THE INTERFACE BETWEEN LINGUISTIC AND POST-STRUCTURALIST FEMINIST ETHNOGRAPHIES
19-20 April 2004
King's College, London
UK Linguistic Ethnography Forum Seminar 4
Participants' research interests
Barwell, Richard
Institution: University of Bristol email address: Richard.Barwell@bristol.ac.uk
Summary of research interests:- My research concerns mathematics classroom discourse. This focus includes an interest in the mathematical thinking of students in multilingual contexts. I am interested, for example, in how multilingual students participate in and make sense of mathematical interaction. I am also interested in the relationship between sociolinguistic context and the patterns of interaction and meaning-making that arise in mathematics classrooms. What is the difference between a mathematics lesson in South Africa or London? What of the difference is related to the different multilingual contexts of the classrooms?
Bilingual students are likely to draw on a wide range of cultural, linguistic and social experiences in meaning-making in the classroom, presenting challenges for interpretive research. I am therefore also interested in the methodological issues which arise from researching in diverse contexts. How can interaction in culturally and linguistically diverse contexts be analysed? What can be said about the role of students' home languages if these are not heard in the classroom? How can we account for the experience of the researcher in making sense of classroom data?
References
Barwell, R. (2003) A discursive psychology approach to the analysis of attention in mathematics classroom interaction. Research in Mathematics Education 5, 3-15.
Barwell, R. (2003) Linguistic discrimination: issues for research in mathematics education. For the Learning of Mathematics: An International Journal 23(2) 37-43.
Barwell, R. (2003) Discursive Psychology and mathematics education: possibilities and challenges. Zentralblatt für Ditaktik der Mathematik (ZDM) 35(5) 201-207.
Barwell, R. (2003) Patterns of attention in the interaction of a primary school mathematics student with English as an additional language. Educational Studies in Mathematics: An International Journal 53(1) 35-59.
Baxter, Judith
Institution: The University of Reading email address: Judith.baxter@tesco.net or j.a.baxter@reading.ac.uk
Summary of research interests:-
My research interests currently lie within two fields: those of language and gender, and feminist post-structuralist research methodology. Within language and gender, I have published extensively on the relationship between gender and pupils’ oracy skills. I am currently setting up a research project on the language of female leadership in business settings.
Within the field of research methodology, I have recently published a book (see below) which introduces the newly emerging field of feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis (FPDA). The book explores the relationship between feminist post-structuralism and ethnography, demonstrating possible approaches through a study of school pupils’ conversations in class and a study of managers’ discussions in team meetings.
Baxter, J. (2002) A Juggling Act: a feminist post-structuralist analysis of girls’ and boys’ talk in the secondary classroom. Gender & Education 14, 1, 5-19
Baxter, J. (2003) Positioning Gender in Discourse: A feminist methodology.
Basingstoke: Palgrave, Macmillan
Baxter, J. (forthcoming) Putting gender in its place: constructing speaker identities in
management meetings. In M. Barrett & M.J. Davidson (eds) Gender and Communications at Work. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
Budach, Gabriele
Institution: Universität Frankfurt am Main
E-mail: budach@em.uni-frankfurt.de
Summary of research interests:-
My Ph.D. research focused on adult literacy with specific reference to French in Ontario. The research was carried out as part of an international project on French-speaking minorities in Canada. As an invited researcher at the Centre for Research on Franco-Ontarian Education (CREFO – Centre de recherche en education franco-ontarienne) at the University of Toronto, I carried out ethnographic fieldwork in three adult literacy centres in different parts of the province of Ontario. My main aims in this empirical work were to identify different discourses about literacy and to investigate literacy practices. In my analysis of the ethnographic and textual data from this period of fieldwork, I made links with recent strands of social theory. Through this research, I have become particularly interested in issues situated at the interface between multilingualism, literacy and gender (see the current collaboration with Marilyn Martin-Jones). Therefore, in the forthcoming seminar organised by the UK Linguistic Ethnography Forum, I would be interested in discussing ways of exploring these issues and considering possible directions of theory-building.
My current work has a somewhat different focus: I am involved in a research project that is focusing on a bilingual German-Italian school programme (two-way immersion) in Frankfurt. One of the goals of this research is to explore the links between (socio-) linguistics and learning theory.
