JSLX Conversations

In our eleventh episode of JSLX Conversations, Professor John E. Joseph from the University of Edinburgh meets with Professor Sinfree Makoni at Pennsylvania State University. They discuss various sociolinguistic issues raised by one of Professor Makoni's many recent books: From Southern Theory to Decolonizing Sociolinguistics, co-edited with Professor Ana Deumert of the University of Cape Town and published by Multilingual Matters in 2023. The transcript is available at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/josl.70065

In our tenth episode of JSLX Conversations, Branca Falabella Fabrício, Professor of Applied Linguistics at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro will meet Daniel Silva, Professor of Applied Linguistics at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas and Jerry Won Lee, Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of California. They discuss various sociolinguistic issues raised by Daniel and Jerry’s latest book, Language as Hope, published by Cambridge University Press. Enjoy this episode. 

In our ninth episode of JSLX Conversations, Professor Penny Eckert from the University of Stanford will meet Professor Emma Moore from Sheffield University to discuss several sociolinguistic issues raised by Emma’s latest book “Socio-syntax: Exploring the Social Life of Grammar” published by Cambridge University Press. Script: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/bys1oq5mgeuxnp9qygrup/JSLX-Conversations-episode-9-script.pdf?rlkey=q8yoj7a8r34ot0p884ex30wq1&dl=0

This special episode of JSLX Conversations features the recording of this year’s Sociolinguistics Symposium 25 Roundtable entitled “Changing (v., adj.) Sociolinguistics”. Convened and moderated by Eldin Milak (Lecturer, Curtin University), the roundtable brings together Christina Higgins (Professor, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa), Annelies Kusters (Professor, Heriot-Watt University), Alastair Pennycook (Professor, University of Technology Sydney), Joseph Sung-Yul Park (Associate Professor, National University of Singapore), and Jaspal Singh (Lecturer, The Open University), to discuss the past, present, and future of sociolinguistics, as well as our role in changing it. Contributions from Annelies Kusters presented in the audio were simultaneously interpreted. Script: https://shorturl.at/JAzmH

Our seventh episode discusses the implications of the paradigm of decolonization for sociolinguistics and alternative epistemologies. The host for this episode is Associate Editor Harshana Rambukwella, Visiting Professor in Literature and Creative Writing at NYU Abu Dhabi. The invited speakers include Rafael Lomeu Gomes, Postdoctoral research fellow at the Arctic University of Norway, Marcelyn Oostendorp, Associate Professor in General Linguistics at Stellenbosch University, and Yecid Ortega, Assistant Professor in Applied Linguistics and TESOL at Queen's University Belfast. Full script: https://shorturl.at/5oKFl

