The Discursive Construction of Identity and Space Among Mobile People

Roberta Piazza

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350053526
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book offers a close look at the discourse of and around three socially marginalised and vulnerable groups – Irish Travellers, Squatters and Homeless people – in order to understand more about how individuals within them position themselves vis-à-vis mainstream society. It investigates the groups' diverse and provisional relationship with space that challenges mainstream society's spatial logic. Given that the relationship between mobility, space and identity has been explored in migrant contexts, Roberta Piazza proposes a reconsideration of this relationship beyond people's movement from one place to another. Investigating the space-identity nexus among the three groups, she highlights how mobility is not solely a cross-country phenomenon, but a no-less crucial and dramatic reality within an individual nation. Based on close linguistic analysis of interviews collected over many years, Piazza investigates how the participants construct their social and personal identities when talking about themselves and the sites they inhabit, drawing on the concepts of 'heterotopia' and non-sexual desire.

1

Introduction

What this book is about

The space each of us occupies is an integral part of our individual selfhood. Who we are is inextricably connected to where we are. The broad concept of ‘place-identity’ has been widely employed by researchers to investigate this relationship. For Georgalou who explores the relevance of place among Facebook users, ‘place identity refers to the ways in which we understand ourselves by attributing meanings to places’ (2017: 45). Even in a virtual environment therefore the lack of and exclusion from space is crucial to the construction of selfhood. In line with the significant turn in the 1970s in the approach to space, this is not understood as objective and physical or as ‘location’, rather as subjective ‘meaning’ and the context of social action within which human existence is emplaced (Johnstone 2004, 67–8).

This volume investigates the relationship between identity and space in order to find out how people who are in an unstable, temporary and threatened spatial condition discursively construct their self in an interaction with an empathetic outsider, while at the same time taking on board the discourses that exist about them in society.

A multifaceted approach is adopted for the analysis of ‘place-identity’ that focuses on the identities of three mobile groups or sets of individuals whose lives lack well-defined space in the conventional sense. Being marginalized and generally poverty-stricken, the Squatters, Travellers and the Homeless (capitalized in this study in respect of their condition) are in many ways very different from the rest of mainstream society. Their space is also markedly distinct from Lefebvre’s (1991) ‘abstract space’ that elite groups represent as homogeneous, integrated, ahistorical and functional to the exercise of power in a capitalist world. Their space is borderline and socially non-integrated and, rather than generating profit, proves the failure of corporativism.

These marginal individuals and groups are ‘super-diverse’ in terms of their social complexity and lack of conformity to mainstream society. Vertovec, who deliberately declines to offer a precise definition of the concept of super-diversity, refers to it as a ‘summary term’:

‘Super-diversity’ is proposed as a summary term. Whatever we choose to call it, there is much to be gained by a multidimensional perspective on diversity, both in terms of moving beyond ‘the ethnic group as either the unit of analysis or sole object of study’ and by appreciating the coalescence of factors which condition people’s lives.

2007: 1026

It is significant that the definition of the concept of diversity by Queensborough Community College makes crucial reference to the elements of acceptance and respect as opposed to practices which result in segregation and exclusion.

The concept of diversity encompasses acceptance and respect. It means understanding that each individual is unique, and recognizing our individual differences. These can be along the dimensions of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, age, physical abilities, religious beliefs, political beliefs, or other ideologies. It is the exploration of these differences in a safe, positive, and nurturing environment. It is about understanding each other and moving beyond simple tolerance to embracing and celebrating the rich dimensions of diversity contained within each individual.¹

While diversity engages with a multitude of differences, diversity studies have often centred on the ethnicity-related pluralism and explored a variety of migratory contexts including multilingual practices in business situations (Cogo 2012) or social work environments (Boccagni 2015) and engaged with issues of integration and ‘cultural confluence’ (Vertovec 2007: 1026) of various groups (Crul 2016) with very rare exceptions of diversity associated with minority groups (Tremlett 2014).

Contrary to such focus of most (super)diversity research, this study investigates a diversity that is integral to the British urban fabric and as such is domestic and internal to it. These people’s existence is blatantly transgressive as much as, if not more than, that of migrants of different ethnicities and provenience and they face enormous challenges in meeting their livelihood needs on a daily and long-term basis. Years of ethnographic work were spent with the protagonists of this volume who are excluded from mainstream society, who do not coalesce with the average citizen and whom many ignore, often deliberately. Exclusion is not simply an economic issue; it is determined by interpersonal behaviour. Naegels and Blomme (2010 in van de Mieroop 2011: 566) argue that people have their personal GPS system, which enables them to avoid problematic individuals such as the poor and needy like the three marginal groups examined in this study. To a degree, therefore, this volume is a tribute to these invisible people and an attempt to give them a voice.