Recent papers
Budach, G. (2003) Diskurse und Praxis der Alphabetisierung von Erwachsenen im frankophonen Kanada. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Budach, G. (2003) “Language ideologies and language practice in French adult literacy centers in Canada: the case of French Ontario”. Conference proceedings of the second University of Vigo international symposium on bilingualism, 23-26 October, 2002. (www.uvigo.es/webs/ssl/sib2002).
Budach, G., Roy, S. and Heller, M. (2003) “Community and commodity in French Ontario” Language in Society 32(5): 603-627.
The project, entitled: “Speaking out: the discursive construction of la francophonie in North America”, was directed by Monica Heller, Normand Labrie (University of Toronto) and Jürgen Erfurt (University of Frankfurt am Main) and received funding between 1996 and 2000 from the German-American Council Foundation and the Human Science Research Council.
Cameron, Deborah
Institution: University of Oxford
email address: deborah.cameron@worcester.ox.ac.uk
Summary of research interests:-
I am a sociolinguist and feminist whose main research interests are in language, gender and sexuality, language ideologies and language education and training. As well as publishing various books and articles specifically about language, I've done feminist research in other areas (I once co-wrote a book about sexual murder, for instance). My most recent project involving fieldwork was about the way spoken language is regulated in new capitalist service workplaces like call centres. It had a gender dimension insofar as there's a considerable overlap between 'good service' talk and the kind of talk that is ideologically linked to femininity. (Though I wouldn't call what I did in call centres ethnography, since the workplaces I got access to weren't keen on long-term participant observation.) Very recently I've been looking at the reception of a web-based tool called the 'Gender Genie', which claims to be able to identify the gender of an author from 500 words of text, and is much discussed among bloggers. This has made me somewhat interested in how you do ethnographic work in virtual cultures.
Angela Creese
Institution: School of Education, University of Birmingham email address: a.creese@bham.ac.uk
Summary of research interests
Angela Creese is lecturer in education and programme coordinator for MEd in
Bilingualism in Education and MA Education (TEFL) at the University of Birmingham. Her interests are in discourse as social practice in educational settings and language policy and planning. She has worked as a researcher on several multi-disciplinary research teams with a focus on difference, diversity and collaboration. She has contributed to national and international journals on teacher talk in multilingual and multicultural settings.
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Flewitt, Rosie
Institution: School of Education, University of Southampton email address: r.s.flewitt@soton.ac.uk
Summary of research interests
My research interests lie in the socially situated and multimodal nature of communication, currently focussing on early years education. My recently completed PhD thesis used longitudinal ethnographic video case studies to investigate how four 3-year-old children integrated a range of strategies, including talk, body movement, gesture and gaze, to make and express meaning at home and in a preschool playgroup. Drawing on the works of Foucault, Bourdieu and Lave and Wenger, the study unravelled how the children adapted to and resisted the communicative practices of the preschool setting, and identified patterns in the children’s uses of different communicative strategies relating to the dynamics of the social, institutional and immediate contexts in which they were situated.
My research interests also include: the impact of early education policy changes, particularly the Foundation Stage Curriculum, early years assessment and single entry to primary school; methodological and ethical issues regarding the representation and analysis of video and audio data. I am an ESRC-funded post-doctoral Fellow at the University of Southampton.
Inagaki, Noriko
Institution: SOAS email address: ni2@soas.ac.uk
Summary of research interests:-
The search for a universal theory (Lakoff 1973; Leech 1983; Brown and Levinson 1978; 1987)has been the mainstream of current politeness studies. I am
exploring the dynamics of linguistic politeness employing an alternative approach, characterised by applying a broader version of the Sapir-Whorf linguistic relativity hypothesis, i.e. relativity in language use (Lucy 1996) and adopting Bourdieu’s (1977) notion of ‘habitus’ and his ‘theory of practice. Also I am using social theorists such as Goffman, Foucault to explain different dimensions of politeness.
Khasandi-Telewa Vicky
Institution: University of Warwick
Email Address: Khasandi@Yahoo.Com
Summary Of Research Interests:
My research interests are in the area of multilingualism and language planning and policy. I am working on my PhD thesis entitled ‘Language use in the Education of Multilingual Refugee children in a camp: the case of Kakuma Kenya. I am using an ethnographic approach. I have already spent some three months in the refugee camp and I am working on the data.
