Brook Bolander

This paper applies the theoretical concept of ‘acts of positioning’ (Davis & Harré 1990) to a qualitative and quantitative analysis of 474 status updates (SUs) taken from the Facebook Walls of twenty individuals living in Switzerland and the UK. Our aim is to analyze how individuals construct their identities through the use of language. The results show that individuals position themselves in five central ways, i.e., they stress aspects of their personality, pastime endeavors, sense of humor, work and relationship. Through a subsequent analysis of 228 reactions to status updates (RSUs), we also address how these acts are responded to, and thereby demonstrate that individuals predominantly support identity claims made in the SUs. Our paper contributes to existing research on language and identity in social network sites (SNSs), and demonstrates the fruitful application of the concept of ‘acts of positioning’.

This paper functions as the introduction to the special issue on ‘relational work in Facebook and discussion boards’. We position our research endeavors within interpersonal pragmatics (see Locher and Graham 2010), by reviewing literature on politeness, impoliteness and relational work in the context of computer-mediated communication. Foregrounding the relational aspect of language, we are particularly interested in establishing the connections between politeness, face and linguistic identity construction. We then position the four papers that form this special issue within this field of research. Two papers contribute to the study of relational work on discussion boards (Kleinke and Boes; Haugh, Chang and Kádár) and two deal with practices on Facebook (Theodoropoulou; Bolander and Locher).

This essay stems from our growing concern about the carbon intensity of academia, and of conferencing as an epitome of this. Face-to-face conferencing is widely recognised as both unsustainable and inequitable. Against this backdrop, digital conferencing (online only, or in hybrid form) offers a viable alternative. However, shifting to digital forms of conferencing does not automatically bring about equity. Drawing on white papers, academic discussions and results from a PollEverywhere survey, this essay explores issues of sustainability and equity across modes of face-to-face and digital conferencing, with the aim of charting a path towards more sustainable and accessible digital practises for a diverse community of linguists.

In this article, we “write-to” time from an autoethnographic perspective. Working intra-actively via a dialogic play script form, we collaboratively wonder about time during our experiences of COVID-19 as it relates to a compression of offline into online spaces. Presenting conversations we’ve had together over email, WhatsApp, and Google docs, with the reviewers of this Special Issue, and with scholarship, we foreground three main questions: What does time mean? How has our sense of time changed? And what is the link between these meanings and changes and the relationship between online and offline spaces?

This paper adopts a transglossic approach to explore the ordinariness of English amongst Muslim communities in South and Central Asia. It thereby maintains that studying English as an ordinary part of these communities’ repertoires is contingent upon an approach to religion as situated, discursive, and interactive. This approach to religion is key to avoiding a paradoxical treatment of religion and language that critically examines the meaning of language without interrogating religion in the same manner. To this end, the paper uses examples from ethnographic face-to-face and online fieldwork amongst Muslim communities in Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Bangladesh to explore and rethink the relationship between religion and language. The paper concludes that religion is co-constructed and emergent in, across, and through English and other languages and semiotic resources. English is rendered ordinary in the sense that it is employed and invoked to perform religious identity in interlocutors’ everyday language practices. It is thereby used to engage in processes of positioning, and emerges as a resource that is simultaneously translocal and polyvocal, while also locally meaningful in its situated practices.