Bourdieu, Language-based Ethnographies and Reflexivity

Putting Theory into Practice

Michael Grenfell, Kate Pahl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351793162
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

Offering a unique and original perspective on Bourdieu, language-based ethnographies, and reflexivity, this volume provides a nuanced, in-depth discussion of the complex relationship between these interconnected topics and their impact in real-world contexts. Part I opens the book with an overview of the historical background and development of language-based ethnographic research and Bourdieu's work in this space. Part II presents a series of case studies that highlight a Bourdieusian perspective and demonstrate how reflexivity impacts language-based ethnography. In each study, Bourdieu's conceptual framework of reflexively-informed objectivity examines the ways in which the studies themselves were constructed and understood. Building on Parts I and II, the concluding set of chapters in Part III unpacks the messiness of the theory and practice of language-based ethnography, and provides insights into what reflexivity means for Bourdieu and in practical contexts. Arguing for a greater reflexive understanding in research practice, this volume sets an agenda for future literacy and language research.

PART I

Theoretical Perspectives

Language-based Ethnographies, Reflexivity and Bourdieu

Introduction

In this first part of the book, we dedicate a chapter to each of our main themes: Language-based ethnographies, Reflexivity and Bourdieu.

In the first chapter, we set out the range of issues, which have shaped the research field of language ethnographies over the decades. A chronological approach is taken as we see the way that interests in language behaviours grew out of traditional anthropological and ethnographic research. We consider the “classic” language-focused ethnographies and both what they set out to do and what they did in fact discover. However, this retrospective account is also framed by contemporary concerns including the multimodal and the digital. The whole provides a context for the practical chapters in Part II.

The second chapter addresses our theme of reflexivity. This account is set within a historical context as a way of showing how issues of knowledge developed in philosophy and how such concerns shaped research practice. We consider the relationship between knowledge and the knower, as well as the significant role that language plays in it. This discussion then looks at language per se and the kind of twentieth century developments, which shaped our understanding of it, and the impact such had on our knowledge fields; all this as a prelude to considering reflexivity and the place of language in its operation. Various approaches to reflexivity are considered including the positivist and the post-modern. Finally, we look at Linguistic Ethnography as a way of highlighting how a research field does reflexivity, and what are its limits.

The third chapter deals with Bourdieu. After a brief biographical account of his intellectual trajectory, we consider his methodology in terms of the theory of practice according to which he worked and the main conceptual tools he used. These tools are also examined in terms of their own underlying epistemological rationale – how significant are they? The chapter discusses a range of Bourdieu’s own ethnographic research; in the Béarn, Algeria, Education and Culture. We see something of his ethnographic field theory in practice. Central to his project was reflexivity. An introduction to this is given in terms of the relationship between the research subject and object, and the biases that this necessarily entails. The chapter concludes with some introductory remarks concerning “participant objectivation”, which was Bourdieu’s main method for operationalising reflexivity in practice. We see what it is and how to do it.

All these chapters are seen as providing the main foundational bases: first, for the chapters in Part II, which are practically orientated towards actual empirical projects and the way researchers saw reflexivity within them; and second, Part III, where we both draw out the salient issues of reflexivity as demonstrated by the Part II accounts, and then take up and extend our discussion of what reflexivity is and can be from a Bourdieusian point of view.

1

LANGUAGE-BASED ETHNOGRAPHIES

Kate Pahl

Introduction

This chapter provides a chronological discussion of a history of language and literacy ethnographies as they have emerged in North America and the UK in recent decades. It does not pretend to be exhaustive; rather here the work in this book is situated within a historical context. This approach brings some specific aspects of the field to the reader’s attention, in preparation for the chapters to come. Particular aspects of the disciplinary area are highlighted that are important throughout the book. These include the changing way that the word “literacy” has been used and the developing emphasis on everyday models of literacy and language. With these has come a slow collapse of the certainties concerning literacy studies due to the development of post-modern epistemological positions. In this discussion, the definition of the word “literacy” moves from being something anchored in writing and skills, to a more nuanced idea from the New Literacy Studies of literacy as a social practice, to a further understanding that some of what we might call “literacy” has features that cannot always be representational and are not tied to written forms. In this way, we see how the study of language within an ethnographic framework is itself represented and contested. In other words, by discussing the field of language-based ethnographies, the field itself becomes subject to discussion.