Lytra, Vally
Institution: Dept. of Byzantine & Modern Greek, King’s College London
email address: vally.lytra@pobox.com
Summary of research interests:-
I am interested in the role of language and processes of social identity construction in multilingual/multicultural settings. I have conducted ethnographic research in the context of my PhD thesis (Lytra 2003) where I have looked into ways in which the members of a linguistically and culturally mixed peer group (Greek majority language and Turkish minority language) comprised of Greek-Turkish bilinguals and Greek-speaking monolingual 10-year olds construct play frames and social identities in an Athens primary school.
I am presently working on a project on identifying levels of linguistic proficiency in Greek as a second language among pupils attending Greek-Turkish bilingual minority schools in Western Thrace (Greece). This is part of a larger project called ‘Education of the Muslim Minority Children’ (for more details see URL: http://www.ecd.uoa.gr/museduc/ [in Greek]. Although the project does not have a strong ethnographic focus, there are some interesting sociolinguistic issues, which have arisen from the data collection and analysis. These issues include home-school interface, perceptions of teachers regarding their pupils’ proficiency in Greek, parents’ attitudes and practices towards their children’s language learning which could be explored in more depth through more ethnographic approaches. This project finishes in June 2004 after which I hope to do an ethnographic study looking at identity and second language learning among Greek-Turkish bilingual adolescents in a community-based youth organisation in a multilingual/multicultural neighbourhood in Athens, Greece.
Publications:
(to appear) Frame Shifting and Identity Construction during Whole Class Instruction: Teachers as Initiators and Respondents in Play Frames. Selected Papers from the Annual Meeting of the British Association of Applied Linguistics University of Leeds, September 2003.
(2004) Learning Greek as a Second Language: Identifying Levels of Linguistic Proficiency in Greek in Minority Elementary Schools in Thrace [in Greek]. In collaboration with: M. Tzevelekou, V. Kantzou, S. Stamouli, V. Chondrogianni, G. Papageorgopoulos, S. Varlokosta & M. Iakovou. (End-of-project report for ‘Education of the Muslim Minority Children, 2002-2004’).
(2003) Constructing Play Frames and Social Identities. The Case of a Linguistically and Culturally Mixed Peer Group in an Athenian Primary School. PhD thesis, King’s College London.
Martin-Jones, Marilyn
Institution: University of Wales Aberystwyth
email address: mqm@aber.ac.uk
Summary of research interests:-
Over the past twenty five years, I have been involved in two broad types of research on bilingualism and multilingualism in Britain: (1) research on bilingual discourse, in classroom and community contexts (i.e. discourse analytic work with an ethnographic component); (2) ethnographic research on literacy and the uses of texts in multilingual settings. My fieldwork has been carried out in urban settings in England and, more recently, in rural and urban settings in Wales. The main focus of my current work is on the interface between multilingualism, literacy and gender. In September 2003, I co-convened a panel (with Gabriele Budach) on ‘Minority language literacy and gender: discourses, positioning, women’s options and practices’ at a conference on Multiliteracies: the contact zone, held at the University of Gent, Belgium.
Recent papers
Martin-Jones, M. 2000 “Enterprising women: multilingual literacies in the construction of new identities”. In M. Martin-Jones (eds.) Multilingual literacies: reading and writing different worlds. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Martin-Jones, M. 2003 “Literacies, gender and different workplace identities: Gujarati women at work in a British city”. Contribution to the panel on ‘Minority language literacy and gender: discourses, positioning, women’s options and practices’ at the conference on Multiliteracies: the contact zone, held at the University of Gent, Belgium, September 2003.
Maybin, Janet
Institution Open University
Email address j.maybin@open.ac.uk
Research activity
I have been working for some years on data from an ethnographic study of 10-12 year old school children’s informal language and literacy practices. I used radio microphone recordings, interviews and participant observation to collect 80 hours of audiodata together with contextual information. I have used this data to look at children's collaboration through talk, their management of reported voices and conversational narratives, framing and intertextuality and performance of gender identities. I am currently looking at creativity in the talk, and bringing all the research together as a book. My analytic approach uses textual analysis within a dialogic model of communication and an ethnographic framework. In theoretical terms I draw on Vygotsky, Bakhtin and Volosinov, the Ethnography of Communication literature and more recent work in Linguistic Ethnography and Linguistic Anthropology..
