Making Signs, Translanguaging Ethnographies

Exploring Urban, Rural and Educational Spaces

Ari Sherris, Elisabetta Adami

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781788921930
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Teoría de la crítica literaria

This book is the beginning of a conversation across Social Semiotics, Translanguaging, Complexity Theory and Radical Sociolinguistics. In its explorations of meaning, multimodality, communication andemerginglanguage practices, the book includes theoretical and empirical chapters that move towardan understanding of communication in its dynamic complexity, and its social semiotic and situated character. It relocates current debates in linguistics and in multimodality, as well as conceptions of centers/margins, by re-conceptualizing communicative practice through investigation of indigenous/oral communities, street art performances, migration contexts, recycling artefacts and signage repurposing. The book takes an innovative approach to both the form and content of its scholarly writing, and will be of interest to all those involved in interdisciplinary thinking, researching and writing.

1 Unifying Entanglements and Dynamic Relationalities: An Introduction

Ari Sherris and Elisabetta Adami

This volume is a polyphonic coming together and going beyond, both in explorations and theorizations of communication and language (or of how we make meaning and communicate).

Traces of the unifying entanglements that hold this book together are in the title’s nonfinite verb forms: ‘making signs’, ‘translanguaging ethnographies’ and ‘exploring urban, rural and educational spaces’ – they resonate, chime and address doing, moving and changing rather than stasis. The knowledge in each of the seven empirical chapters (Chapters 3 through 9) that comprise the lion’s share of words is about exploring sign-making and translanguaging from smaller pieces of larger ethnographic datasets. One way to conceptualize the entanglements is to cluster them as follows: three chapters explore making signs (Chapters 3 through 5) in urban (Chapter 3), rural (Chapter 5) and both rural and urban contexts (Chapter 4). Two additional chapters explore translanguaging (Chapters 8 and 9), each in rural Africa, with one in an educational space (Chapter 9) and the other through an outdoor linguistic landscape study (Chapter 8). Finally, two further chapters resonate with explorations of both sign-making and translanguaging in urban educational contexts (Chapters 6 and 7).

An additional way to construct meaning across the chapters is through the moves implied in a (re)centering of discourses from the periphery. Where relevant, Adami’s (Chapter 3) and Banda, Jimaima and Mokwena’s (Chapter 5) ethnographies might be interpreted as suggesting that researchers in multilingual contexts explore the possible central role that artifacts-as-signs might play in their research, particularly in contexts where linguistic meaning-making due to constraints of linguistic comprehensibility prevail; Archer and Björkvall’s research (Chapter 4) suggests the adaptability of a concept of repertoire from translanguaging as a centering move in their study of circulating discourses around upcycled artifacts-as-signs; Bradley and Moore (Chapter 6) suggest semiotic transformation as a centering move possibly leading to a dynamic conceptualization of translanguaging around artifacts-as-signs; Perera (Chapter 7), Goodchild and Weidl (Chapter 8) and Sherris, Schaefer and Mango (Chapter 9) center the communicative resources of translanguaging and work the spaces of translanguaging repertoires in contexts that themselves are not central research sites and more traditional sociolinguistic and sociopolitical takes on their research would stress code-switching across separate and distinct language categories. If sign-making is at bottom relational, entangling and dynamic, it is no less political. As such, each chapter might be viewed as a political re-centering of ethnographic research agendas in urban, rural and educational spaces.

Because ethnography does not occur in a theoretical vacuum, no matter the extent to which an emic understanding grounds the endeavor, short narratives on broad questions with theoretical ramifications were solicited from major theorists on sign-making/social semiotics (Gunther Kress), translanguaging (Ofelia García), exploratory/radical sociolinguistics/social theory (Jan Blommaert) and Complex Dynamics Systems Theory (Diane Larsen-Freeman). The resulting bricolage piece (Chapter 2) embodies its title ‘Communicating beyond Diversity’ in its very process of co-construction; by entexting1 into writing what we foresee as a mutually influencing practice of theoretical discussion, it shows, we hope, the immensely rich and useful opportunities and outcomes of pursuing a dialogue across these important theories. A complex subject positioning across these theories is to take a heterarchic approach (discussed briefly below and in Chapter 10) to tools and research methods across timescales, spaces, practices, bodies and the material world. As such, a complex dynamic turn as metaphor (Blommaert, 2015, 2016) or as metatheory (Larsen-Freeman, 2017; Bricolage) represents directions to guide a complexity turn in ethnography (Agar, 2004a, 2004b). Social semiotics (Hodge & Kress, 1988; Kress, 2010; van Leeuwen, 2005) discusses complexity and change with respect to meaning-making, suggesting a mutual process of influence between social semiotics and ethnography (Dicks et al., 2011).

