Volume 30, Issue 2

This article examines the particular difficulties and challenges experienced by a practitioner-researcher while collecting signed language interpreting data within the specific institutional setting of the workplace. Given the complex relationships that exist between the minority Deaf community and that of the majority hearing community, as well as the tensions present between Deaf people and signed language interpreters, undertaking research in this area requires both sensitivity and an in-depth understanding of the power imbalances involved. Practitioner-researchers in this field are positioned between the Deaf and hearing communities, and have to maintain a finely tuned awareness of the issues raised by their insider/outsider status. Exploring issues of methodology, access, identity, and participant observation, this paper examines the process of collecting video data for the analysis of interpreted events. The paper draws on an ethnographic study of interpreted interaction within the workplace, and considers the complex relationship between the hearing researcher and the Deaf research participants, concluding with what I see as a fundamental requirement—collaboration with and information dissemination to all those involved in the research process.

This article reports on a study into communicative practices in educational settings by members of the South African Deaf community. The data contain interviews of miscellaneous South African Deaf people who were interviewed through South African Sign Language (SASL) by Deaf SASL users who received a short training on interview simulation. From the narratives a general prevalence of communicative barriers in educational settings emerges. Similar to many other Deaf communities, Deaf identities appear to be shaped by means of alienation from the hearing community and solidarity among the Deaf community (to a certain extent even across ethnic boundaries). The communication barriers lead to different dimensions of power relations. Moreover, certain educational practices extend beyond the school premises and influence family practices. What also emerged from the South African data were issues of stigmatization of signing and complex issues of communication in South Africa's multilingual society. Linguistic ethnography has proven a very productive methodology as it has yielded interesting “counter-narratives” (i.e., narratives from within the Deaf community that give a different picture than the beliefs put forward within a hearing hegemony) by means of which Deaf South Africans get “a voice” in mainstream society.

This article focuses on the use of back region humor in two different professional settings in order to highlight the ways in which professional orientations are reflected in both topic selection and style of humor. The first part of the paper examines humor in a prototypical back region setting, the school staffroom, challenging the view that such staffrooms exhibit characteristics associated with a back region, where professional issues do not receive serious attention. In the second part, the school setting is compared with that of an agricultural research establishment and it is suggested that professional orientations may influence the nature of humor, even when topics have no direct relation to the work of those involved. The paper therefore provides support for the claim that humor is “a distinctive feature of workplace culture” (Holmes and Stubbe, Power and politeness in the workplace, Longman, 2003: 134) and that different groups can be distinguished in terms of their preferences in this respect (Holmes and Marra, Journal of Pragmatics 34: 1683–1710, 2002). However, it goes further in suggesting a link between styles of back region humor and professional orientation. The paper concludes with a discussion of the contribution that linguistic ethnography can make to the comparison of features of different social worlds.

This article is an ethnographic case study of a senior business reporter as he discovers, writes, and reflects on a news story. We “follow the story” from its entry in the newsroom through the review process during a story meeting and the writing process up to the point the story is filed for copy editing. Drawing on ethnographic data, this article sheds light on how a news story about Russian gas exports to France is discursively constructed. In this writing process, we focus in particular on a frame shift in the construction of the lead and argue that this shift is led primarily by technological rather than overt ideological concerns. The detailed description of one newswriting process supports the argument that framing is an interpretive practice achieved within the demands, relationships, and discourses that anchor business news as a social institution.

In this article we review ways of understanding how social and welfare institutions achieve their goals and produce their products, whether these are expected or not. We analyze mainstream approaches to study these institutions in Spain and in other parts of Europe. From this review, we argue in favor of an approach focused on the role of social practices as constitutive elements of institutional life and products. Our proposal focuses on one type of institution, residential child care institutions (RCCIs), to highlight how traditional limits between formally designed activities and informal practices may be problematized. The data comes from a brief linguistic ethnography, conducted in central Spain, in two RCCIs that focused on children's everyday social practices in the institution. We argue that RCCIs may be characterized as “paradoxical institutions” due to what we call “paradoxical practices,” prototypical of these institutions. As part of this argument, we analyze and discuss the trajectory of a paradoxical practice by paying attention to the product it creates and develop a model to understand institutional functioning. Finally, we discuss how linguistic ethnography provides a valuable alternative to scrutinize the work of residential child care institutions and the role they play in children's socialization.

This article examines the political and ideological processes that underlie the ritual event of a weekly gathering of Heads of Section at a British embassy. Relying on participant observation, audio recordings, and interviews, it juxtaposes participants' assumptions and projections about the meeting's symbolic role in achieving democratic ideals (community participation, status equality) with evidence of a battle zone, an arena for status contests and participants maneuvering for position. It explores this contrast on multiple levels of discourse and interaction, using transcripts from interviews and interaction during the meetings. It demonstrates not only the ritualistic importance of meetings in consolidating the powers that be but also the duality of the discourse around them, with a proclaimed ideology of shared power, shared knowledge, and equal opportunities masking and covering up an authority-based system promoting status differences and inequality.

Linguistic ethnography has rapidly secured itself a place among the most commonly used paradigms for analyzing language in use. In this discussion paper we present a bird's eye view of the state of linguistic ethnography as it is reflected in the papers included in this volume. We propose to identify the main theoretical and methodological concerns that seem to emerge across the research presented here. Some of them center around the etic–emic, frontstage–backstage, text–context, and linguistics–ethnography questions. While ultimately these issues cannot be resolved, we argue that they nevertheless continue to provide an impetus for ethnographic inquiry and a frame within which to explore the specific challenges of doing language and communicative analysis in institutional sites in the contemporary era. In the end, we suggest that linguistic ethnography should perhaps be seen as a liminal activity, with both the researchers and the language they investigate situated within and across different worlds. The present approach is an empirical one since we propose a close reading of the papers in this volume as “texts” and we examine them not to provide a state-of-the-art survey of linguistic ethnography but to unravel some of the cues that these texts contain regarding the practices constituting linguistic ethnography as a part of social reality.