Our point de départ is that the study of language and literacy practices in schools and communities has drawn principally on ethnography as a methodology. Indeed, the focus has been on naturalistic modes of inquiry that privilege the local, and particular, with an attention to unfolding events captured through detailed naturalistic methodologies (see Hymes, 1996; Maybin, 2006; Rampton, 2007a). It is a field that has developed and grown over the years, with a number of linked traditions and methodological genealogies, including those of social anthropology and ethnography. It has diversified, however, in response to new challenges. These include considerations of what literacy and language practices are in practice and how they can be described (see Baynham and Prinsloo, 2009; Parkin, 2016; Rowsell and Pahl, 2015). In fact, not only has the field shifted in terms of epistemological ways of knowing in order to encompass far wider practices than just writing, it has shifted substantially in terms of what and how as researchers we come to know and what can be known. These shifts have particularly been located in modes of enquiry that can be seen to have “de-centred” linguistic paradigms as central. Indeed, scholarship has subsequently focused more on the multimodal (Kress, 1997), the sensory and embodied (Leander and Boldt, 2013) and the post-human and new materialism (Braidotti, 2013; Kuby, Gutshall Rucker, and Kirchhofer, 2015). There has, therefore, been a shift away from modernist conceptualisations of language and literacy to less certain post-modern understandings of what has been understood to be important within the field of literacy and language ethnographies. Moreover, post-human and new materialist positions, as exemplified by a number of recent journal special issues (for example, Kuby and Rowsell, 2017), have appeared alongside other shifts. The work of Karen Barad (2007), for example, enables a re-thinking of the ways that the relationship between humans and objects could be conceived of. Literacy researchers have also begun to incorporate “more-than human ontologies” into their theoretical understandings of literacy and language (Kuby et al., 2015). These new positions are discussed more fully in Chapter 8.

The chapter addresses such histories of language ethnographies. The complex and shifting world of the New Literacy Studies, and its diversifications across contexts, will be delineated. In the rest of the book, and after the four contextually rich chapters that follow in Part II, the thread of this discussion will be taken up once more in reflecting on how the new field of language-based ethnography is emerging. We shall trace the ways in which literacy and language ethnographies have changed and adapted to new contexts. This contextual information will both situate the data chapters, but bring a rich argument to bear on the potential of Bourdieu’s reflexivity as described by Grenfell in this volume.

It is important to emphasise again the way that ethnographies of language and literacy grew from a concern that there was an insufficient understanding of the everyday, as opposed to largely prescriptive, psychological or cognitive models of literacy. Initially (from the early 1980s to the early 2000s), language and literacy practices were understood within language ethnographies as being “situated” and located within “practice”; studies were rooted in everyday settings and drew on naturalistic data (see for example, Heath, 1983; Street, 1993; Barton and Hamilton, 1998; Barton, Hamilton and Ivanic, 2000). These lenses enabled richer understandings of what people did with literacy to come to the surface. Studying literacy and language closely revealed practices that lay outside of the education context to be rich and contextually different. This insight implied a shift in ways of knowing and conceptualising literacy with a renewed focus on the nature of the contexts for literacy and language research (see Duranti and Goodwin, 1992).