Selected publications
Maybin, J. (1999) 'Framing and evaluation in 10-12 year old school children's use of reported and appropriated speech, in relation to their induction into educational procedures and practices’. in TEXT Vol 19(4).
Maybin, J. (2002) ‘‘What’s the hottest part of the Sun? Page 3! Children’s exploration of adolescent gender identities through informal talk’, in J. Sunderland and L. Litosseliti (eds) Discourse analysis and gender identities. Amsterdam, John Benjamins.
Maybin, J. (2003) ‘Language, relationships and identity’ in Kehily, M.J.and Swann, J. (eds) Children’s cultural worlds. John Wiley, Chichester.
Obondo, Margaret
Institution Rinkeby Institute of Multilingual Research
Email address margaret.obondo@rinkeby-multiling.stockholm.se
Research activity
I am a Research Fellow at Rinkeby Institute of Multilingual Research in Stockholm. Rinkeby Institute focuses its research on language, literacy and education of linguistic minorities within the Stockholm City. My research interest include language and education in Africa, language and literacy socialisation of pre-school children in multilingual context. Since 1988, I have been the principal investigator in three years ethnographic study of language and literacy socialisation of Somali pre-school children in a multilingual neighbourhood in Stockholm. The ethnographic field-work focused on three sites: the pre-school context (b) the home and family context and (c) the wider community context. The main body of data from the three sites include: interview data from different key players in the children socialisation (i.e., the parents, teachers, Swedish and Somali pre-school caregivers), field-notes from the pre-school classroom observations, audio-recordings of caregiver/child interactions and observation data from the families. The goal of our work is to highlight the complex range of cultural and interactional experiences shaping the way the children are being socialised.
I am in the process of working on two publications (a Swedish and English version) based on our findings from this project. The publications are due in the autumn (Sept. 2004). The volumes are intended for a wider readership of practitioners as well as researchers.
Pahl, Kate
Institution: University of Sheffield email address: K.Pahl@sheffield.ac.uk
Summary of research interests:-
Kate Pahl currently works at the University of Sheffield, and has recently completely a project with a team of researchers on community-focused provision in adult literacy, numeracy and ESOL, funded by the NRDC. She has experience of evaluating family learning provision in Derbyshire and the London Borough of Croydon. She is involved with a practitioner research project looking at ways of attracting new learners, with Sheffield College, funded through the NRDC. Her research interests have focused on literacy in community and family settings, and ways of considering the home/school border crossing.
She has drawn on ethnographic research methods with a particular attention to family and community learning practices to consider what families bring to school based learning. She has also considered the way in which narratives of migration, loss and displacement can be considered drawing on linguistic ethnography as a methodological tool. She has drawn on Bourdieu’s theory of habitus to consider how text making in the home is shaped by social practice, and has also drawn on theories of identity in practice from Holland et al in understanding narrative and identity (Bourdieu, 1990; Holland et al 2000).
References
Bourdieu, P. (1990) The Logic of Practice Cambridge: Polity Press
Holland, D. et al (2000) Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds. Harvard: Harvard
University Press.
Pichler, Pia
Institution: Middlesex University
email address: piapichler@yahoo.co.uk
Summary of research interests:-
My research investigates the discursive construction of young femininities in the talk of adolescent British girls from different social class and ethnic backgrounds. My data consists of the spontaneous talk of 3 groups of adolescent girls, as well as of informal observations, questionnaires, group interviews and my close collaboration with one of the girls. My methodology draws on a selection of qualitative frameworks (ethnography, discourse analysis, conversation analysis and interactional sociolinguistics) that allow me to investigate both the micro-structures of language practices and their relationship to macro-structures.
Although I view gender identities as being constructed discursively, I am particularly interested in whether and how the girls’ agency is framed by structural categories (social class and ethnicity.) Thus I feel that the emphasis on the local character of gender identities offered by the highly influential model of the Community of Practice (Eckert and McConnell Ginet: 1992, 1995, 1999), which takes a social constructionist approach to gender, has regrettably resulted in what I believe to be a neglect of interest in macro-structural factors such as social class and ethnicity. Moreover I feel that the necessary process of deconstructing gender in post-structuralist feminism has at times obscured the political agenda of feminism. I hope to be able to address some of these points in the ethnography forum.