Volume organization

This volume comprises eight chapters. Following this introduction, chapter two presents the study’s interdisciplinary theoretical background and the several constructs that are used in the analysis of the discourse of the individuals in each group. Firstly is the notion of space as a physical ‘geographic location, material form, and a human investment with meaning and value’ and place as the emotive discursive positioning of a speaker, the ‘socially-based spatiality’ constructed through the process of discursive interaction and referring to the individuals’ affective engagement with a locality (Liebscher and Dailey-O’Cain 2013: 15–16). The three other key concepts that underpin the analytical approach of this study are also presented: the construct of desire or, better, desires, plural, referring to continually de/reformulated, non-sexual, momentary, albeit persistent, wants (e.g. for affection, security, material objects and the like) that individuals harbour; liminality, as the condition of occupying suspended, unofficial and in-between spaces; and, finally, the Foucaldian (1966/7-1986) concept of heterotopia as the place outside all places, the non-place with its value of compensation of an individual’s lack of integration but also resistance to and challenge of society’s norms. These three constructs are approached from the Gramscian (1971) perspective of ‘hegemony’ as the ideological control that a majoritarian group exerts on others on economic, and, more importantly, intellectual and cultural levels. For Gramsci, hegemony is reached not through force and subjugation but through consent obtained through the manipulation of language, morality and common sense (in terms of guidance of individuals’ private activities) and the circulation of relevant ‘narratives’ or ‘Discourses’, with ‘big D’ (van de Mieroop et al. 2017: 181), in support of specific views of the world that are functional to a group’s supremacy. Discourses as ‘ways of being in the world, or forms of life which integrate words, acts, values, beliefs, attitudes, social identities, as well as gestures, glances, body positions and clothes’, are opposed to ‘discourse’ with a little ‘d’, referring to any meaningful and connected stretches of language from a joke, to a conversation or a story (Gee 2005). Therefore (D)discourse is the subject matter of this volume in the belief that individuals align themselves or defy hegemonic ways of being in society (Benwell 2011). As identity is inherently social, the multidimensional consideration of factors external to its construction during the interactional practice of the interview is crucial to a full understanding of what the interviewees produce as a response to a range of narratives that society perpetuates around them.

Chapter three explains the study’s interdisciplinary methodology which merges linguistic ethnography and critical discourse analysis. It discusses the benefits of this integrated approach and how the research was based on field notes and conversational interviews (De Fina 2009a) to then examine the practical and ethical issues involved. After these three preparatory chapters, four chapters of data analysis follow. All of them see identity construction as a ‘performative achievement’ (Butler 1990) against the backdrop of a number of social constraints and expectations by others (Bamberg and Andrews 2004). The chapters touch on, therefore, the existing social Discourses or sets of signs related to Squatters, Travellers and the Homeless that influence people’s ways of thinking, and that the interviewees themselves plausibly take into account when constructing their persona.

Chapter four is a case study of a female Squatter in her various temporary locations; the discussion centres on the multiple identities she creates for herself according to two distinct topical configurations in a specific time and space. The focus is on the resistance she opposes to mainstream interpretation of space and the consequent heterotopia she conjures up as she attempts to come to terms with the outside world. The contradiction between contestation and a desire to belong (Benwell 2011) that is the core of her identity construction is emphasized. Chapters five and six centre on a group of female Irish Travellers who were interviewed in a coastal city in the south of England firstly in a transit site (chapter five) and subsequently in a permanent council-provided location (chapter six). Their desires, ambitions, future plans as well as the account of their hardship are highlighted in relation to their space deprivation first and space appropriation later on. Their strong preoccupation with their children and the chiasm between the world they desire for them and their perceptions of mainstream society emerge clearly in the interviews where they construct their personas in dis-alignment with the roles they are aware society has set for them.

Chapter seven examines conversations with male and female clients of a day centre for the Rough Sleepers in a city on the English southern coast; the liminal identities they create in their talk often revolve around their past life or around their projection for a better future, which are investigated against the backdrop of society’s discourses around street Homelessness. Chapter eight concludes the volume and brings together the various threads and results’ implications through a final discussion of the three groups as well as through a conclusive evaluation of the theoretical framework and the constructs employed in the study.