These shifts in approach led to a more pluralistic understanding of the relationship between methods and methodologies, and opened up epistemological as well as ontological uncertainties. While epistemologies might be about knowing, ontological understandings included a more physically grounded “state of being” in literacy. As Parkin (2016: 81) suggested, “the ontological is about being and presence, and, as such is commonly expressed through the body or body parts”. These new understandings of literacy led to a shift in perspective within the study of literacy and language ethnographies. The field then became even more diverse as digital, multimodal and maker perspectives informed theory on the “situated” nature of literacies and language (Rowsell et al., 2016). The beginnings of the “New Literacy Studies” and the turn to the social had derived from an interest in language and literacy practices in everyday and within situated language contexts. As suggested above, part of the reason for the “turn” to the social was that the field previously had focused on reified accounts of language that did not recognise the shifting, everyday nature of language practice. A ground-breaking response to autonomous models of language was Halliday’s Language as Social Semiotic (1978), which acknowledged the situated nature of linguistic interactions. This developed partly as a response to ways in which language had been traditionally reified or codified into systems that could be named or aspired to. However, what people did with literacy and language was less commonly understood. The concept of “situated literacy practices” recognised what was going on with literacy and language in the everyday (see for example, Street, 1984). The “turn” in research that concentrated on understanding what people do with literacy and language had diversified, and was then extended to include multimodal, visual, affective and digital literacy practices (see Rowsell and Pahl, 2015). New understandings of digital, material, (im)material, multilingual and post-human perspectives were developed, producing a more pluralistic and complex space (see Burnett et al,. 2014; Leander and Boldt, 2013; Enriquez et al., 2016). The research field is therefore very different in recent times from where is began. So, it has changed from the early days of “Situated Literacies” (Barton, Hamilton and Ivani, 2000). The central argument is that everyday literacies come from somewhere. We locate this “somewhere” within the histories of literacy and language ethnographies. We address these issues with a particular eye on the US and the UK traditions of linguistic ethnography (UK) and linguistic anthropology (US).

Threaded through the chapter are also the voices of research participants (Lem in “Ways with Words” 1982), researchers thinking about writing (Hymes, 1996) about analysis (Rampton, 2007a) about revisiting (Sefton-Green and Rowsell, 2015) and about group analysis (Copland and Creese et al., 2015). We draw attention to those voices as part of the history of the field, and an analysis of their language to trace that history. So, we re-read the field, reflexively and also, personally. Who creates the canon?

One aspect of this work is concerned with who gets named and who does not; with women’s scholarship being sometimes absent from a settled trail of citations (see Ahmed, 2017). Presenting a “citation trail” in itself constructs a history and a story of voices from a field. Writing about it means making sense of it anew. Reflexivity can provide a layer of thinking from which to reflect on what has been created, what it has made, and what it could be. Locating moments within this field is a choice that is itself political, located in discursive choices and stances. Citation trails then can be seen as themselves traces of practice and provide genealogies that, analysed reflexively, shape and construct the field. Telling this story is itself a form of academic literacy and a literacy practice (see Seloni, this volume).

Epistemological positions are, therefore, important. As noted, research in the field of language and literacy research initially focused more on texts, practices, scripts and discourses (Candlin and Hyland, 1999). The written was more salient as a category and the oral was still in a more indeterminate space; although Ruth Finnegan’s work was challenging the boundaries of the relationship between oral and written texts (Finnegan, 2007). The work of Gunther Kress on multimodality, particularly in his seminal “Before Writing” (1997), enabled “writing-plus-other-stuff” to be seen as communicative practice in its own right. The demands of digital literacies then unsettled the relationship between speech, writing and the visual so profoundly that literacy in the “new media age” could be conceptualised in new ways that challenged conventional binaries of speech, writing and the visual (Kress, 2003).

The chapter begins by outlining the salient features of the study of literacy and language ethnographies and the salient scholars in the field. It then addresses the nature of ethnography itself and the significance of the New Literacy Studies movement. This account leads to an exploration of new “re-imaginings” of language-based ethnography before we consider themes coming from Bourdieu’s own theory of practice with respect to method and reflexivity in the other two chapters of this part of the book.

