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- Convenors:
-
Kinga Kozminska
(University of Oxford/Birkbeck, University of London)
Rosemary Hall (University of Oxford)
Nancy Hawker (University of Oxford)
Leonie Schulte (University of Oxford )
Alessandro Duranti (UCLA)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Stream:
- Language
- Location:
- Magdalen Lecture Room A
- Start time:
- 19 September, 2018 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 3
Short Abstract:
Imaginations of 'justice' and 'language' affect speakers' senses of belonging. These are experienced, expressed and enacted verbally in legal, political and social arenas, which the panel will analyse discursively and ethno-linguistically. Normative methods and researchers' ethics will be discussed.
Long Abstract:
'Justice' relies on the political imagination to conceive of 'fair' social arrangements. The workings of justice are conducted verbally, often depending on public speeches or legal interrogations. Anthropology produces wide-ranging research on how justice is constructed and served - or not - in words: from gender performance in Japan, to the jargon of central bank managers during financial crises, to asylum hearings in Belgium. Such studies describe and explain how 'justice' is arranged socially in ways that make emic sense to the subjects of the research. Meanwhile, discourse analysis provides normative determinations of 'unjust' speech with general, etically observed, political implications. Scholarship with such tools ascertained, for instance, that scientists' communicative failures led to inaction on global warming, or that discrimination against migrants was enabled discursively.
The Language, Justice and Belonging panel posits that imaginations of 'justice' and 'language' affect communal and individual senses of belonging in various ways. The panel welcomes abstract submissions for presentations in the sister disciplines of linguistic anthropology and discourse analysis, with the aim of discussing ideas on the incorporation of nuanced normative stances, aligned with scholars' ethical responsibilities, in analyses of linguistic material on 'justice'. Presentation topics may cover: campaigns on language/educational policies and practices, court proceedings current and historical, discursive aspects of social justice or international law, and more. The convenors build on their experience of organising the Language, Indexicality and Belonging (2016) and Language, Mobility and Belonging (2017) conferences to form a coherent panel that will foster debate and encourage publication.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the ways in which migrants and refugees experience Germany's language and civic integration program, while negotiating forms new and emergent forms of belonging and identity, which challenge and reimagine imposed and stereotyped notions of the 'integrate able migrant'.
Paper long abstract:
The proposed paper presents findings from ongoing ethnographic PhD research, investigating the ways in which migrants and refugees in Berlin experience Germany's language and integration programs. Since its inception in 2007, Germany's so-called Integrationsprogramm seeks to equip newcomers with the linguistic and civic knowledge deemed necessary to allow them access to the job and education market. The concept of integration is pervasive in German political and public discourse, and government-funded add campaigns regularly promote their programs alongside images of 'successfully integrated' migrants and refugees. Against this backdrop, migrants and refugees are required to complete rigorous language and civics knowledge courses, which culminate in oral and written examination. Alongside learning German, migrants are taught how to present their personal, national and professional identities through structured and mediated exercise, which can often be limiting and based on stereotype. What emerges from classroom interaction as well as public and political discourse is a notion of an 'integrateable' (and therefore also, unintegrateable) migrant, who adheres to the values and norms of Germany's constitutional democracy, and who actively contributes to culture and economy.
Through analysis of classroom recordings, individual and focus group interviews with integration course participants and teachers, this paper explores the ways in which the notion of the integrateable migrant is constructed in public and institutional discourse, and how migrants and refugees encounter and negotiate stereotypical and imposed identities, often constructing new and emergent self-representations, which break both from their own past experience, as well as from the identities imposed on them.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how the police and the CPS prosecute individuals for speech acts in London using The Public Order Act (1986). In this paper language, space and the law intersect in such a way as to criminalize wide swathes of public behavior.
Paper long abstract:
The issue of language - written and spoken - is central to understand how the police and the Crown make use of The Public Order Act to prosecute/control wide swathes of behaviour in diverse public areas. Based on fieldwork in Magistrates' Courts Across London. As Gibbons (1999: 156) has remarked: 'Law is language… it is a profoundly linguistic institution. Laws are coded in language, and the processes of the law are mediated through language.' Language - written and spoken - is central to understand how the police and the Crown use of the Act to prosecute/control wide swathes of behaviour in diverse public areas. I begin by examining 'the language of law' set out in legislation which define an offence and how it is that the police, CPS and courts prosecute this type of offence. Section (ii) looks at the way the public order offences were used by the police, the CPS and the courts in 2017/18. I conclude that the POA provides wide discretion to the authorities to interpret the Act in ways which allow them to successfully prosecute such offences (in large part because little or no independent evidence is required to convict) and because defendants face huge problems in defending their actions (a problem compounded by poor legal representation).