In this sixth episode of JSLX Conversations, Birgül Yilmaz, Lecturer in Intercultural Communication at the University of Exeter, meets Judith Purkarthofer, Junior Professor in German Linguistics at the University of Duisburg Essen, and Mi-Cha Flubacher, Research Associate and Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences, in the division of Language Management and Globalisation. They discuss Judith and Mi-Cha's edited volume "Speaking subjects in multilingualism research: biographical and speaker-centred approaches" published by Multilingual Matters. Summary Concerning the approach, Judith explains that the publication project centres on speakers’ lived experiences through biography as lens to understand language use in different contexts. The edited volume builds on Brigitta Busch’s personal and intellectual journey and is a “quilt” that combines different chapters to jointly make sense of this biographical approach. Birgül is particularly interested in the book’s contribution to sociolinguistic research, especially in the areas of migration and mobility. According to Mi-Cha, the project is situated within the affective turn and has consolidated the conception of language as having not only material but also emotional effects on the speaker. The book’s interdisciplinary approach puts the speaker at the centre, who is not understood as an isolated self in the neoliberal sense but as a subject under specific political and economic conditions. In a way, then, the book sets out to go beyond categories such as “migrant”, which have traditionally racialised speakers and to broaden the horizon in addressing also other speakers from a phenomenological, affective perspective. As such, the contributions pay special attention to speakers who have been mobile or who are minoritised and find themselves in environments where they recalibrate their speaking selves. Birgül would like to know more about the line of research about language and trauma developed by Busch. Judith explains that the focus on speakers’ lived experiences in circumstances of neglect, violence and oppression looks into the speakers’ own explanations from the margins and opens onto research fields, like psychotherapy, that most sociolinguists might not be familiar with. This line of research relates to Busch’s research on the experiences of Slovene speakers in Carinthia, Austria, who were displaced during the Nazi regime, and as such it is relevant also to people who recently had to flee or were displaced, which connects back to migration studies. Adding another point, Mi-Cha highlights that the authors featured in the edited volume have spoken with a wide array of people in their research studies, and have come up with creative ways to gain insights into their daily lives that surpass interviews and participant-observation. Summarising, Judith underlines that speaker-centred methods adapt to specific contexts and different participants. Finally, Birgül raises the question about Southern epistemologies in the book. According to Mi-Cha, they did not deal with this specific question in their introduction because the driving aim was a specific methodological outlook. However, some chapters put a Southern perspective at the forefront, for instance in asking fundamental questions about the various understandings of language and the situated implications in local contexts. In their view, relational questions of positionality are also important to address, particularly in academia, recognising researchers’ social privilege. In addition, few of the authors have used English as their first language in their lives and all the authors work in multilingual environments, but the book and this episode is monolingual in English for a global audience. FULL script: https://shorturl.at/dFofQ Link to edited volume: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.21832/9781800415737/html Link to Heteroglossia group: https://www.heteroglossia.net/Home.2.0.html

In this fifth episode of JSLX Conversations, Prof. Melissa G. Moyer (Autonomous University of Barcelona) meets Prof. Suresh Canagarajah (Penn State University) to talk about Suresh’s latest book Language Incompetence: Learning to Communicate through Cancer, Disability, and Anomalous Embodiment (2022) published by Routledge. The conversation opens with a discussion about the concept of language (in)competence, which depends on the dominant definitions of what speech is and who is capable of speaking. Through an autoethnographic lens, Suresh provides examples of ways of communicating in non-normative ways that incorporate objects and multilimodal resources. For him, communication is always embodied and generates meaning as a distributed practice among speakers. Given that competence lies not in the individual but in the social network, the field is moving towards an embodied sociolinguistics. In order to better address disability from a sociolinguistic perspective, Suresh invites us to challenge three underlying assumptions in the field: cognitivism, logocentrism and humanism. Is the body agentive or only the mind? How do we communicate through non-verbal resources like gestures? What is the role of objects and space in communication? Melissa is interested in how embodied impairment in conjunction with objects and prosthetics communicate identity. Suresh argues that objects, such as a computer, are part of our make-up and construct identities such as “scholar”. As for group identity, positioning of bodies and chairs can develop a shared activity and create solidarity. What matters is constructing environments in which people have to engage with each other. Melissa highlights the need to incorporate pain and vulnerability into sociolinguistic inquiry and Suresh calls for a view of communication as non-linear and meaning as uncertain as it is negotiated across rupture and disturbances in all interactions. Concerning the generation of knowledge by persons with a disability, Suresh explains how his experience of communicating, especially writing, during cancer treatment shifted from his individual agency and ability to enhanced collaboration with other people with different resources and in the available spaces. In sum, the author claims that disabled people are questioning autonomy and human ability as reductive in ways that foreground creative communication beyond words. Full script: https://shorturl.at/BxmFp Link to Canagarajah’s latest book: https://www.routledge.com/Language-Incompetence-Learning-to-Communicate-through-Cancer-Disability/Canagarajah/p/book/9781032078915

