Ben Rampton

CALA Proceedings 2022: abstract Changing Sociolinguistic Concerns, Linguistic Ethnography, and North/South Research Relations? Author Information Ben Rampton, King’s College London, U.K. DOI: 10.47298/cala2022.1-2 The GLOCAL Proceedings: The GLOCAL Conference in Asia 2022 Abstract Many influential theories and

What's the relevance of ‘Linguistic Citizenship' (LC), a concept developed in southern Africa, to language education in England? LC is committed to democratic participation and voice, to linguistic diversity and the value of sociolinguistic understanding (Stroud 2001), and it provides a framework for contesting linguistic conditions in England, where vernacular multilingualism faces monolingual language education policies and an officially ‘hostile environment for migrants'. In fact, LC lines up with four sources of opposition to this: civil society and small-scale community organisations cultivating heritage language multilingualism; experience of system-wide ‘hospitality to diversity' in education in England in the 1970s & 1980s; c.50 years of linguistics research in Britain; and universities themselves. Drawing on LC's pedigree in sociolinguistics, we then turn to the Hub for Education & Language Diversity, a collaboration between King's and non-profit language organisations which approaches LC as a multi-dimensional programme of language development. This includes BA & MA classes; teacher training (with resonant concepts like ‘diasporic local'); and efforts to broaden ideas about university ‘impact’. Overall, Linguistic Citizenship invites us to reassess the lie of the land in language education, and suggests an array of practical but principled initiatives at different points of the language teaching/university interface.

This paper begins in Section 1 by noting two processes that have been generally overlooked in sociolinguistics. Firstly, the prevailing approaches to ethnicity have tended to neglect the processes through which individuals can either adopt someone else's ethnicity, or get together with them and create a new one. Secondly, socialization in sociolinguistics is most commonly seen as enculturation into an ingroup, not as a process of learning to like and live with social and ethnic difference. To throw some light on these two processes, the paper turns its focus towards a practice it calls 'language crossing' ('code crossing', 'crossing'). Language crossing involves code alternation by people who are not accepted members of the group associated with the second language that they are using (code switching into varieties that are not generally thought to belong to them). This kind of switching involves a distinct sense of movement across social or ethnic boundaries and it raises issues of legitimacy which, in one way or another, participants need to negotiate in the course of their encounter. A fuller account of the intricate dialectic between language, peer group belonging and ethnic otherness that lies at the heart of language crossing emerges as the paper proceeds. After some methodological preliminaries (Section 2) and an outline of some of the ways in which the multiracial peer group I studied can be considered a community (Section 3), the empirical description of crossing itself begins with an initial emphasis on the way that crossing was integrated with what was shared in peer group culture (Section 4). The following section (Section 5) turns to the way in which crossing processed ethnic division and race stratification within the peer group, and this is further elaborated in the discussion of socialisation in Section 6. Section 7 contains a conclusion which briefly links crossing's treatment of ethnicity with Bourdieu's discussion of doxa, orthodoxv and heretical discourse.

Focusing on issues of class identity, this paper explores the relationship between sociolinguistics and Raymond Williams’ view of hegemony as “relations of domination and subordination… [that saturate] the whole process of living…: Our senses and assignments of energy, our shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world” (1977: 109-110). It assesses the kinds of insight afforded in both variationist and interactional sociolinguistics, and then turns to an analysis of London adolescents putting on exaggerated ‘posh’ and ‘Cockney’ accents in situated interaction. Underpinning the contingencies of particular instances, there was a set of well-established dualisms shaped in relations of class inequality (high vs low, mind vs body, reason vs emotion), and the resonance and reach of these was attested both in corporeal performance and in the fantastical grotesque. Can theories of interactional ‘identity projection’ do justice to this, or can sociolinguistics accommodate the cultural analyst’s wider concern for ‘subjectivity’? The paper looks at ways of drawing these perspectives together, and concludes with an emphatic rejection of claims that in late modernity, class identities are losing their significance.

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 profoundly committed to—indeed lived—a programme of sociolinguistics that he often traced to the writings of Dell Hymes, the founder of Language in Society. 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 sociolinguistics, I have borrowed from the title of Hymes’ introduction, ‘The use of anthropology: Critical, political, personal’ and, as well as citing some of Jan's own words, I also draw on the reflections of others as evidence of the vigour, clarity, and coherence with which he articulated a practice and purpose for work on language in society.

It is often said that surveillance has massively transformed our social lives (Lyon, Haggerty, and Ball 2012: 1), but this claim is weakened by the admission that its “effects are difficult to isolate or observe, as they are embedded within many normal aspects of daily life.” Picking up this analytic challenge, this paper investigates the everyday interactional practice and experience of being surveilled. To do so, it draws on Goffman’s account of the interaction order, dwelling closely on unfocused interaction in which people maintain a side-of-the-eye, half-an-ear awareness of the people, objects, and events in the space around them. After introducing key concepts from Goffman, the paper discusses three scenes of surveillance: a woman walking down a city street, two men putting up street stickers (a civil offence), and passengers being scanned at an airport (Pütz 2012). It shows how different senses of potential threat and illegality enter the experience of surveillance, and it builds a rudimentary model. This paper considers only a tiny fraction of contemporary surveillance, but it shows Goffman’s value as an analytic resource that can hold large-scale generalisations about the surveillance society to account, allowing us to see agentive responses to surveillance that are too subtle to be captured by notions like subversion and resistance. Indeed, Goffman corroborates Green and Zurawski’s (2015) suggestion that surveillance is a basic mode of the social, elaborated in different ways in different environments.