Where did Language Ethnography Begin?

There are many different threads and themes that have developed the field known as “New Literacy Studies”. These intersect with another field known as “Linguistic Ethnography”. These two traditions have links and intersections, and some authors cross over and conduct linguistic ethnography but draw on a New Literacy Studies perspective (for example, Tusting, 2000; Maybin, 2006; Rampton, 2007a). However, in some cases it is possible to perceive distinct boundaries between them.

The “New Literacy Studies” or “NLS” movement as it is commonly called, can be traced through the initial work of Street (1984, 1993) in describing the idea of models of literacy that can be identified with the word “autonomous” and “ideological”. “Ideological literacies”, is a model of literacy that understands literacy to be embedded within discourses of power and located in cultural and ideologically positioned contexts. The work of Barton and Hamilton (1998) in their book “Local Literacies” further delineated the ways in which literacy practices were used in everyday life, using ethnographic methodologies. In a series of ethnographic studies, Gregory and Williams (2000) drew on similar methods to map the literacies of the city in their work in Bethnal Green in East London in their book, “City Literacies”. Bringing in multilingualism to New Literacy Studies, and seeing the situated nature of multilingual literacy practices was a key contribution of work by Martin-Jones and Jones (2000), which considered the ways in which multilingual literacies were situated in everyday contexts.

The field of “Linguistic Ethnography” can also be traced, particularly in the UK through the work of Tusting (2000), Maybin (2006) and Rampton (2007a) in combining fine-grained ethnographic work on language and interaction with an understanding of context. This was the core methodology for a large-scale team ethnography of supplementary schools in the UK led by Angela Creese and Adrian Blackledge (Blackledge and Creese 2010; Copland and Creese et al., 2015). Of equal interest in North America is the field of “linguistic anthropology”, as exemplified by the work of Anna De Fina (2009). Anna De Fina (2009) explored ways in which spatialised understandings of narrative could produce different conceptual framings of border narratives that located these narratives more precisely in particular spatial configurations. There are differences between these two fields: the one, linguistic anthropology drawing on the heritage of Gumperz (1982) and resulting in work by scholars such as Monica Heller (2011); the other developed by scholars such as Ben Rampton (2007a), Janet Maybin (2006) and Karin Tusting (2000), who began to map out the implications of a detailed linguistic analyses of oral speech together with writing in naturalistic settings together with ethnographic contextual work to make sense of that field. While these two traditions have much in common, they do have different antecedents and genealogies.

At the heart of much of this work is a focus on power, on recognising the “ways with words” of people in everyday settings and acknowledging that theory building about language has to come from those everyday intersections (Heath, 1983). The initial and pioneering work on language came from the research of ethnographers such as Del Hymes (1996) as well as John Gumperz (1982). Followers of Gumperz such as Monica Heller (2011) and others worked to challenge and disrupt language ideologies through linguistic ethnographic studies of how these ideologies work within institutional and community settings. Ethnography as a way of knowing, of collaboratively “coming to know”, is hence a mode of engagement with that process; a respectful and careful understanding of what is going on here, and what matters (see also Lassiter, 2005; Campbell and Lassiter, 2015). Collaborative and situated understandings of discourse practices across contexts brought to light new and evolving insights into how literacy practices evolved on sites and across sites (see, for example, Kell, 2006). I now look at some classic studies in the field of literacy and language ethnographies.

Ways with Words

Where language ethnographies began is often linked to the work of Shirley Brice Heath in “Ways with Words” (1983). Her book delineated the literacy and language practices of three communities in the Carolinas in the US. Her ethn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• PART I Theoretical Perspectives: Language-based Ethnographies, Reflexivity and Bourdieu
• PART II Reflexivity in Practice: Case Examples
• PART III Reflexivity and Beyond: In Theory and Practice 131
• Conclusion
• About the Authors
• Bibliography
• Index