Paper short abstract:
Translation processes in plurilingual institutional contexts and spaces of interaction include not only denotational meanings, but index ideological, ambivalent and creative aspects of understandng and communication going beyond power relations and established dichotomies.
Paper long abstract:
In the Central Andes, the contact situations between (inter-) national institutions and indigenous communities and languages are typical settings in which diversity affects various layers of communication and cultural life. Until the present the Quechua language has been regarded as an oppressed or marginalized language in relation to Spanish due to colonial histories, ideologies and particular embeddings in relations of power between language that endure in new constellations .
Departing from conversation analysis and ethnography in institutional settings (courts, public institutions) and other "spaces of interaction" in the provincial capitalHuanca velica (fieldwork 2004, Schneider 2007), where Quechua speakers or confronted with the national juridical system coded in a foreign language, it will be described how processes of translation, mutual understanding, but also manipulation and ideologically informed interpretations take place, in what ways relations of power are enacted and created, but also undergone or reversed. This includes not only alternative vocabulary and a given context, but also includes conversational strategies or social practices aimed to establish peace and order in a given community. However, conversational features will not be analyzed as independent structures in their own right, rather it will be shown how those concepts are evoked indexically in people´s social relations and linguistic utterances. So indigenous perspectives do not only refer to the cultural or societal background and specific meanings, but include creative potentials indexing underlying (invisible or implicit) processes of interpretation and communication.
Paper short abstract:
This paper provides an ethnographic account of the tensions, doubts and controversies around the 'neoliberalization of solidarity' and documents social workers' investments in language and communication to pursue the utopian projects of justice that they associate with their professional practice.
Paper long abstract:
This paper presents ethnographic insights from the everyday struggles of a group of social workers employed by Legame, a social cooperative based in Rome, Italy and who invest in a set of actions and activities to promote forms of social justice for migrants In Italy. In Italy, social cooperatives have historically been at the forefront of social movements promoting a new civil society based on utopian principles of justice, community, solidarity, redistribution and inclusion (Rei, 1998). Recently, however, these organization have gone through major processes of restructuration, professionalization and corporatization (Cameron, 2002) and have adopted market principles that are seen at odds with their histories of anarchism and internationalism as well as their struggles against corrupted state structures and economic exploitation (Muehlenbach, 2016). This paper draws on ethnographic fieldnotes, interactional data and It provides a linguistic-ethnographic documentation of the tensions, doubts and controversies around what we might call the neoliberalization of solidarity, and documents social workers' investments in language and communication (i.e. practices of language brokering, language training as well as the investment in translation and multilingual talk) to pursue the utopian projects of inclusion and justice that many of them associate with their specific professional practice.
Cameron, D. (2002). Globalization and the Teaching of 'communication skills'. In Globalization and Language Teaching, ed. by D. Block and D. Cameron. London: Routledge.
Muehlebach, A. (2012). The Moral Neoliberal. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Rei, D. (1998). The Social Cooperation. AIS, 127-136.
Paper short abstract:
Palestinians inside Israel are judged for their supposed political 'quiescence' to subordinate citizenship. Analysis (avoiding normative nationalist traps) of codeswitched Arabic public discourse explores how this dissonant medium bears on civic conceptualisations. Research choices are questionned.
Paper long abstract:
Palestinian citizens of all political colours used Arabic on public Israeli platforms in 2015. Nationalist Hanin Zoabi demonstratively read an Arabic statement on 12 February at a parliamentary hearing. Communist Ayman Odeh gave part of his maiden speech to parliament in Arabic on 4 May. Journalist Lucy al-Harish who lit a beacon for Israel's Independence Day gave her speech political nuance by also speaking Arabic on a Zionist stage.
This presentation analyses Zoabi's codeswitching interactions at the hearing which decided on banning her from standing in elections. Her use of Arabic falls into several patterns, as do the Hebrew speakers' metalinguistic comments. The analysis draws on Monica Heller's work on bilingualism and its ideological coordinates. Here, the ideologies performed linguistically bear on conceptions of citizenship and the limits to their inclusivity. What is also questionned is the researcher's choice to analyse ethno-national civic limits by focusing on Palestinian positions in Israel, rather than religious and criminal limits which are relevant to cases where defendants are far-right supremacists. In monolingual contexts, the prism of bilingualism brings specific political problems into relief but not others.
Research on the politics of Palestinians inside Israel often queries their 'quiescence' to injustice and superficial forms of (un)belonging in their strategies for dealing with the state. Such approaches judge political behaviour, including linguistic, by nationalist standards. By applying sociolinguistic analysis to the new public Arabic-Hebrew codeswitching discourse, this paper can avoid some normative traps while exploring how Arabic is an ideologically dissonant medium in Hebrew-dominant settings.
