10th Explorations in Ethnography, Language and Communication

Joke Dewilde, University of Oslo and Maria Rydell, Stockholm University

Working with stakeholders – tensions and shifting relations

During this workshop, we will invite the audience to a joint discussion on various aspects of working with stakeholders as researchers. Who do we perceive as stakeholders? What role do stakeholders play in different parts of the research process? And how do relationships between researchers and stakeholders shift across contexts and scales – from grassroots levels to state-level policy making?

We will start by an introduction by the convenors who will share experiences and reflections on working with stakeholders in different contexts such as schools, cultural festivals and state agencies. Together with the audience, we are interested in discussing affordances of working with stakeholders, but also the tensions that can arise when researchers and stakeholders hold divergent understandings of the research process, have different goals for the research, and experience discrepancies between the slow nature of research and stakeholders’ time constraints, as well as the ethical considerations of being a researcher interested in language and migration and working with stakeholders in times characterized by restrictive migrations policies.

Linus Salö, University of Stockholm

Impactful scholarship and ideologies of research communication

Socially interested linguists have ample reasons to grasp reflexively the types of “ideologies of communication” (Briggs) that pertain specifically to science, research and academic knowledge production. A baseline aim of “research communication” is to make scientific knowledge known to various publics, so as to contribute to goals such as general education or entertainment (Fleck et al. 2009). However, insofar as politicians and policy-makers constitute an audience, the objectives of research and research communication relate additionally to notions of societal impact as an effect of how knowledge travels (Howlett and Morgan 2010). In this sense, research communication is a means for making research matter and, as such, worthy of serious consideration (Mattsson et al. 2024). With this opening comment, I accordingly seek to provide input on the topic of research communication as a feature of scholarly impact. I draw on some insights gained from having recently participated in a national evaluation of Swedish universities’ so-called samverkan, which is an institutionalized mission of collaborative engagement designed to bolster the role of universities as change agents (Benneworth et al. 2015). This view beckons us to break with the linear and one-dimensional idea that “knowledge is produced in scientific or other expert sectors, disseminated through other spheres, and then assimilated by publics” (Briggs 2005, 274–275) to instead envision knowledge-effects as being co-produced through processes of collaboration. Understanding impactful scholarship in this vein opens up for a meta-scientific discussion on the qualities of actionable knowledge as well as the preconditions of knowledge uptake. It also raises questions about the tasks and raison d'être of research where a set of questions may be pondered. In what ways – and to whom – do we hope that our research matters? How can we act to facilitate such ends? What characterizes the forms of research-based knowledge that travel into policy? What characterizes the processes as such? How do preconditions for mattering change over time and vary across contexts considering, for example, varying degrees of expert trust? 

• Benneworth, P., de Boer, H., & Jongbloed, B. (2015). Between good intentions and urgent stakeholder pressures: Institutionalizing the universities’ third mission in the Swedish context. European Journal of Higher Education 5(3), 280–296.
• Briggs, C.L., 2005. Communicability, Racial Discourse, and Disease. Annual Review of Anthropology 34, 269– 291.
• Fleck, C., Hess, A. & Lyon, S. 2009. Intellectuals and their Publics. Perspectives from the Social Sciences. Routledge.
• Howlett, P. and Morgan, M.S. (eds.) 2010. How Well Do Facts Travel? Cambridge University Press.
• Mattson, P., Perez Vico, E. & Salö, L. (Eds.) 2024. Making Universities Matter: Collaboration, Engagement, Impact. Springer

This presentation examines the challenges of implementing approaches that urge us to decolonize research. I look at recent scholarship that aligns itself with language and social justice and decoloniality, broadly speaking, in the context of attempts to reform anthropology, such as action anthropology, applied anthropology, and public anthropology. I consider the ways that researchers from different scholarly traditions. including applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and language ideologies understand how to treat participants’ beliefs, what counts as ‘data’, and how to situate researchers’ understandings.  

I examine how these approaches articulate with debates between different scholarly traditions for studying Korea.  For example, while research in language ideologies generally takes a skeptical stance towards participants’ beliefs about language, other research argues that these should be validated as important forms of theory. Likewise, historians of South Korea have delighted in recent years in pointing out how many things that Koreans themselves think of as emblematically “Korean”, including the Korean alphabet, taekwondo, bbq, kimchi, or K-pop, can be understood, from a historical perspective, as accomplishments where foreigners played key roles. This approach has been criticized by scholars who instead orient towards a timescale of the present. These questions of epistemology and ontology impact what kinds of perspectives we take on what is or is not understood as “Korean” as well as what the stakes are in engaging in “description”. For example, some would argue that presenting binary oppositions, data that reifies deficit ideologies, or hegemonic understandings of “native speakerism” is to align and support such ideologies.  Instead, we should be actively engaged in writing about, giving credence to, and centering other perspectives on language and the social world. For other scholars, an adequate understanding of power requires unpacking its workings; to describe is not necessarily to align. Here too, issues of scaling and perspective comes to the fore, since what counts as evidence of resistance at one scale might be read from another as a form of alignment. 

Injunctions to make scholarship relevant and to act ethically are of vital concern these days, when the very purpose of the university and its future as a research institution are under attack. By looking closely at the points of tension that are produced in trying to reconcile pragmatist, historical, and justice oriented approaches to the study of language and social life, this paper points out the difficulties that can arise for researchers trying to chart moral courses of action.

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.