Exploring the interplay of narrative and ethnography: A critical sociolinguistic approach to migrant stories of dis/emplacement
-
Maria Sabaté i Dalmau
Abstract
In this article I explore the benefits of interplaying narrative and ethnography for conducting a context-grounded, sociolinguistic analysis of the representational and interactional functions of migrant storytelling events concerning dis/relocation. I focus on a series of narratives of socioeconomic and geographic im/mobility told by three Ghanaians who, unsheltered, lived on a bench of a Catalan urban town. These were gathered via “go-along” narrative interviews and multi-site ethnography during six months of fieldwork. I show that the imbrications of a social-practice and social-action approach to narrative with network ethnography allow to: (1) investigate how representation and interaction in place-centered stories and storytelling acts reveal the narrators’ positionings with respect to host-society dis/emplacement, in their alternative spaces of socialization; (2) capture what gets silenced in dis/orientation narratives, like discrepancies between stories told and lived concerning identity management across migrant groups; and (3) expose the researchers’ impact on shaping the form and content of these stories by ingraining self-reflexivity activities into all analytical accounts. This offers an informant-integrative, critical view of how migrants enact transnational survival in contexts of precariousness and exclusion, which contributes to understanding how they place themselves with regard to their non-citizenship statuses, from a socially-sensitive, non-essentializing perspective.
Acknowledgements
This study was funded by two research grants awarded by the Catalan Department of Economy and Knowledge and by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. The former was granted to the group Applied Linguistics Circle (CLA) at the University of Lleida (2014 SGR 1061), and the latter to the group Intercultural Communication and Negotiation Strategies at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (FFI2011-26964).
Appendix: Transcription system
Following the critical approach presented in Section 1, I understand the transcription choices presented below as an integral part of the researcher’s goals and positioning in this particular research project (see Bucholtz 2000).
Transcription conventions
- @Bck:
[Background]: Information of the participants, context and topic
- @com:
[Comment]: Contextual information about the previous utterance
- @add:
[Addressee]: Addressee of the previous turn
- %tra:
[Translation]: Free translation of the turn for languages other than English
- +^
quick uptake or latching
- +”/.
quotation in the next line
- +”
quotation follows
- #
pause
- [>]
overlap follows
- [<]
overlap precedes
- [/]
repetition
- [//]
reformulation
- <>
scope
- :
lengthened vowel
- ::
longer lengthening of vowel
- xxx
unintelligible material
- ((Follows narrative)): turns omitted due to space constraints
Intonation contours
- .
end-of-turn falling contour
- ?
end-of-turn rising contour
- !
end-of-turn exclamation contour
- -,.
end-of-turn fall–rise contour
- -.
intra-turn falling contour
- -,
intra-turn fall–rise contour
- ,,
tag question
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© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Lifestyle residents in Barcelona: a biographical perspective on linguistic repertoires, identity narrative and transnational mobility
- Exploring the interplay of narrative and ethnography: A critical sociolinguistic approach to migrant stories of dis/emplacement
- “No-one told me it would all be in Catalan!” – narratives and language ideologies in the Latin American community at school
- Narrative circulation, disputed transformations, and bilingual appropriations at a public school “somewhere in La Mancha”
- Circulation and localization of a transnational founding story in a social movement
- YouTube-based accent challenge narratives: Web 2.0 as a context for studying the social value of accent
- Afterword
- Book Review
- Ana María Relaño Pastor: Shame and pride in narrative: Mexican women’s language experiences at the U.S.-Mexico border
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Lifestyle residents in Barcelona: a biographical perspective on linguistic repertoires, identity narrative and transnational mobility
- Exploring the interplay of narrative and ethnography: A critical sociolinguistic approach to migrant stories of dis/emplacement
- “No-one told me it would all be in Catalan!” – narratives and language ideologies in the Latin American community at school
- Narrative circulation, disputed transformations, and bilingual appropriations at a public school “somewhere in La Mancha”
- Circulation and localization of a transnational founding story in a social movement
- YouTube-based accent challenge narratives: Web 2.0 as a context for studying the social value of accent
- Afterword
- Book Review
- Ana María Relaño Pastor: Shame and pride in narrative: Mexican women’s language experiences at the U.S.-Mexico border
