Tracing trajectories as units of analysis for the study of social processes: addressing mobility and complexity in sociolinguistics
-
Catherine Kell
Catherine Kell is Associate Professor and Director of the School of Education at the University of Cape Town, specializing in language and literacy education. Her research interests are literacy studies, digital literacy and the sociolinguistics of mobility. She recently (2015) co-edited a special issue of
Social Semiotics on “Objects, language and trans-contextual communication.”
Abstract
Locating itself within Blommaert’s (2014, From mobility to complexity in sociolinguistics, Tilburg Paper in Culture Studies, Tilburg University, Paper 106) sociolinguistics of mobility and complexity, this article argues for the theoretical and methodological value of the concept of the “meaning-making trajectory” as a unit of analysis for research in sociolinguistics and literacy studies. A meaning-making trajectory gives priority to analysis of transcontextual processes, questions of agency and intentionality, and the precise ways in which semiosis materializes activity as it unfolds over time and space. Focusing on empirical data from research on a participatory house-building project in South Africa, I present a language of description for the analysis of trajectories, which links together “strips,” “nodes” and “participant frameworks.” I argue that a trajectory comprises a unit of analysis which has mobility as its premise and which reveals complexity in the transformations of meaning making across space and time. I argue for a close tracing of trajectories on the emic level and that the identification of moments or “nodes” in trajectories, where the direction of the trajectory shifts, enables researchers to undertake precise analyses of agency and contingency. Inequalities of access to and availability of semiotic and material resources at points along a trajectory reveal potential for the mediation of agency or for the enactment of symbolic violence.
About the author
Catherine Kell is Associate Professor and Director of the School of Education at the University of Cape Town, specializing in language and literacy education. Her research interests are literacy studies, digital literacy and the sociolinguistics of mobility. She recently (2015) co-edited a special issue of Social Semiotics on “Objects, language and trans-contextual communication.”
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on this article, as well as the editors of this Special Issue. The members of Khayalethu welcomed me into their lives and for this I am very grateful.
References
Bauman, Richard. 2004. A world of others’ words: Cross-cultural perspectives on intertextuality. Malden MA and Oxford: Blackwells.10.1002/9780470773895Search in Google Scholar
Bauman, Richard & Charles Briggs. 1990. Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology 19. 59–88.10.1007/978-1-349-92299-4_41Search in Google Scholar
Bernstein, B. 1996. Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: Theory, research, critique. London: Taylor and Francis.Search in Google Scholar
Blommaert, Jan. 2001. Context is/as critique. Critique of Anthropology 21(1). 13–32.10.1177/0308275X0102100102Search in Google Scholar
Blommaert, Jan. 2005. Discourse: A critical introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511610295Search in Google Scholar
Blommaert, Jan. 2014. From mobility to complexity in sociolinguistics. Tilburg Paper in Culture Studies. Tilburg University. Paper 106.Search in Google Scholar
Bourdieu, P. 2000. Pascalian meditations. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Bowker, Greg & Susan Star. 1999. Sorting things out: Classification and its consequences. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.10.7551/mitpress/6352.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Cicourel, Aaron. 1992. The interpenetration of communicative contexts: examples from medical encounters. In A. Duranti & C. Goodwin (eds.), Rethinking context: language as an interactive phenomenon, 291–313. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving. 1972. The neglected situation. American Anthropologist 66. 133–139.10.1016/B978-0-08-023719-0.50040-1Search in Google Scholar
Goodwin, M. 1990. He-said-she-said: Talk as social organisation among black children. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Gumperz, John. 1976. Sociocultural knowledge as conversational inference. In M. Saville-Troike (ed.), Linguistics and Anthropology. Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 1977, 191–211. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Iedema, Rick. 2001. Resemiotisation. Semiotica 137 (1/4). 23–39.10.1515/semi.2001.106Search in Google Scholar
Kell, Catherine. 2008. Making things happen: Meaning making, agency and literacy in housing struggles in South Africa. Journal of Development Studies 44(6). 892–912.10.1080/00220380802058263Search in Google Scholar
Kell, Catherine. 2011. Inequalities and crossings: Literacy and the spaces–in-between. International Journal of Educational Development 31. 301–663.10.1016/j.ijedudev.2011.02.006Search in Google Scholar
Kell, Catherine. 2015a. Ariadne’s thread: Literacy, scale and meaning-making across time and space. In C. Stroud & M. Prinsloo (eds.), Language, literacy and diversity: Moving Words, 72–91. Routledge: London and New York.Search in Google Scholar
Kell, Catherine. 2015b. Making people happen: Materiality and movement in meaning-making trajectories. Social Semiotics 25(4). 423–445.10.1080/10350330.2015.1060666Search in Google Scholar
Kress, Gunther. 2000. Text as the punctuation of semiosis: Pulling at some of the threads. In Ulrike Meinhof & John Smith (eds.), Intertextuality and the Media: From Genre to Everyday Life, 132–154. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Leander, Kevin, Nathan Phillips & Katherine Taylor. 2006. The changing social spaces of learning: Mapping new mobilities. Review of Research in Education 34. 329–394.10.3102/0091732X09358129Search in Google Scholar
Lemke, J. 2000. Across the scales of time: Artifacts, activities and meanings in ecosocial systems. Mind, Culture and Activity 7(4). 273–290.10.1207/S15327884MCA0704_03Search in Google Scholar
Nicols, Sue & Colette Snowden. 2016. Languages and literacies as mobile and placed resources. New York and London: Routledge.10.4324/9781315758268Search in Google Scholar
Silverstein, Michael & Greg Urban. 1996. (eds.). Natural histories of discourse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Search in Google Scholar
Wortham, Stanton. 2005. Socialisation beyond the Speech Event. Linguistic Anthropology 15(1). 95–112.10.1525/jlin.2005.15.1.95Search in Google Scholar
Wortham, Stanton 2012. Beyond macro and micro in the linguistic anthropology of education. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 43(2). 197–213.10.1111/j.1548-1492.2012.01165.xSearch in Google Scholar
© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: the dynamics of textual trajectories in professional and workplace practice
- Textual trajectories: Theoretical roots and institutional consequences
- Recruiting Frontstage Entextualization: drafting, artifactuality and written-ness as resources in police – witness interviews
- Text bite news: the metapragmatics of feature news
- Imagined, prescribed and actual text trajectories: the “problem” with case notes in contemporary social work
- Continuity and change: semiotic relations across multimodal texts in surgical education
- Tracing trajectories as units of analysis for the study of social processes: addressing mobility and complexity in sociolinguistics
- Analyzing textual trajectories: Tensions in purpose and power relations
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: the dynamics of textual trajectories in professional and workplace practice
- Textual trajectories: Theoretical roots and institutional consequences
- Recruiting Frontstage Entextualization: drafting, artifactuality and written-ness as resources in police – witness interviews
- Text bite news: the metapragmatics of feature news
- Imagined, prescribed and actual text trajectories: the “problem” with case notes in contemporary social work
- Continuity and change: semiotic relations across multimodal texts in surgical education
- Tracing trajectories as units of analysis for the study of social processes: addressing mobility and complexity in sociolinguistics
- Analyzing textual trajectories: Tensions in purpose and power relations
