10th Explorations in Ethnography Language and communication

Having previously analyzed ideologies of communicability—projections that speech and writing (ideally) provide clear, transparent, stable mechanisms for exchanging ideas (Locke 1959[1690]; Bauman and Briggs 2003), I recently rejected communicability as a foundational analytic in favor of tracking how ideologies of communicability and associated practices rather produce incommunicability by stigmatizing populations as incapable of achieving communicability (Briggs 2024). I also explored how people sometimes embrace spheres of incommunicability as sites for critically engaging dominant communicative ideologies and practices. Here I discuss two manifestations of a master creator of incommunicability—Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0.

First, I examine White House Coronavirus Task Force daily briefings March-April 2020 by analyzing the contrapuntal performances of Trump and physician/scientist Anthony Fauci. Through words and gestures, Fauci projected perfect figure transparency (Agha 2005) through his purported translation of COVID-19 facts and statistics into clear, transparent, non-contradictory statements. Trump rather embodied a politics of COVID incommunicability, treating statistics and scientific findings as constructions subservient to political and economic priorities. Trump suspended these daily briefings when Faucian COVID communicability turned Trumpian COVID incommunicability into a political liability—during an election year.

I then chart a linguistic ethnography of an unstable and rapidly shifting present. Trumpian incommunicability 1.0 centered on Trump’s words, social media texts, and media performance of figural opacity and unpredictability. Trumpian incommunicability 2.0 is simultaneously centered on Trump’s embodiment of the angry, defiant, all-powerful white U.S. man figure and decentered—as distinct forms of incommunicability emerge in capillary fashion in stock markets, federal agencies, and universities. My linguistic ethnography is unfolding in real time through participant observation as administrator and faculty member in the University of California, Berkeley. Through emails, meetings, casual conversations, social media groups, protests, and mainstream media, I trace how lives and careers vibrate with mounting and constantly shifting uncertainties. One focus is on the circulation of emails to grantees that announced cancellation of projects funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). University administrators attempted to centralize this circulation (“please send all such emails to X”). Media sources then reported that NEH had cancelled all grants, shifting the locus of incommunicability to UC Berkeley administrators’ vague promises of “bridge funding.” Similarly, an incommunicable economy of rumors project sitings of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, prompting speculation that the arrest and deportation of students and faculty who participated in Palestinian solidarity rallies had begun on our campus. Senior administrators are linking all rumored loci of federal intervention into an institutional sphere of incommunicability by declaring that they have devised strategies for countering all points of vulnerability—but cannot disclose them lest federal agents create counter-counter measures.

This paper will thus constitute an experimental linguistic ethnography where the author presents no claims to clairvoyance or communicability but only to analyze how he, colleagues, and students are learning to live—like oppressed populations more generally—in pervasive spheres of incommunicability.

References

• Agha, Asif. 2005. Voice, Footing, Enregisterment. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15:38-59.
• Bauman, Richard, and Charles L. Briggs. 2003. Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and Social Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Briggs, Charles L. 2024. Incommunicable: toward communicative Justice in Health and Medicine. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• Locke, John. 1959[1690]. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. New York: Dover.

This presentation examines the turn towards person-centered approaches in linguistic ethnography. It considers the political, epistemological, and methodological issues at stake in reconciling scholars’ and perceiving subjects’ understandings of signs and actions. Drawing from an incident that involved conflicting understandings of relevant moral frameworks, chronotopes, and characterological figures, I discuss tensions that arise when we try to mobilize frameworks that rely upon clear dichotomies between perpetrators and victims.  I examine some of the contradictions that arise from our investment in liberal notions of the empirical sign, the sovereign speaking subject, and language ideologies and consider potential alternatives for the study of language and social life.

Eva, a 35-year-old Italian Catholic based in the UK, wakes up, opens her bible and sends a passage (“Luke 6, 1-5”) by WhatsApp text message to a friend in her parish, before getting up and heading to the station to catch a train to work. While waiting on the platform, she sends a Telegram voice message in Italian to her sisters back in Italy, sharing with them an inspiring story she knows will resonate with their religious beliefs.

