Planck-Institut zur Erforschung multireligiöser und multiethnischer Gesellschaften, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity Göttingen © 2012 by the author ISSN 2192-2357 (MMG Working Papers Print) Working Papers are the work of staff members as well as visitors to the Institute’s events.
    [Show full text]
  • Tilburg University Dialogues with Ethnography Blommaert
    Tilburg University Dialogues with Ethnography Blommaert, Jan Publication date: 2015 Document Version Peer reviewed version Link to publication in Tilburg University Research Portal Citation for published version (APA): Blommaert, J. (2015). Dialogues with Ethnography: Notes on classics and how I read them. (Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies; No. 138). General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 30. sep. 2021 Paper Dialogues with Ethnography Notes on classics and how I read them (working paper) by Jan Blommaert© (Tilburg University) [email protected] June 2015 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/ Contents Preface Chapter
    [Show full text]
  • Jan Blommaert and the Use of Sociolinguistics: Critical, Political, Personal BEN RAMPTON King’S College London, UK
    Language in Society 50, 331–342. doi:10.1017=S0047404521000312 Jan Blommaert and the use of sociolinguistics: Critical, political, personal BEN RAMPTON King’s College London, UK On 7 January 2021, Jan Blommaert died aged 59, after a ten-month battle with cancer. He was an extraordinary person and a brilliant academic, and there have been a great many very moving personal accounts of how much Jan meant to the people he interacted with. I knew and worked with him for over twenty-five years, and during his protracted illness, for me and for a lot of others, it was good to be able to tell him directly how much I owed him. But beyond the warm, hospitable, humorous and hugely energising individual we knew, Jan was pro- foundly committed to—indeed lived—a programme of sociolinguistics that he often traced to the writings of Dell Hymes, the founder of Language in Society.1 A number of this programme’s core elements were spelled out in the introduction to Hymes’ ground-breaking 1969 collection, Reinventing Anthropology,a‘book… for people for whom “the way things are” is not reason enough for the ways things are, who find fundamental questions pertinent and in need of personal answer’ (1969:7). For my account of the value and vitality that Jan brought to sociolinguis- tics, I have borrowed from the title of Hymes’ introduction, ‘The use of anthropol- ogy: Critical, political, personal’ and, as well as citing some of Jan’s own words, I also draw on the reflections of others2 as evidence of the vigour, clarity, and coherence with which he articulated a practice and purpose for work on language in society.
    [Show full text]
  • Interactional Sociolinguistics
    Paper Interactional Sociolinguistics by Ben Rampton© (King’s College London) [email protected] January 2017 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/ Interactional Sociolinguistics Ben Rampton King’s College London Centre for Language Discourse & Communication 2017 Abstract This paper starts with a sketch of the origins of Interactional Sociolinguistics (IS) in Gumperz and Hymes’ early efforts to develop a general theory of language and society. Characterising the key features of Gumperzian IS, it emphasises the notions of ‘inference’ and ‘contextualisation’ as well as the (counter-hegemonic) centrality of intensive analyses of recorded interaction. It then turns to IS’s close relationship with Linguistic Anthropology and Conversation Analysis, considering the challenges presented by IS’s insistent interdisciplinarity and its relative lack of formalisation, following this with a brief discussion of how IS seeks to intervene in non-academic activity. Concurring with Auer & Roberts’ view that Gumperz was the first to develop a sociolinguistics capable of handling globalised superdiversity, the paper then describes the ways in which his work on code-switching and intercultural communication has been updated in, respectively, studies of stylisation and asylum procedures. Finally, it suggests that in future work, IS should examine the interface between face-to-face and digital interaction together with the implications of new forms of surveillance, capitalising on the anti-structuralist rigour that IS can bring to the study of Foucauldian ‘governmentality’. 1. Introduction 1 Interactional Sociolinguistics (IS) developed as the expression of John Gumperz’s approach to research, and it usually focuses on face-to-face interactions in which there are significant differences in the participants’ sociolinguistic resources and/or institutional power.
    [Show full text]
  • CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS Jan Blommaert Chris Bulcaen
    P1: NRM August 28, 2000 9:49 Annual Reviews AR111-17 Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2000. 29:447–66 Copyright c 2000 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS Jan Blommaert Ghent University, Department of African Languages and Cultures, B-9000 Gent, Belgium; e-mail: [email protected] Chris Bulcaen Ghent University, Department of English, B-9000 Gent, Belgium; e-mail: [email protected] Key Words linguistics, social theory, power, ideology, critique ■ Abstract This paper provides a survey of critical discourse analysis (CDA), a recent school of discourse analysis that concerns itself with relations of power and inequality in language. CDA explicitly intends to incorporate social-theoretical in- sights into discourse analysis and advocates social commitment and interventionism in research. The main programmatic features and domains of enquiry of CDA are discussed, with emphasis on attempts toward theory formation by one of CDA’s most prominent scholars, Norman Fairclough. Another section reviews the genesis and dis- ciplinary growth of CDA, mentions some of the recent critical reactions to it, and situates it within the wider picture of a new critical paradigm developing in a number of language-oriented (sub) disciplines. In this critical paradigm, topics such as ideol- ogy, inequality, and power figure prominently, and many scholars productively attempt to incorporate social-theoretical insights into the study of language. INTRODUCTION Critical discourse analysis (CDA) emerged in the late 1980s as a programmatic development in European discourse studies spearheaded by Norman Fairclough, Ruth Wodak, Teun van Dijk, and others. Since then, it has become one of the most influential and visible branches of discourse analysis (as can be seen in the anthology by Jaworski & Coupland 1999).
    [Show full text]
  • Online with Garfinkel
    Paper Online with Garfinkel Essays on social action in the online-offline nexus by Jan Blommaert© With Malgorzata Szabla, Ico Maly, Ondřej Procházka, Lu Ying, Li Kunming (Babylon, Center for the Study of Superdiversity, Tilburg University) [email protected] August 2019 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/ Online with Garfinkel Essays on social action in the online-offline nexus Jan Blommaert with Malgorzata Szabla Ico Maly Ondrej Prochazka Lu Ying Li Kunming 1 Table of contents Chapter 1: Online with Garfinkel Chapter 2: From groups to actions and back in online-offline sociolinguistics. Chapter 3: Does context really collapse in social media interaction? Chapter 4: Invisible lines in the online-offline linguistic landscape. Chapter 5: Collective action in hashtag activism Chapter 6: Ergoic framing in New Right online groups: Q, the MAGA kid, and the Deep State theory Chapter 7: Formatting online actions: #justsaying on Twitter Chapter 8: From the Self to the Selfie 2 Chapter 1 Online with Garfinkel Jan Blommaert The Durkheim and the Internet project (DAI in what follows) being completed, I now move on towards a more radical exercise: using some of Harold Garfinkel’s central intuitions as a lead into forms of online analysis. This exercise, I should underscore, builds onto DAI and does not replace or qualify it – it extends it. For a summary of DAI, see Blommaert (2018). This extension is warranted, I believe, because of one methodological outcome of the project: the “four lines of sociolinguistic methodology” that I designed as a way to investigate new forms of collectivities in online-offline contexts.
    [Show full text]