Resumen El propósito de este artículo de reflexión es doble: en primer lugar, damos cuenta de la metodología participativa que aplicamos en el proyecto “Mejorando la vida de las mujeres a través del rol de las traductoras sociales en el Perú rural”. Este proyecto, desarrollado entre los años 2018 y 2019, tuvo como objetivos visibilizar y resaltar el rol desempeñado por lideresas comunitarias de Puno y Ayacucho, en el sur andino del Perú, como intérpretes y traductoras ad hoc, en beneficio de miembros de sus comunidades, muchos de ellos y ellas hablantes de quechua o aimara y español, con diferentes niveles de bilingüismo. En segundo lugar, sobre la base de esta experiencia, abordamos el alcance de las metodologías participativas como un recurso para crear conciencia sobre los procesos de construcción de ciudadanía “desde abajo” en Sudamérica.
{"title":"Dirigentas, intérpretes, acompañantes: sobre metodologías participativas y construcción de la ciudadanía en el Perú","authors":"Luis Andrade Ciudad, R. Howard","doi":"10.1515/ijsl-2022-0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2022-0022","url":null,"abstract":"Resumen El propósito de este artículo de reflexión es doble: en primer lugar, damos cuenta de la metodología participativa que aplicamos en el proyecto “Mejorando la vida de las mujeres a través del rol de las traductoras sociales en el Perú rural”. Este proyecto, desarrollado entre los años 2018 y 2019, tuvo como objetivos visibilizar y resaltar el rol desempeñado por lideresas comunitarias de Puno y Ayacucho, en el sur andino del Perú, como intérpretes y traductoras ad hoc, en beneficio de miembros de sus comunidades, muchos de ellos y ellas hablantes de quechua o aimara y español, con diferentes niveles de bilingüismo. En segundo lugar, sobre la base de esta experiencia, abordamos el alcance de las metodologías participativas como un recurso para crear conciencia sobre los procesos de construcción de ciudadanía “desde abajo” en Sudamérica.","PeriodicalId":52428,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of the Sociology of Language","volume":"2023 1","pages":"67 - 89"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42110430","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This study examines how the use of rhotics in Santomean Portuguese is becoming enregistered as a feature that marks Santomeans' national identity. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork and semistructured interviews with Santomeans living on São Tomé Island and in Portugal. The qualitative analysis of the data reveals the process that leads to the use and awareness of the rhotic feature among Santomeans. This increasing awareness is analysed in terms of orders of indexicality. The author suggests that awareness of this rhotic feature among Santomeans is contingent on having contact with Portuguese speakers of non-Santomean origin, as they only become aware of their distinctive use of rhotics when they are in contact with speakers of another variety of Portuguese on the island, in the diaspora, or online. Also, even if this feature is perceived negatively by many, it remains available for identity-driven use to express a connection to São Tomé and Príncipe.