This talk puts forward a post-digital linguistic ethnography for understanding the technology-rich lives of contemporary networked individuals like Eva. Eva is not alone in living in a post-digital society which has been transformed by digital technologies and is now characterised by intricate entanglements of the digital and social. Although the implications of post-digitality for language and communication are still being deliberated, it is evident that linguistic ethnography must increasingly contend with what Jan Blommaert calls the “online-offline nexus” – the unfolding of everyday social encounters across digital and non-digital spaces. In this talk, I chart developments in linguistic ethnography towards a post-digital approach from two directions: firstly, as offline ethnographers began to observe the growing importance of the digital in their participants’ lives; and secondly, as digital ethnographers moved from a focus on online spaces as constituting their own context to a recognition of the intricate ways in which the online intersects with offline lives. I then focus on my own work, homing in on two projects: the first a multi-sited primarily offline linguistic ethnography which incorporated analysis of participants’ digital encounters (TLANG); and the second a smaller project which focused on exploring mobile messaging conversations in the context in which messages were sent and received (MoCo). Through these projects, my colleagues and I developed a ‘day-in-the-life’ methodology which explores how networked individuals move between multiple online and offline activities and encounters in the course of a typical day.  

In this talk, I illustrate this post-digital linguistic ethnography by exploring extended moments taken from days-in-the-life of Eva and Debbie, two mothers living and working in the UK. Both women, who were participants in the MoCo project, were interviewed before and after keeping ‘time-use’ diaries over three consecutive days and submitting all mobile phone messages sent and received during that time. These datasets were analysed using an interactional sociolinguistics approach which focused on how Eva’s and Debbie’s mobile conversations shaped, and were shaped by, the parallel activities and encounters in which they engaged. The analysis of their distinct post-digital experiences – as shaped by their lifestyles, media ideologies, and affective responses to digital and mobile technologies – sheds light on the complex entanglements of technologies, relationships, and individual wellbeing typical of contemporary life, whilst raising questions about our current understanding of language and communication. I end the talk by reflecting on potential future developments in linguistic ethnography, including the need for linguistic ethnographers to find flexible, creative and ethical ways to develop work into private, intimate spaces whilst accommodating the increasingly post-digital conditions of contemporary society.

When geopolitical tensions on a global scale lead to new patterns of displacement and forced migration, teachers in reception classes in the receiving countries are among the first welfare professionals to meet new groups of newcomers. Reception class teachers thus function as frontline workers (Ceccini & Harrits, 2022) in the educational system and at regular intervals experience drastic changes in the composition of students in the reception classes. This was the case in 2015 when Danish reception class teachers received large numbers of Syrian students, and in the wake of Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Ukrainian students rapidly grew to constitute a significant group of newcomers in reception classes in Denmark.

The Ukrainian newcomers generally received a warm welcome, both in civic society and by the established political system – not only in Denmark, but across Europe. In Denmark, a Special Act (LOV nr 324 af 16/03/2022) accorded Ukrainian newcomers unique rights and privileges in terms of residence and work permits, and in primary and lower secondary school legislation, special provision for Ukrainian students was also made. This included linguistic privileges through authorisation of both Danish, English and Ukrainian as medium of instruction for Ukrainian students (LOV nr 691 af 24/05/2022) – in stark contrast to other groups of newcomers for whom Danish only is authorised as medium of instruction.   

The reception of Ukrainian students in Danish schools can thus provide salient insights in the dynamics of language and (in)equality in everyday school life in Denmark. The presentation draws on insights from the interdisciplinary research project Ukrainian children in Danish schools (2022-2024) and presents a linguistic ethnographic analysis of interviews with teachers in reception classes in lower secondary school. The analysis is anchored in Butler’s (2009) conceptualisation of grievable and ungrievable lives (Butler, 2009). Building on the concept of differential distribution of grievability, Butler describes how the lives of some groups or populations are consistently framed as worthy and deserving of official mourning, thereby appearing as eminently grievable, while the lives of others remain ungrievable. In the presentation, Butler’s thinking is brought to the language classroom and used to shed light on Danish reception class teachers’ intense emotional responses and profound feelings of professional inadequacy in the encounter with the Ukrainian students.