For Elisabetta, coming from a social semiotic perspective (Hodge & Kress, 1988; Kress, 2010; van Leeuwen, 2005) onto meaning-making, the book shows the coming to a meeting space of two recent areas of thinking that, each from its end, started questioning well-established traditional assumptions on the way in which language and communication work. On the one end, by looking at the situated practices of language use, the latest sociolinguistic research into superdiversity and applied linguistic research on (trans)languaging (for the most recent works in the area see Arnaut et al., 2016; Canagarajah, 2017, 2018; Creese & Blackledge, 2018; García et al., 2017; Hua et al., 2017; Vogel & García, 2017; Wei, 2017) is not only questioning national language codification as the most useful lens to investigate meaning-making today, but it is also coming unavoidably to engage with the multimodality of communication; quite simply, if we want to observe how people communicate and make meaning in actual practices and contexts, we realize that we need to factor in how we gesture, how we smile and frown, how we use objects, images and our bodies, along with how we speak and write. And, when we do so, the whole process appears in its fluidity and complexity, rather than as the result of selecting and combining pre-given inventories of (nationally codified) rules and signs. On the other end, the latest semiotic research, in the increasingly multifaceted and stratified theoretical and empirical body of work in social semiotic multimodality, is faced with the need to tackle issues of ‘culture’, when confronted with today’s transnational dynamics and flows of people and signs (Adami, 2017; Hawkins, 2018). While social semiotics multimodality has had an innovative influence and effect on the ways in which we look at language, as one (not necessarily the most sophisticated and norm-providing) of the resources that we use to communicate, it still needs to develop and refine its theoretical, methodological and analytical apparatus to account for today’s trans- inter- and cross-cultural dynamics of meaning-making. The chapters addressing sign-making in this volume are a first attempt at doing so.

For Ari, yet another way to conceptualize the entanglements (Barad, 2007) is through a Complex Semiotic Heterarchic Theory. As such, the many labors of love published in this volume are but snapshots of continuous movement and changes in their making, translanguaging and exploring. They are, perforce, dynamic, mobile, porous, soft-assembled and co-constructed (Larsen-Freeman, 2017a,b) with materials, voices, discourses, lyrics, scripts, transcriptions, objects and any number of ways we label the relationalities within and between the discoursing in all the chapters of this book, including the theoretical ones. The meaning within each chapter emphasizes a continuously emerging meaning-making or ‘effects’ (Chapter 2), making it unnecessary to decide if change or sign-making are in some modernist hierarchy, some metatheory with sign-making or change beyond or higher than the other. A heterarchy also discounts a homoarchy, which would only be one path or patterning. This thinking, perhaps, is promoted through a concept of the world as an undifferentiated manifold – materially and relationally. Heterarchy is also promoted when we conceptualize relationalities as Martin Buber has done. In I and Thou, Buber (1923/1970) traces relationalities through ‘encounter’ and ‘experience’, where the former is our closest relation of ecological wholeness in ways not unlike the conceptualizing of posthumanism we live within when we are one with our most embodied sense ...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• 1 Unifying Entanglements and Dynamic Relationalities: An Introduction
• 2 Communicating Beyond Diversity: A Bricolage of Ideas
• 3 Multimodal Sign-Making in Today’s Diversity: The Case of Leeds Kirkgate Market
• 4 Material Sign-Making in Diverse Contexts: ‘Upcycled’ Artefacts as Refracting Global/Local Discourses
• 5 Semiotic Remediation of Chinese Signage in the Linguistic Landscapes of Two Rural Areas of Zambia
• 6 Resemiotisation and Creative Production: Extending the Translanguaging Lens
• 7 Gesture and Translanguaging at the Tamil Temple
• 8 Translanguaging Practices in the Casamance, Senegal: Similar but Different – Two Case Studies
• 9 The Paradox of Translanguaging in Safaliba: A Rural Indigenous Ghanaian Language
• 10 Heterarchic Commentaries
• Index