本研究考察了在圣葡语中使用卷舌音是如何成为标志着圣葡民族认同的一种特征。它是基于对居住在 o tom岛和葡萄牙的圣多美人的实地考察和半结构化访谈。数据的定性分析揭示了导致使用和意识到的过程中舌音特征的圣多米安人。这种日益增长的认识是根据索引顺序来分析的。作者认为,圣多米安人对这种卷舌音特征的认识取决于与非圣多米安血统的葡萄牙语使用者的接触,因为他们只有在与岛上、侨民或在线上的另一种葡萄牙语使用者接触时,才会意识到自己独特的卷舌音使用。此外,即使这个功能被许多人认为是负面的,它仍然可以用于身份驱动的使用,以表达与 o tom和Príncipe的联系。
{"title":"\"We have that strong R, you know\": the enregisterment of a distinctive use of rhotics in Santomean Portuguese.","authors":"Marie-Eve Bouchard","doi":"10.1515/ijsl-2021-0099","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2021-0099","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This study examines how the use of rhotics in Santomean Portuguese is becoming enregistered as a feature that marks Santomeans' national identity. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork and semistructured interviews with Santomeans living on São Tomé Island and in Portugal. The qualitative analysis of the data reveals the process that leads to the use and awareness of the rhotic feature among Santomeans. This increasing awareness is analysed in terms of orders of indexicality. The author suggests that awareness of this rhotic feature among Santomeans is contingent on having contact with Portuguese speakers of non-Santomean origin, as they only become aware of their distinctive use of rhotics when they are in contact with speakers of another variety of Portuguese on the island, in the diaspora, or online. Also, even if this feature is perceived negatively by many, it remains available for identity-driven use to express a connection to São Tomé and Príncipe.</p>","PeriodicalId":52428,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of the Sociology of Language","volume":"2023 279","pages":"233-257"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9832281/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9191208","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract In this paper, I examine how liminal spatio-temporal contexts both afford and constrain how immigrant children navigate their social lives in educational settings. Liminal schooling contexts have largely been unexamined in micro-ethnographic approaches to schooling, despite the potential of these contexts for illuminating the educational lives of youth. Shifting the ethnographic lens to the interactions occurring in seemingly liminal schooling contexts (in between ratified activities, in between ratified places, etc.) reveal heightened forms of behavior at the extremes of a continuum ranging from empathy/inclusion to violence/exclusion. On the one hand, liminality can render immigrant youth more vulnerable to racialized bullying, including verbal and physical aggression, since many of the institutional protections that apply in ratified schooling contexts are in abeyance. On the other hand, liminal contexts also allow for displays of support and empathy that can lead to the development of cross-ethnic peer friendships, which can happen when social-ethnic boundaries and hierarchies that are reproduced in more central contexts are relaxed. This paper builds on a linguistic ethnography documenting the social lives of Moroccan immigrant children in a Southwestern Spanish town. Using videoanalysis and ethnographic methods in discourse analysis, I focus on videotaped interactions between immigrant students and their Spanish counterparts taking place in the interstices of school life – when students are walking between buildings, in the fringes/corners of the schoolyard, in between classes … etc. The long-term ethnography allows me to examine the interactions occurring in these liminal contexts in relation to institutional culture and to the relational history between children. This paper calls for examining youth’s schooling experiences more holistically. What happens in liminal contexts is crucial to achieving educational equity in the 21st century: it can, for example, undermine progressive curricular efforts and can have positive/negative implications for immigrant youth’s enduring feelings of belonging and educational enfranchisement.
{"title":"Linguistic ethnography and immigrant youth’s social lives in the liminal interludes of schooling","authors":"I. García-Sánchez","doi":"10.1515/ijsl-2022-0033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2022-0033","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this paper, I examine how liminal spatio-temporal contexts both afford and constrain how immigrant children navigate their social lives in educational settings. Liminal schooling contexts have largely been unexamined in micro-ethnographic approaches to schooling, despite the potential of these contexts for illuminating the educational lives of youth. Shifting the ethnographic lens to the interactions occurring in seemingly liminal schooling contexts (in between ratified activities, in between ratified places, etc.) reveal heightened forms of behavior at the extremes of a continuum ranging from empathy/inclusion to violence/exclusion. On the one hand, liminality can render immigrant youth more vulnerable to racialized bullying, including verbal and physical aggression, since