Volume 2018, Issue 250 - Special Issue: Storytelling in globalized spaces: a linguistic ethnographic perspective

The popularization of lifestyle migration epitomizes the individualization of contemporary lives, and the centrality of travel and spatial relocation in people’s aspirational or real life projects. This article examines the processes of sociolinguistic relocation of “lifestylers” in the polylingual city of Barcelona through the lens of their embracing or rejection of Catalan, the non-state, local co-official language. It aims to decipher to what extent these individuals see Catalan as relevant to their transnational life experiences, and how this relevance is embedded in their relational-emotional experiences and evolving sense of self. This article, which examines two life stories gathered through ethnographic interviewing, is framed within biographical-experiential approaches to the multilingual repertoire. The analysis shows that by assembling different narrative bits and by examining in detail the small stories informants tell to ground their accounts, a complex picture of language (dis)appropriation emerges. It argues that national identity rhetoric is a discursive strategy deployed by narrators to partly make sense and partly rationalize what is a complex bundle of identity (re)constitution reasons, emotional stances and interpersonal power dynamics. The article concludes by arguing that presences or absences in people’s repertoire are embodied struggles for personal coherence.

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.

This article discusses the circulation of language ideologies through conversational narrative repertoires among Latin American parents in the secondary education system in Catalonia. Data, gathered in a linguistic ethnography carried out in three secondary schools in the metropolitan area of Barcelona between 2011 and 2013, include fieldwork in the classroom and other spaces of the school in different periods of the school year, as well as narrative repertoires gathered from in-depth interviews with some of the actors (students and parents of Latin American backgrounds). We focus on conversational narrative because it has proved to be an effective methodological resource for gathering evaluative and moral stances amongst tellers. Narrative data are triangulated with observational and interactional information. Some of the findings reveal, amongst other phenomena, the coexistence of a constellation of conflicting language ideologies regarding Catalan as the language of the school.

This article addresses the narratives of bilingualism that emerged in ethnographic interviews with members of Sancho’s Primary in La Mancha city (Spain), whose prestige as the first MEC/British bilingual school in town has been disputed, transformed and eventually socially accepted as competitively eligible in the global market for two decades. By bringing to the fore a perspective of heteroglossia, the article discusses stakeholders’ stancetaking towards the salient tensions and dilemmas related to bilingualism in the region of Castilla-La Mancha. The analysis discusses how Sancho’s stakeholders by means of indexical meanings and heteroglossic resources come to terms with bilingualism as ideology and practice regarding who the legitimate teacher of English is, whose English-es are legitimated, which classroom practices are most valued and who can guarantee the status and prestige of bilingual programs in this region. In addition, the analysis emphasizes the validity of narratives emerging in interviews as situated, context-dependent, and contextualizing practices shaped by the conditions of linguistic ethnography, while shaping the researcher and participants’ significant values, beliefs and ideas about bilingualism and bilingual programs in Castilla-La Mancha.

This article investigates the circulation and appropriation of the “origins” story in a social movement called Emmaus. In particular, it analyzes storytelling in two localities, Barcelona and London, at critical moments when collective identity is foregrounded for different socio-political purposes. Emmaus is a transnational social movement that (re)inserts marginalized people who live and work with more privileged members in local groups called “communities” dedicated to recycling and social projects. Ethnography is essential to situate and understand narratives in broader interactional and socio-political contexts. My multi-sited ethnography (2011–2012) affords an outlook on the storytelling practices that produce and negotiate a cultural chronoscope , “depictions of place-time-and-personhood” to which participants orient when they interact with each other (including telling their life stories) within Emmaus. Situated storytelling constructs a collective identity across linguistic and national borders at a particular sociohistorical juncture. The Emmaus story constructs a certain worldview and person types within an imagined community made up of (narrated) others all over the globe. The Emmaus chronoscope is based on the encounter between two individuals from different backgrounds, which will transform their reasons to live thanks to the shared value of solidarity with others.

This article illustrates how, in a Web 2.0 environment, narrative ways of knowing circulate and disseminate indexical value associated with performances of accent. We compare the information-storing and -sharing functions of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, making an analogy between these two conceptualizations of the Internet and Jerome Bruner’s two different modes of knowing in his (1986) book Actual minds, possible worlds : logico-scientific and narrative. Just as analyses of Web 2.0 discourse highlight collaborative construction, dissemination, and uptake of information, analysis of narrative illuminates the accrual of sociocultural meaning in collaboratively constructed stories. We use discourse and narrative analytic methods to investigate the social indexicality of “accent” in a corpus of Philadelphia Accent Challenge YouTube videos (and the associated comment sections), and we illustrate how indexical value accrues via the snowballing of reflexive metacommentary in the form of narratives about these accent performances. We argue that discourse in Web 2.0 affords narrative ways of recirculating certain emblematic features of accent. This perspective on analyzing YouTube video-based accent data illuminates the value of YouTube accent performances as a source of linguistic anthropological and narrative insight, and narrative modes of knowing as a means of circulating language ideological discourse via Internet-based participatory culture.