Ethnographic Monitoring: Hymes's Unfinished Business in Educational Research

This essay describes the process of Hymesian monitoring, a collaborative effort to understand voice in education, so crucial in Hymes's later work. A report of ethnographic monitoring in 1970s Philadelphia and a recent collaborative project in the Caribbean demonstrate how one can work from the voice of the pupil, through that of the analyst toward that of the teacher and back, checking what each party brought into the analysis and treating each of these voices as legitimate. [Hymes, ethnographic monitoring, Philadelphia, Barbados, ethnopoetics]

Grassroots Literacy

A market of accents

This paper describes the cultural semantics of internet courses in American accent. Such courses are offered by corporate providers to specific groups of customers: people in search of success in the globalized business environment. The core of such courses is an order of indexicality which stresses uniformity and homogeneity, producing an invisible accent that replaces existing ‘foreign’ (i.e. authentic, biographic) accents. It is a new form of commodified dialectology, which differs quite substantially from common state and academic attitudes towards dialects and accents. The procedures used by such private providers are instances of language policing aimed at the infinitely small stuff o…

Multi-Everything London

Space, scale and accents : constructing migrant identity in Beijing

Bernstein and poetics revisited: voice, globalization and education

This article engages in a theory of linguistic inequality under conditions of globalization. Starting from a development of the notion of voice as the capacity to make sense, and a development of the organized and patterned `poetic' structure of actual discourse, it analyses data from police interviews with immigrants, witness statements in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and data from classroom learning environments in South Africa and Belgium. Throughout these analyses, we see that detailed attention to poetic patterning is required in order to reconstruct the voice articulated by people whose voice's would otherwise not be heard. This insight has a bearing on our …

A Market of accents

Book review: NORMAN FAIRCLOUGH, Language and Globalization. London: Routledge, 2006. viii + 186 pp

Dissecting multilingual Beijing : the space and scale of vernacular globalization

Chthonic science: Georges Niangoran-Bouah and the anthropology of belonging in Côte d'Ivoire

Georges Niangoran-Bouah worked assiduously toward Africanizing national education, academia, and public culture in Cote d'Ivoire. As part of this venture, his research projects, including his study of "drummology," can be regarded as a quest for "chthonic" science, that is, an anthropology that uncovers and implements the deep tenets of African-Ivorian culture. Properly situated in its academic, ideological, and political umwelt, we demonstrate, Niangoran-Bouah's anthropology of belonging is not merely an instance of "closure" but must be seen as a multiform attempt to recover a "local" position as a way to participate in universal-global science.

Notes of power

"Isn't it enough to be a Chinese speaker" : language ideology and migrant identity construction in a public primary school in Beijing

Language and movement in space

Further notes on sociolinguistic scales

AbstractThis short paper seeks to reformulate and refine the notion of sociolinguistic scales as relative scope of understandability, thus drawing the notion fully into the realm of semiotics, rather than in the rather unproductive sphere of spatiotemporal and distributional interpretation where it has been deployed. Differences in scope of understandability are differences in the presupposability of signs, and such differences are not equivalent but stratified in a polycentric environment. Scales, in that sense, point towards the non-unified and hierarchical-layered nature of the sign and of meaning making practices. Scalar effects, once established, can furthermore be carried over into di…