Paper short abstract:
This paper will explore the language through which observant Jews, survivors of sexual abuse, advocate their claims for both justice and belonging. It will draw from transcripts of public testimonies of abuse, and will illuminate the discursive sensibilities that sustain this daring form of speech.
Paper long abstract:
In recent years, survivors of sexual abuse in the Jewish ultra-Orthodox world have started to speak out. An emerging grassroots movement, constituted of organizations and activists, provides public venues for them to articulate their claims for both justice and belonging. This movement urges ultra-Orthodox communities, rabbis and institutions to listen to these as yet untold stories, demanding inclusion, recognition and repair.
While it is always a struggle for survivors of sexual abuse to find the right words to describe their experiences, in the Jewish ultra-Orthodox context this struggle resonates with emic semiotic ideologies that hinder attempts to unsilence the matter. To begin with, talking about sexual abuse is impermissible. There are no words for some private organs, and no legitimation to speak about sexuality or abuse of power. The insistence on speaking about sexual abuse is thus subversive, placing the speaker at risk of losing his or her face, good name and secure belonging. Furthermore, ultra-Orthodox individuals must navigate between two conflicting legal discourses: that of the state and that of Jewish law.
In order to explore the stakes involved in speaking "correctly" about sexual abuse in this context, I will draw from transcripts of public testimonies of survivors (in public events in Israel and the USA), as well as from a recorded exchange between an activist and a rabbi. I will analyze the linguistic aspects of these texts (word choice, template, hesitations and silences) to illuminate the underlying sensibilities and possibilities of this communal conversation.
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores the intersection between linguistic diversity and imaginations of justice within British society looking at Polish-speaking community's language policy efforts.We analyse migrants' senses of belonging in relation to economic inequality,political participation,cultural domination.
Paper long abstract:
Since the EU enlargement in 2004, Polish-speaking migrants with diverse linguistic and sociocultural profiles have been settling in Britain in large numbers at an unprecedented pace. This paper examines how their struggle for representation within British society is played out at the level of language. Based on extensive linguistic ethnographic fieldwork in London and focus group interviews with members of key Polish organizations in the UK conducted for the ESRC-funded Family Language Policy project between September 2017 and August 2018, our preliminary analysis shows how contemporary senses of belonging are linked to social and economic struggles, political participation and discourses on culture and language.
The aim of this paper is to show how members of contemporary diaspora communities claim their legitimate place in the new nation-state through language policy and practice and how this is linked to their ideas about language, culture and justice. By looking at a mobile migrant community, we investigate how the relationship between imaginations of language and justice is also reconfigured by constant flows of people and languages. The emerging themes of interview data centring around key socioeconomic challenges facing the community, current changes in cultural and political situation in Britain and language policy efforts as well as discourse analysis of existing policy documents allow for identification of emic and etic categories potentially shaping this community's senses of belonging. The paper contributes to the debates on linguistic justice, economic inequality and cultural domination.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the racialized dialect performances of a group of white men in Bermuda, exploring the implications of this type of data for sociolinguistic theories of authenticity, and discussing methodological concerns in research contexts involving highly empowered participants.
Paper long abstract:
The idea of the 'authentic speaker' is closely linked to language, justice and belonging, since it can be used to dictate speakers' entitlement to linguistic varieties. In line with social constructionist approaches to language and identity, scholars in recent years have deconstructed ideas of authenticity and the 'native speaker' (Rampton 1990; Eckert 2003). Authenticity remains, however, 'a quality of experience that we actively seek out, in most domains of life, material and social' (Coupland 2003: 417), and in some cases, denying speakers `authentic' status means failing to recognise the heritage and experiences that have led them to speak a language or dialect. Further, this approach has the potential to legitimise linguistic mockery and appropriation.
This paper calls for a more nuanced, particularistic approach to authenticity, drawing on data from Bermuda, a site of heated debate about belonging and national identity, in which stylised performance intersects with race. I compare interviews with two groups: white men known for their theatrical performances of Bermudian English (BerE), and elderly black Bermudians locally considered to be `authentic' speakers. The white speakers frame their performances as legitimate self-parody, but phonetic analysis contradicts this conclusively, showing that they target and caricature features of black BerE. Contextual analysis finds that the performances propagate basic raciolinguistic stereotypes.
The data serve as an important reminder of the difference between scholarly theorising about 'authenticity' and its everyday reality for speakers. Further, they prompt a discussion about the responsibilities of the researcher to privileged participants whose linguistic practices reproduce social hierarchies.
Paper short abstract:
TBA
Paper long abstract:
TBA