8,768 research outputs found
Moving for a Better Life: Negotiating Fitting in and Belonging in Modern Diasporas
No full textThe paper focuses on the complexity of claiming and indexing fitting in and belonging in modern diasporas drawing on the narratives of young people (aged 15-26) who moved for the prospect of a better life. Successfully settling in a different context depends on being granted membership to the community and being accepted as one of us in at least some domains of human activity. This process is not straightforward and involves negotiating established hierarchies and positions of power. Dominant ideologies about the other are projected onto the newcomer, who is expected to fit in with the norms and ways of doing of the majority group and to display belonging.
This paper focuses on the narratives of people from Greece and Italy who have either moved with their families or individually as young professionals. The narratives were collected through ethnographic interviews in a language chosen by the participants and fully transcribed and analysed following a critical interactional sociolinguistic approach.
We pay special attention to the ways in which individuals position self and other. Our findings show that our participants narrate their lived experiences using binaries such as here and there, us and them, now and then in relation to belonging and fitting in. The participants claim intermediate, in-between positions and display strategies for claiming or resisting othering, while at the same time displaying fitting in with the broader, imagined context of the ‘new’ locus. We conclude the paper with the theoretical contribution of our work to socio- and applied linguistic studies and point to directions for further research
Moving for a Better Life: Negotiating Fitting in and Belonging in Modern Diasporas
No full textThe paper focuses on the complexity of claiming and indexing fitting in and belonging in modern diasporas drawing on the narratives of young people (aged 15-26) who moved for the prospect of a better life. Successfully settling in a different context depends on being granted membership to the community and being accepted as one of us in at least some domains of human activity. This process is not straightforward and involves negotiating established hierarchies and positions of power. Dominant ideologies about the other are projected onto the newcomer, who is expected to fit in with the norms and ways of doing of the majority group and to display belonging.
This paper focuses on the narratives of people from Greece and Italy who have either moved with their families or individually as young professionals. The narratives were collected through ethnographic interviews in a language chosen by the participants and fully transcribed and analysed following a critical interactional sociolinguistic approach.
We pay special attention to the ways in which individuals position self and other. Our findings show that our participants narrate their lived experiences using binaries such as here and there, us and them, now and then in relation to belonging and fitting in. The participants claim intermediate, in-between positions and display strategies for claiming or resisting othering, while at the same time displaying fitting in with the broader, imagined context of the ‘new’ locus. We conclude the paper with the theoretical contribution of our work to socio- and applied linguistic studies and point to directions for further research
Gender and sexuality normativities
No full textTaking a critical and queer-theoretical approach (e.g. Milani 2014), this chapter explores the use of conversation analysis (CA) for investigating the (re)production of normative sexualities and genders in everyday spoken interactions. Everyday interactions are interesting in this regard because they concern both individual actions and societal discourses, and everyday norms may be conveyed in such unremarkable ways that they are almost invisible. The theoretical framework used is the genderism model of Hornscheidt (2012, 2015). Basic tools and theoretical assumptions of CA that are of particular relevance to gender and sexuality are introduced, and then applied to a case study of normativities in interaction. Here, sexuality normativities and cisgender normativities are analysed in order to illustrate how CA uses evidence from examples that follow a pattern, evidence from examples that deviate from that same pattern, and finally, how challenges to assumed patterns can be dealt with. © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Jo Angouri and Judith Baxter
Transnational collaboration and mobility in higher education: Looking back – looking forward (The Guild Insight Paper No.4)
No full textThe politics of talk at work : negotiating membership and fitting in
No full textThe modern workplace is transient and diverse. Employees are expected to work in teams and to operate at the interface of linguistic, professional and geographical boundaries. In this paper I draw on ongoing and completed work and I unpack the complexities of crossing borders. I take a sociolinguistic perspective and argue that transitions are negotiated in discourse (Angouri, Marra and Holmes, 2017).
Moving between teams (or jobs, countries and professions) involves managing multiple different norms and ways of doing in enacting professional roles and identities. Employees negotiate belonging and index group membership, or the opposite, in daily life at work which has implications for claiming, and being accepted or not, as ‘one of us’. I pay special attention to the relationship between language policy and language practice and the process of ‘fitting in’ in different professional contexts
‘We don’t speak proper English ourselves’. Language problems in a multinational company
No full textMNCs are linguistically diverse and this diversity is often associated with problems assumed to arise from language barriers and variation in language competence. The position we take in this paper is that language ‘problems’ are typically ideological indexing power struggles at work. We draw on excerpts from interviews in a multinational company. We focus on how language problems are constructed in talk (i.e. interview events). We take an ethnographic approach combined with an interactional sociolinguistic analysis of our data. Our analysis shows that employees’ valuation of language competence is related to organisational activities, contingent on the (perceived) situational and institutional context. Language practices in the data become sites to negotiate power relations. We argue that talk about language problems can provide an insight into individuals’ ideological positioning and multilingual realities (Angouri and Piekkari, 2017). We close the paper with a discussion of our findings in relation to the institutional and social orders and we provide directions for further research
Reading by Jo Walton
No full textAward-winning author and Mythopoeic Fantasy Award finalist Jo Walton will read from her works and answer questions from the audience
'If we know about culture it will be easier to work with one another': Developing skills for handling corporate meetings with multinational participation
No full textThe current international nature of socio-economic activities is reshaping workplace settings and creating the need for large numbers of employees to perform successful communicative acts with a wider range of interactants than in the past, often using a language other than their mother tongue. Against this backdrop much emphasis has been placed on the need for training current and future employees in order to develop their work-related communication skills. In this context, the paper reports on an ongoing study into workplace discourse and its implications for pedagogic practice. I discuss here operationalisations of the concept of culture in pedagogic materials, and focus on the meeting event as presented through texts published in some widely used Business English textbooks in the UK. Special attention is paid to the underlying assumptions about culture and preferred norms for handling meetings which feature multinational participation - as presented by the textbooks but also in relevant academic literature. The discussion also draws on data from multinational companies in Europe. The analysis shows that textbooks often take a macro-level view of culture and treat it as an entity with distinct boundaries. This paper closes by making a case for sociolinguistic research findings to feed back into the language classroom to complement language for specific purposes textbooks for further developing learners' socio-pragmatic skills. © 2010 Taylor & Francis
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