Rationale behind the choice of study’s participants

The three sets of individuals observed in this study are an expression of diversity in so much as they interpret and use space in a very different way to mainstream social groups. In addition, their beliefs and lifestyle defy generally accepted shared norms, which adds to their diversity within the city’s urban fabric and contributes to society’s response in terms of their exclusion and marginalization. For this reason, they can be characterized as having ‘deficit’ identities (Reynolds and Taylor 2005 in Van De Mieroop 2011: 566) which are marked by lack, in this case a denied access to space and the deprivation it involves; their identities are also ‘poverty-associated’ (Van De Mieroop 2011) as the economic factor is undeniably a shared determinant of these groups’ collective physiognomy. While more for the Squatters and Rough Sleepers than for the Travellers, economic deprivation is often alluded to, no specific reference to class is deliberately made in this study. This decision will appear clearer when in the methodology the notion of groups is problematized. Here, however, it suffices to point out that class cannot be taken as a uniform variable in defining the destiny of the individuals discussed in this book. While Irish Travellers fall outside traditional economic considerations, the most varied people may end up squatting or sleeping rough. The interviews show how both Martha and some of the Homeless men and women came from middle class, which suggests their condition is not associated necessarily with an economic disadvantage.

As noted earlier, this study is positioned within the mobility and (super)diversity framework (Vertovec 2007, Blommaert 2013). However, instead of exploring the identity of people whose mobile lives are determined by the desire to leave one country in search of better economic, social and cultural opportunities or fear for their safety, the volume offers an analysis of the social difference that exists within the fabric of English society (although very similar realities exist in many other parts of the UK and the world at large). While the lives of Squatters, Irish Travellers and street Homeless (or Rough Sleepers as a sub-category of the latter) have an undeniably dramatic dimension that people generally prefer to disregard, their experiences and choices also represent a challenge to many of the tenets of mainstream society, in particular the notions of permanency, property, profitability and individualism. For this reason, these people are often perceived as a threat and, as much as possible, concealed by dominant society.

The groups analysed in this volume are also often the object of negative media coverage and portrayed as people creating concerns for the hegemonic majoritarian society; the dramatic eviction of Travellers from the largest site in the UK (at Dale Farm in Essex) in October 2011 made the news for months; similarly, the political activities of the anarchist ANAL group occupying a Russian millionaire’s mansion in one of the wealthiest areas of London fulfilled all criteria of newsworthiness (Bednarek and Caple 2014 and 2017). In both cases the press strategically tapped into settled people’s fear of having their property and land invaded or taken away by unwanted others. Numerous documentaries have been produced on Travellers and Gypsies, most chastising them by representing them as crooks, thus enforcing misconceptions about them,² others occasionally attempting to capture their plight and consequent segregation (Piazza 2015a and 2017). On the contrary, the worsening situation of people living on the street in the UK and the continually rising death toll of Homeless people is the persistent concern of local and national press and investigative journalism (cf. the 2019 Guardian series in G2 ‘The homeless death of …’). Such media representation operating through language and visual channels divulges discriminatory concepts, ideas and feelings (Hall 1997) and reinforces negative stereotypes about the three groups discussed in this book. Such Discourses, in a Foucauldian sense, of exclusion, otherness and distrust therefore constitute the macro-context within which this study’s participants operate and with which they engage in their identity work, the micro-context being the face-to-face interaction (McNamara 2019: 119).

Beyond such public discourses, very little is known about these groups. Therefore, this volume seeks to inform readers about the diverse and invisible people who occupy the interstices of society, also with the aim of challenging the shared beliefs about them. In this sense, this book responds to the plea of such scholars as Creese (2008) to give due consideration to the area of social action and involvement, whereby academic work can encourage a change in social and cultural attitudes.

The relation between language and place-identity

The post-modernist view of reality as not objective but socially constructed (pioneered by Berger and Luckmann in the mid-1960s) when adapted to identity understands language not as a reflection of a self that is an individual’s permanent and fixed property, but as fluid and situated in the speakers’ many contexts, interlocutors, aims and intentions, and emerging in the interactional practice in which the individual is involved.

In the face-to-face situation the other is appresented to me in a vivid present shared by both of us. I know that in the same vivid present I am appresented to him. My and his ‘here and now’ continuously impinge on each other as long as the face-to-face situation continues. As a result, there is a continuous interchange of my expressivity and his. I see him smile, then react to my frown by stopping the smile, then smiling again as I smile, and so on. Every expression of mine is oriented towards him, and vice versa, and this continuous reciprocity of expressive acts is simultaneously available to both of us. This means that, in the face-to-face situation, the other’s subjectivity is available to me through a maximum of symptoms.

Berger and Luckmann 1966/1991: 43

The self therefore is ‘constructed’ through language and invoked as speakers choose to (dis)align with the relevant roles that are available in society. Sociolinguists have for many years paid attention to langu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Theoretical framework
• 3 Methodology
• 4 Locating the transient self in a transient heterotopia: Squatting as an affective and entrepreneurial proposition
• 5 ‘We don’t need a castle. We need a home.’ Desire for place in a Travellers’ transit site
• 6 Irish Travellers: Mobility within immobility
• 7 Rough Sleepers: ‘Homeless is what I am, not who I am.’ Rough sleeping as a liminal condition not the essence of being
• 8 Conclusions
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Copyright