Volume 11, Issue 2 - Special Forum: Language(s), culture(s), ethnicity(-ies), social class and religious background: intersections in researcher’s identity and ethnography, Edited by: Lídia Gallego-Balsà

Based on two ethnographic studies of people of Latin American descent in global cities, this article explores how language, gender, and ethnicity shape field relations, community membership, and data collection. It examines some of the implications of being positioned intersectionally as an outsider or insider of the community, and being sexualised by a male gatekeeper. It suggests that gender roles are a powerful aspect of conducting ethnographic research among Latinos, while pointing to the challenge of dealing with, and potentially contributing to, essentialising discourses in the field. It argues that the notion of ‘being Latino’ is imagined and constructed interactionally and contextually, in reaction to social pressures, as well as local and historical narratives.

This paper focuses on the development of an academic of colour between ethnographic fieldwork and becoming an academic. In terms of data collection, this study demonstrates the complexities and multiple positionalities ascribed and assumed within fieldwork which question the stability of the insider/outsider dichotomy. These positionalities range from being a Muslim ‘brother’ to being aligned with Government security. Being Muslim and male also allowed for entrance in areas of the field which were exclusively for Muslim males. While fieldwork presented certain complexities, being a person of colour and Muslim in academia presents many more. A number of studies have demonstrated the structural whiteness of academia and thus, dealing with this as an academic of colour require particular skills and actions. I share my experiences of navigating academia as a person of colour and question the role of whiteness within ethnographically oriented representative groups which are exclusively white and who represent an academic audience for ethnographic scholarship.

In bilingual settings language choice represents one of the main resources individuals have to construct their identities. According to Jaffe (2009), it is also a way in which individuals position themselves towards the languages of the sociolinguistic context. However, in the context of researching multilingual settings, very little attention has been paid to how the researcher’s language choice(s) interact with the participants’ language choices, and how the linguistic features that s/he activates contribute to the construction of the researcher’s identity and her/his stance towards the languages of the sociolinguistic matrix within which the research is embedded. This paper is based in the context of Catalonia and explores how the researcher projects and is ascribed a stance as a consequence of her own linguistic practices. First, it shows that these practices lead to the construction of relationships of (dis)affiliation between the researcher and the participants, which ultimately influence the type of data collected. Second, it suggests that language choice is an essential lens through which to look at the researcher’s positionality in multilingual settings and provide more transparent accounts of multilingual ethnographic research.

‘Context collapse’ (CC) refers to the phenomenon widely debated in social media research, where various audiences convene around single communicative acts in new networked publics, causing confusion and anxiety among social media users. The notion of CC is a key one in the reimagination of social life as a consequence of the mediation technologies we associate with the Web 2.0. CC is undertheorized, and in this paper we intend not to rebuke it but to explore its limits. We do so by shifting the analytical focus from “online communication” in general to specific forms of social action performed, not by predefined “group” members, but by actors engaging in emerging kinds of sharedness based on existing norms of interaction. This approach is a radical choice for action rather than actor, reaching back to symbolic interactionism and beyond to Mead, Strauss and other interactionist sociologists, and inspired by contemporary linguistic ethnography and interactional sociolinguistics, notably the work of Rampton and the Goodwins. We apply this approach to an extraordinarily complex Facebook discussion among Polish people residing in The Netherlands – a set of data that could instantly be selected as a likely site for context collapse. We shall analyze fragments in detail, showing how, in spite of the complications intrinsic to such online, profoundly mediated and oddly ‘placed’ interaction events, participants appear capable of ‘normal’ modes of interaction and participant selection. In fact, the ‘networked publics’ rarely seem to occur in practice, and contexts do not collapse but expand continuously without causing major issues for contextualization. The analysis will offer a vocabulary and methodology for addressing the complexities of the largest new social space on earth: the space of online culture.

This paper investigates the conceptual metonymies and metaphors behind SHUI (水, water) and HUO (火, fire), two of the Five Elements (五行, wu-xing ) in traditional Chinese thought, as recorded in ancient and modern Chinese. Our analysis shows that: (1) SHUI in ancient Chinese is built around the conceptual metonymies SHUI FOR FEATURES OF WATER, SHUI FOR BODY LIQUID and SHUI FOR BODIES OF WATER and the conceptual metaphors THOSE WITH FEATURES OF WATER ARE SHUI and THOSE WITH FEATURES OF SHUI XING ARE SHUI . (2) HUO in ancient Chinese is built around the metonymies HUO FOR FEATURES OF FIRE and HUO FOR THE POWER/DESTRUCTION OF FIRE and the metaphors THOSE WITH FEATURES OF FIRE ARE HUO and THOSE WITH FEATURES OF HUO XING ARE HUO . (3) SHUI and HUO in modern Chinese show an overall similarity with their ancient counterparts, the main differences being that the metaphor THOSE WITH FEATURES OF SHUI XING ARE SHUI is absent from modern Chinese and that the metaphor THOSE WITH FEATURES OF HUO XING ARE HUO has a much narrower coverage in modern Chinese. We discuss what this kind of selective inheritance suggests about the development of Chinese people’s conceptualization of the world.

In an increasingly multilingual world, empirical knowledge about the reciprocal influence between the mother tongue (L1) and a learner’s acquisition of foreign languages (FL) is crucial yet remains surprisingly scarce. This paper examines how an explicit focus on metacognitive strategy use within a FL (German) classroom impacts students’ development of writing strategies in the FL, and whether any such effects transfer to another FL (French) and/or to the L1 (English). Based on a quasi-experimental design, the study involved a two-phase intervention of strategy-based instruction primarily in the FL classroom and later also in the English classroom in a secondary school in England. Data were collected using writing strategy task sheets. Key findings indicate high levels of cross-linguistic transfer, both from one FL context to another and from FL – L1, evidenced especially by an improvement in the quality of students’ planning and a reduction in the number of errors. Findings support the development of a multilingual, strategy-based pedagogy for writing where L1 and FL teachers collaborate to encourage and facilitate connection-making across language contexts.

Previous research on studying abroad has documented the value of exploring students’ interactions with the members of their host community with a focus on the theoretical concepts of identity, imagined communities, and communities of practice. Following this line of research, this qualitative study breaks new ground through investigating how nine Thai students studying in China navigated the complex process of identity negotiation in their imagined communities and communities of practice. This investigation revisits intercultural sensitivity, proximity and boundaries in exploring how the students’ communities of practice afforded different opportunities to demonstrate their identities. The findings reveal that the students envisioned belonging to an imagined community of foreign students in China by demonstrating the identities of cross-cultural mediators and dedicated language learners. However, the misalignment between the students’ imaginations and the realities in their host communities caused predicaments with their identity negotiation. The Thai students’ multi-layered experiences and the social contexts of Chinese language learning influenced their identities, which in turn mediated their senses of belonging to imagined communities of Chinese speakers, and their self-perceived Chinese language competencies. Relevant pedagogical implications of the findings are discussed.