In the fourth episode of JSLX Conversations, Prof. Luisa Martín Rojo (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) meets Prof. Christian W. Chun (University of Massachusetts Boston) to talk about Chun’s recent book “A World Without Capitalism: Alternative Discourses, Spaces and Imaginaries” published by Routledge. This conversation opens with the author’s discussion of how the intertwining of his identities as an activist and as a scholar shaped the themes and goals in the book. Chun’s experiences as a peace activist in the Los Angeles area introduced him to Gramsci’s common-sense discourses of capitalism (Chun, 2017) and the different language registers and demeanours across neighourhoods. Next, the author discusses how interview data show the contradictions and ideological inconsistencies in people’s experiences of capitalism linked with class and race, to the extent that racial dynamics have prevented coalition movements to grow in the USA. Martín-Rojo highlights how class and race differences are displayed and identified in interactions featured in the book and reminds us that they should be defined in not only economic but also cultural terms. Martín-Rojo is interested in the dialectic between urban spaces and social justice in semiotic and linguistic landspaces. Chun claims that whether people feel welcome in a given space depends on their identity in terms of race, gender and class and the way they talk, act and dress. Following Soja, the organisation of space not only is a social product but also shapes social relations. The book’s focus on different cities, primarily Boston and NYC, reveals the different cultural, pragmatic and linguistic norms for interaction linked with their cultural representations in the media, colonial histories and migration patterns. At the same time, both cities illustrate classed and racialised segregation into neighbourhoods. According to Lefebvre, the commodification of urban spaces results in changes in the types of residence and shop signage. In gentrifying areas, Chun claims that signs have very similar design in terms of font style, colour and layout and include less elaborate descriptions of stores. Martín-Rojo adds that neighbours feel expelled when signs change from the majority language, Spanish, to English as the language of gentrification in Spain. Gentrification processes lead to the emergence of resistance through graffiti and the occupation of urban spaces, which challenge oppressive social hierarchies and foster collective action at the service of alternative modes of social organisation. Martín-Rojo wonders to what extent the act of imagining alternatives to capitalism contributes to effectively transforming social reality. For Chun, street art and graffiti with counter-hegemonic discourses prompt discussions among residents, friends and family, and they have also helped organise social movements like Black Lives Matter in reclaimed physical spaces. Another example that Martín-Rojo gives is the destruction of colonial images and statues that change the semiotic landscape and may create a different narrative. To close this episode, Chun calls for sociolinguists to reach out to the broader public to understand their concerns, such as climate change, and make them aware of discourses that benefit the elites. Link to "A World Without Capitalism?"   References Chun, C. W. (2017). The discourses of capitalism: Everyday economists and the production of common sense. Routledge. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space. Blackwell Publishing. Lefebvre, H. (1996). Writings on cities. Blackwell Publishing. Lefebvre, H. (2003). The urban revolution. (R. Bononno, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1970). Soja, E. W. (1989). Postmodern geographies: The reassertion of space in critical social theory. Verso. Soja, E. W. (2010). Seeking spatial justice. University of Minnesota Press.

Summary in English: In this episode of JSLX Conversations podcast in Spanish, Daniela Lauria (Universidad de Buenos Aires) and Miguel Pérez-Milans (University College London) give an overview of the genealogies of glotopolítica and critical sociolinguistics and discuss their similarities and differences. The guest speakers’ brief introductions revolve around their academic training, scholarly trajectories and contacts with both traditions. Lauria is affiliated with glotopolítica while Pérez-Milans has been trained in critical sociolinguistics. The guests situate the two traditions in the study of language and society from a geopolitical perspective. Pérez-Milans discusses critical sociolinguistics as a political project in the late 20th century that reacts against modernist sociolinguistics at the service of nation-state construction and capitalist expansion. Its concern with the reproduction of inequalities is connected to social movements like feminism and anticapitalism. Lauria locates the emergence of glottopolitique in the periphery of France and Europe from where it was exported to Argentina in the mid-1980s. Glotopolítica is chiefly interested in the linguistic creation of a Latin American regional identity and emerging national identities in dialogue with history and sociology. Its objective is linguistic and economic emancipation. As for epistemology, glotopolítica articulates linguistic and historical knowledge to explain language interventions in the public sphere, such as gender-inclusive language and dictionary compilation. It mainly draws on discourse analysis as a tool to analyse material from historical archives but Lauria points out that younger generations are adopting ethnographic approaches. According to Pérez-Milans, critical sociolinguistics places ethnography at the heart of its endeavour to study situated practices imbricated with institutional and ideological regimes. As a reaction to modernist sociolinguistics, this tradition problematises the analysis of communities as essentialist ontological realities. Critical sociolinguistics is increasingly giving more weight to a historicising perspective that situates practices in the here-and-now within overarching historical processes. Concerning research agendas, Lauria refers to the interdisciplinary nature of glotopolítica to look back to the past to understand the present. Its Latin American perspective is central in the choice of topics, which include for example linguistic (de)colonization and hispanofonía & lusofonia in late capitalism. Both traditions examine situations and phenomena in which inequality is reproduced through linguistic resources. Lauria claims that the differences between them are methodological and geopolitical. The main priority of critical sociolinguistics, Pérez-Milans claims, is to dismantle the structures of social inequality through decades of a critical description of specific situations and situated institutional arrangements. In line with the turn towards reflexivity, he invites sociolinguists to reimagine safer and less unequal alternative futures in order to transform moral ways of acting within broader sociopolitical structures, which requires conversations beyond academia. The last section deals with ways forward and possible intersections. Glotopolítica analyses a broader array of semiotic materials and disseminates knowledge publicly. In spite of the many common points with Global North scholars in critical sociolinguistics, Lauria warns against adopting concepts without problematising and  reformulating them. Pérez-Milans claims that both traditions intersect in the critical, decolonial, antiracist, spatial and semiotic turns in the study of language in society. Their institutionalisation and consolidation engenders the risks of internal fragmentation and hierarchisation, but the legitimisation of these labels can also facilitate access to public funding and decision-making spaces with all the dilemmas involved.

