BAAL Reading 2001
At the 2001 BAAL Annual Meeting in Reading, we
held a Colloquium on “Rethinking the Ethnography of Communication”. The
colloquium proposal follows below.
"Rethinking the Ethnography of Communication" Colloquium at BAAL 34th
Annual Meeting, 6th-8th September 2001, Reading
Colloquium presenters
David Barton, Lancaster University; Angela Creese, Leicester University; Janet
Maybin, Open University; Ben Rampton, King's College London; Karin Tusting,
Lancaster University
Rationale
This colloquium is intended to develop and explore a number of key issues which
emerged at the BAAL/CUP Seminar Linguistic Ethnography 28th-29th March 2001 at
Leicester. This seminar brought together UK-based researchers conducting
linguistic ethnography here and abroad to explore a range of past and current
work, to identify key theoretical and methodological issues and to explore the
possibility of establishing a Linguistic Ethnography Forum in the UK. Because
we had to limit numbers at the seminar to 30, the colloquium at BAAL would not
only extend the work of the seminar, but also provide the opportunity for a
wider range of people to take part and contribute. The colloquium would focus
mainly on the 3rd conference theme: unity and diversity in language
description, and pursue the conference topics of language use in diverse
contexts, models of language of use and research methodologies.
During the BAAL/CUP Linguistic Ethnography Seminar we discussed some of the
main dimensions of variation within UK linguistic ethnography and considered
examples of research on literacy practices, institutional discourse, urban
heteroglossia, multilingualism and children's home and school learning. Key
issues which we would like to explore further in the colloquium include:
a. The theoretical and methodological framework provided by the Ethnography of
Communication tradition, and the reworking of those ideas in relation to more
recent theoretical developments in the social sciences.
b. The epistemological status of ethnography in sociolinguistic research, and
the boundaries of what counts as ethnographic.
c. The possibilities and problems of combining ethnography with discourse or
conversation analysis and the potential for linguistic ethnography to explore
the relationship between the institutional and interactional orders.
Structure and content of the colloquium
Paper One: The Ethnography of Communication (10 minutes)
This paper will review key ideas from Dell Hymes' seminal work in the
ethnography of communication. Hymes starts with the social context and
describes and explains the ways of communicating within it in order to analyse
how patterns in communication interrelate in a systematic way with and derive
meaning from other aspects of culture. The paper will briefly discuss the
theoretical assumptions underpinning the Ethnography of Communication
tradition, and the methodological issues involved in identifying the emic rules
of language use within a social group.
15 minutes: discussion
Paper Two: The Ethnography of Communication and the New Literacy Studies (15
minutes)
Traditionally, the Ethnography of Communication has largely dealt with spoken
interaction with little attention to literacy. However, New Literacy Studies research
with its detailed ethnographic work and its focus on practices fits in well
with the Ethnography of Communication. It can also contribute to and challenge
the Ethnography of Communication by emphasising that much spoken interaction is
mediated by written texts, that the materiality of language is significant in
contemporary interactions, that language serves other functions beyond
communication and that language is located in multimodal meaning making.
15 minutes: discussion
Paper Three: The Ethnography of Communication and Post-structuralist theory (15
minutes)
The ideas of postmodernist theory have raised questions about many of the basic
concepts and ways of working in linguistics and social sciences, including the
Ethnography of Communication. The Derridean emphasis on contradiction and
incompatibility within supposedly coherent narratives, the work of Bakhtin and
Volosinov on heteroglossia and intertextuality, and Lyotard's critique of the
overarching metanarrative call us to attend to hybridity and fluidity, rather
than seeking to subsume difference within a single explanatory framework. This
approach therefore challenges unitary theoretical concepts such as speech
community and communicative competence, stressing rather the plurality of communicative
competencies and identity positionings. The postmodern critique of
subjectivity, in its weak version, has been taken up in much of our work which
draws attention to the situatedness of speakers, texts and events within
different discourses and social contexts. However, in its strong version the
very notions of speaker and text are deconstructed - what then are we to work
with? Foucault's work calls us not only to examine the ways in which the
language practices we study are embedded within and contribute to the
maintenance of relations of power in society, but also to address our work
itself as a site of production of power-knowledge. To what extent have we taken
up these and other such theories within the ethnography of communication? And,
given that postmodern theory has itself been critiqued, particularly for its
tendency towards radical relativism, to what extent do we want to?
15 minutes: discussion