References:
Eckert, Penelope and McConnell-Ginet, Sally (1992) ´Think practically and look locally: language and gender as community-based practice’, Annual Review of Anthropology 21, pp 461-490.
Eckert, Penelope and McConnell-Ginet, Sally (1995) ‘Constructing meaning, constructing selves: Snapshots of language, gender and class from Belten High’ in Kira Hall and Mary Bucholtz (eds.) Gender articulated. Language and the socially constructed self, pp 469-508. New York: Routledge.
Eckert, Penelope and McConnell-Ginet, Sally (1999) ‘New generalizations and explanations in language and gender research’, Language in Society 28: pp 185-201.
Preece, Siân
Institution: University Of Westminster, Educational Initiative Centre, 35 Marylebone Rd, London, NW1 5LS
email address: s.preece@wmin.ac.uk
Summary of research interests:-
I am interested in sociolinguistic questions concerning language, gender, ethnicity and identity from a poststructuralist feminist standpoint. My current work, which will form my doctoral thesis, is situated in an academic literacy programme, established as part of a post-1992 urban university’s strategy on widening participation and student retention. Through discourse analysis, I am considering ways in which the primarily British multilingual undergraduates on this programme perform gender within their undergraduate peer group. I am particularly interested in the ways in which this peer-group talk orients these students to the ‘discoursing subjects’ (Foucault, 1991) of higher education and the language and literacy practices of university communities of practice.
References:
Preece, Siân (2004) ‘Language and identity issues with home students on EAP writing programmes’ in L. Sheldon (ed), Directions for the Future: Issues in English for Academic Purposes. Bern: Peter Lang.
Preece, Siân and Godfrey, Jeanne (2004) ‘Academic literacy practices and widening participation: first year undergraduates on an academic writing programme’. Widening Participation and Lifelong Learning: The Journal of the Institute for Access Studies and the European Access Network, 6 (1): 5-13.
Name: Rampton, Ben
Institution: King's College, University of London
Email: ben.rampton@kcl.ac.uk
Summary of research interests:-
My research generally works on the Gumperzian premise that as it's a key site for the negotiation of social order, relations and identities, a close look at situated interaction can throw new light on issues of more general social, cultural and educational debate. I have done three periods of intensive fieldwork focusing on urban heteroglossia among adolescents in youth clubs, playgrounds and schools in London and the South Midlands (1984-85, 1987, 1997-98), and most of my fieldwork involves participant-observation, interviews, radio-microphone recording, and playback sessions. My approach is grounded in interactional sociolinguistics and the ethnography of communication, though I have also drawn quite extensively on themes and concepts from cultural studies, anthropology and sociology. Along with Roxy Harris, Constant Leung and Celia Roberts, I am part of the Language and Ethnicities Research Group (previously the Urban Multilingualism RG) at King's, and our stated aims are (a) to develop applied and sociolinguistic frameworks adequate to the analysis of contemporary urban language, learning, literacy and interaction, and (b) to develop modes of intervention within language education policy and practice that are productively tuned to the local realities of urban institutional life.
My own efforts to contribute to this larger programme have been influenced by the ways in which my empirical data on urban heteroglossia resonate with wider debates about late/post-modernity. This coalescence of data and theory throws doubt on the traditional linguistic assumptions that (i) language study should be centrally concerned with systematicity in grammar and coherence in discourse, and (ii) that people learn to talk grammatically and coherently from extensive early experience of living in families and fairly stable local social networks, and it has led to critical engagement with prevailing sociolinguistic perspectives on ethnicity, speech community, intercultural communication, and code-switching. Urban heteroglossia involves a complex dialogue around self/us and the other, but there has been very little sensitivity to this in the massive linguistic literature on second/foreign/additional language learning, and so this has been a second field of engagement. Language education policy and practice constitute a third area, and here I have explored the interface between urban heteroglossia and the teaching of ESL, minority languages, language awareness, and foreign languages. Lastly, I have argued that ongoing epistemic shifts provide applied linguistics with a good opportunity to move beyond SLA+ELT to Hymes' view of a socially constituted linguistics and to a much fuller relationship with interdisciplinary research and intervention elsewhere in the social sciences.
My current research includes a project on Interaction, Media Culture and Adolescents at School (2001-2002; Rampton, Harris and Dover; Spencer Foundation) Representative Publications
Rampton, B. (1995) Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. London: Longman.