As sociolinguists, many of us engage in not only research but also teaching . Even though teaching is a central part of our academic lives, we rarely discuss our teaching and the resources that we use to teach sociolinguistics in higher education. In this second episode of JSLX Conversations, our editorial board members Helen Kelly-Holmes (University of Limerick) and Mariana Achugar (Universidad de la República de Uruguay) discuss resources for teaching sociolinguistics from the perspective of their local contexts. First of all, the guest speakers give an overview of their different experiences in teaching sociolinguistics at university. Then, they recommend a wide array of teaching resources for courses in sociolinguistics in their local contexts (see shownotes for a list). They raise the decreasing importance of textbooks in favour of multimodal content and resources in addition to actual language examples gathered by students. Last, Achugar and Kelly-Holmes discuss the political economy of teaching resources, with a focus on current and future challenges in an Anglocentric publishing industry. Two possible ways forward are sharing teaching resources and pooling translation efforts across national borders. Below you'll find various teaching resources recommended by our guest speakers: Blogs Language: a feminist guide by Deborah Cameron ⁠https://debuk.wordpress.com/ Movies Arrival (2016), directed by Denis Villeneuve: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/ Podcasts Accentricity by Sadie Ryan: ⁠https://www.accentricity-podcast.com/⁠ Discursos sacan discursos by Camila Cárdenas and Camila Pérez: ⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/5wx8kaojzbgs37AenzDmPx⁠ Lexicon Valley by John H. McWhorter: ⁠https://slate.com/podcasts/lexicon-valley⁠ Lingthusiasm by Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch:⁠ https://lingthusiasm.com/⁠ The Vocal Fries Pod by Carrie Gillion and Megan Figueroa: ⁠⁠ https://vocalfriespod.com/ ⁠ Texts Coupland, Nikolas (2016). Sociolinguistics: Theoretical Debates. Cambridge University Press. ⁠https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107449787⁠ McNamara, T. (2012). Poststructuralism and its Challenges for Applied Linguistics. Applied Linguistics, 33(5), 473-482. ⁠https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/ams055⁠ Wright, S.M. (2016). Language Policy and Language Planning: From nationalism to globalisation. Springer. ISBN: 978-1-137-57647-7. Videos 68 voces: Cuando muere una lengua about language loss, language, culture and thought: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dwQnMEIJ8E⁠ American Tongues about language variation in the USA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5IUmHVj-H8 Los castellanos del Perú about Spanish language varieties in Perú and Latin America: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rroXCqvC1Ek [Students watch the video and discuss questions in groups. They later illustrate concepts they identify local examples]