Rampton, B. (1997) 'Returning in applied linguistics.' International Journal of Applied Linguistics. 7 (1): 3-25.
Rampton, B. (1998) 'Speech community.' In J. Verschueren, J-O +la, J. Blommaert and C. Bulcaen (eds) Handbook of Pragmatics 1998. Amsterdam: John Benjamins
Rampton, B. (1999) 'Sociolinguistics and Cultural Studies: New ethnicities, liminality and interaction.' Social Semiotics. 9 (3): 355-374.
Rampton, B. (1999) 'Deutsch in inner London and the animation of an instructed foreign language.' Journal of Sociolinguistics 3 (4): 480-504.
Rampton, B (2001) 'Critique in interaction.' Critique of Anthropology 21 (1)
Rampton, B. (2003) 'Hegemony, social class and stylisation'. Pragmatics 13 (1) 49-84
Rampton, B. (2005). Interaction in an Urban School: Late modern language & society. Cambridge: CUP
Shrubshall, Peter
Institution: Kings College, London email address: paul@shrubshall6012.freeserve.co.uk
Summary of research interests:-
Recent work:
1996-2003, PhD, EAL, classroom interaction and narrative
2003-NRDC research projects in ESOL and embedded literacy
Street, Brian
Institution: King’s College London
email address: brian.street@kcl.ac.uk
Summary of research interests:-
Brian Street is Professor of Language in Education at King’s College, London University and Visiting Professor of Education in the Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania. Prof. Street undertook anthropological fieldwork on literacy in Iran during the 1970's and taught social and cultural anthropology for over twenty years at the University of Sussex before taking up the Chair of Language in Education at King's College London. He has written and lectured extensively on literacy practices from both a theoretical and an applied perspective. He has a longstanding commitment to linking ethnographic-style research on the cultural dimension of language and literacy with contemporary practice in education and in development. He has been involved in Technical Support teams, lecture tours, workshops, training programmes and research on this in a number of countries - Australia, USA, S. Africa, Nepal, etc. His most recent publication in this field was an edited volume of ethnographic accounts of development and literacy work entitled Literacy and Development: Ethnographic Perspectives (Routledge, 2001: shortlisted for the BAAL Book Prize). Other books include Literacy in Theory and Practice (C.U.P. 1985), edited, Cross-Cultural Approaches to Literacy, (CUP, 1993), Social Literacies (1995) and a co-edited volume on academic literacies (Student Writing in the University: Cultural and Epistemological Issues Benjamins 2000). He is currently writing up a research project and on home/ school literacy and numeracy practices (forthcoming – co-author Numeracy Practices at Home and at School, Kluwer) and is editing a collection of essays under the title Literacies across Educational Contexts Caslon Press: Phila.) and a reader on literacy studies entitled Literacy: A resource Handbook, Routledge).
Swann, Joan
Institution: Centre for Language and Communications, Open University
email address: j.swann@open.ac.uk
Summary of research interests:-
My main research area is sociolinguistics, although I’m also interested in interdisciplinary approaches. I have an ongoing interest in language and gender in educational contexts, with a particular focus on spoken interaction in the classroom. A current preoccupation here is with attempts to teach children particular ways of speaking, and how such ‘educationally relevant’ forms of talk are drawn on by children in the negotiation of identities and the management of relations with others. I’m looking at this in terms of ‘design’, in that the talk is deliberately and explicitly designed by educationists to serve certain ends, but is then redesigned by children as speakers. A related methodological concern is in how researchers interpret spoken texts in terms of gender, and in particular what kinds of warrants are drawn on to support such interpretations.
My two most recent publications on language and gender are:
Swann, J. (2002) ‘Yes, but is it gender?’, in Litosseliti, L. and Sunderland, J. (eds) Gender Identity and Discourse Analysis, Amsterdam, Benjamins, pp. 43-67. ISBN 9 027 22692 X.
Swann, J. (2003) ‘Schooled language: language and gender in educational settings’, in Holmes, J. and Meyerhoff, M. (eds) The Handbook of Language and Gender, Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, pp. 624-44. ISBN 0 631 22502 1.
Tremlett Annabel
Institution: King’s College, London
email address: Annabel.tremlett@kcl.ac.uk
Summary of research interests:-
Title: Social integration of Roma in Hungry
The Roma (Gypsies) remain to date the most deprived ethnic group in Europe. The prospective enlargement of the European Union has awoken European institutions to the plight of the Roma, and improving their position has been a fundamental criterion for candidate countries such as Hungry since 1993. European commission annual reports from 1997 have strongly recommended the integration of Roma into Hungarian society, and since 1998, the Hungarian government has adopted an integration discourse. School has been the main focus of the implementing integration strategies, and it is also a key institutional site of interface between policy discourse and ordinary people. But the goal has been 'to reduce the deficiencies' of the Roma (Doncsev 2000: 6), and integration has been guided by the assumptions of a deficit model that has been widely contested in other European minority contexts (e.g. Grant 1997 on minorities and identity in Europe).
This research seeks to investigate discourses of social integration at three broad levels:
(a) The EU accession and national policy discourses of integration
How the Roman minority and the integration into Hungarian society have been discussed and represented in the EU accession process, using discourse analysis to interpret documents with a focus on education;
(b) The local uptake and effects of integration policy discourse
How national policy discourses intersect with discourses of integration at a local level, in the school and home lives of a Roma community; how national representations of Roma identity impact on the lived experience of the Roma community in Kecskemet, Hungary, using ethnography with discourse analysis and cultural theory.
(c) The relation of the Hungarian Roma case to discourses about minority integration elsewhere
The manner and extent to which ethnography, discourse analysis and cultural theory produce an account of integration policies and experience for the Hungarian Roma that is different or similar to discussions of minority integration elsewhere.
References
Doncsev, T. (ed) 2000 'Measures taken by the state to promote the social integration of Roma living in Hungry' Budapest, Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Grant, G.1997 'Some problems of identity and education: a comparative examination of multicultural education, in Comparative Education 33, 1 9-28.
Wetherell, Margaret
Institution: Social Sciences,Open University
email address: m.s.wetherell@open.ac.uk
Summary of research interests:-
My principal interest has been in developing discourse theory and method for social psychological investigations. This work which has become known as 'discursive psychology' draws on a range of discourse theories including conversation analysis and post-structuralism. We try and study how social relations enter into people's everyday situated actions, talk and interaction, moving from the analysis of turn by turn features through to the broader cultural resources organising meaning making. The focus throughout is on discursive practices particularly the psycho-discursive practices which construct a consequential self, psychology, emotions, motivations and subjectivity for the speaker and social actor. I have applied this general theoretical work to the study of racism in New Zealand and to gender relations, specifically forms of masculinity. My latest grant is an investigation of discursive or deliberative democracy through an ethnography of a citizen's council set up by the National Institute of Clinical Excellence. Here the issue is to clarify what deliberation might look like as an actual discursive practice as opposed to a philosophical ideal or an ideal speech situation.
My recent work has also been more firmly focused on identity and I currently direct a research programme on Identities and Social Action for the ESRC. I have been exploring the interface between psychoanalytic and discursive accounts of subjectivity, in part developing a critique of psychoanalysis but also examining what purchase psychoanalytic concepts might have in light of the 'turn to discourse'. What might 'splitting', for example, or the 'depressive position' look like as a discursive phenomena? There is potential for rich new understandings of subjectivity as these traditions are brought together but also scope for some knotty epistemological conflicts.
Wetherell, M., Taylor, S. and Yates, S. (eds) (2001) Discourse Theory and Practice: A Reader. London: Sage.
Wetherell, M., Taylor, S. and Yates, S. (eds) (2001) Discourse as Data: A guide to Analysis. London: Sage.
Van Den Berg, H., Wetherell, M. and Houtkoop, H. (eds) (2004) Analysing Racist Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wetherell, M. (2003) ‘Paranoia, ambivalence and discursive practices: Concepts of position and positioning in psychoanalysis and discursive psychology’. In R. Harre and F. Moghaddam (eds) The Self and Others: Positioning Individuals and Groups in Personal, Political and Cultural Contexts. New York: Praeger/Greenwood Publishers.
Wetherell, M. (1998) ' Positioning and interpretative repertoires: Conversation analysis and post-structuralism in dialogue'. Discourse and Society, 9, 431-456.
Wetherell, M. and Edley, N. (1999) 'Negotiating hegemonic masculinity: Imaginary positions and psycho-discursive practices'. Feminism and Psychology, 9, 335-356
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