many of the institutional protections that apply in ratified schooling contexts are in abeyance. On the other hand, liminal contexts also allow for displays of support and empathy that can lead to the development of cross-ethnic peer friendships, which can happen when social-ethnic boundaries and hierarchies that are reproduced in more central contexts are relaxed. This paper builds on a linguistic ethnography documenting the social lives of Moroccan immigrant children in a Southwestern Spanish town. Using videoanalysis and ethnographic methods in discourse analysis, I focus on videotaped interactions between immigrant students and their Spanish counterparts taking place in the interstices of school life – when students are walking between buildings, in the fringes/corners of the schoolyard, in between classes … etc. The long-term ethnography allows me to examine the interactions occurring in these liminal contexts in relation to institutional culture and to the relational history between children. This paper calls for examining youth’s schooling experiences more holistically. What happens in liminal contexts is crucial to achieving educational equity in the 21st century: it can, for example, undermine progressive curricular efforts and can have positive/negative implications for immigrant youth’s enduring feelings of belonging and educational enfranchisement.","PeriodicalId":52428,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of the Sociology of Language","volume":"2023 1","pages":"71 - 99"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46452981","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract This paper brings contemporary scholarship on youth migration, Indigeneity, race, and language into conversation with formative work on liminality and rites of passage. Drawing on six years’ worth of participant observation and interviews with L1 Maya (primarily K’iche’) speaking Guatemalan youth workers in Los Angeles, we theorize the transformations that characterize urban immigrant life for Indigenous Latinxs in the contemporary United States as a passage through the liminal state from separation to consummation. We first analyze participants’ language behavior during the separation phase following migration, when youth sought to defend themselves from anti-Indigenous harm and discrimination through discourse practices such as cloaking or denying Maya proficiency, claiming to be Mexican or non-Indigenous Guatemalan, or avoiding speaking Spanish or K’iche’ in public. Participants also employed techniques of bodily concealment that were believed to make them less racially identifiable in physical terms. As time went on, youth felt less of a need to defend themselves from stigmas attached to Indigeneity and Guatemalan identity and began to consider possibilities for expressing ethnic and linguistic pride in communal settings. This reflection was enabled by youth’s growing embeddedness in Los Angeles’s multicultural society along with coethnic small group settings that valorized Indigeneity and invited youth to compare their trajectories to those of other immigrant groups. We acknowledge the distinctive challenges that Indigenous youth encounter as immigrants to the US. However, our findings point beyond Indigenous Latinxs’ post-migration experiences of shame, fear, and discrimination to possibilities for language maintenance and cultural pride in the context of long-term sobrevivencia, or survival, in diaspora.
摘要:本文将当代关于青年移民、土著、种族和语言的学术研究与关于阈限和成人仪式的形成性工作进行了对话。通过六年的参与观察和对洛杉矶说母语玛雅人(主要是K ' iche ')的危地马拉青年工人的采访,我们将当代美国拉丁美洲原住民的城市移民生活特征的转变理论化,作为从分离到完善的阈值状态的通道。我们首先分析了参与者在移民后的分离阶段的语言行为,当时年轻人试图通过话语实践来保护自己免受反土著的伤害和歧视,例如掩饰或否认玛雅语的熟练程度,声称自己是墨西哥人或非土著危地马拉人,或避免在公共场合说西班牙语或K ' iche '。参与者还使用了身体隐藏的技术,据信这可以使他们在身体上不那么容易被识别出种族。随着时间的推移,年轻人感到不太需要为自己辩护,以免受到土著和危地马拉身份的污名,并开始考虑在社区环境中表达种族和语言自豪感的可能性。这种反思是由于年轻人越来越多地融入洛杉矶的多元文化社会,以及同族小团体的环境,这些环境强调了土著性,并邀请年轻人将他们的轨迹与其他移民群体的轨迹进行比较。我们承认土著青年移民到美国时所遇到的独特挑战。然而,我们的研究结果指出,除了土著拉丁人在移民后的羞耻、恐惧和歧视经历之外,在长期流亡或生存的背景下,语言维护和文化自豪感的可能性。
{"title":"Thresholds of liminality: discourse and embodiment from separation to consummation among Guatemalan Maya youth workers in Los Angeles","authors":"B. O’Connor, Stephanie L. Canizales","doi":"10.1515/ijsl-2022-0035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2022-0035","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper brings contemporary scholarship on youth migration, Indigeneity, race, and language into conversation with formative work on liminality and rites of passage. Drawing on six years’ worth of participant observation and interviews with L1 Maya (primarily K’iche’) speaking Guatemalan youth workers in Los Angeles, we theorize the transformations that characterize urban immigrant life for Indigenous Latinxs in the contemporary United States as a passage through the liminal state from separation to consummation. We first analyze participants’ language behavior during the separation phase following migration, when youth sought to defend themselves from anti-Indigenous harm and discrimination through discourse practices such as cloaking or denying Maya proficiency, claiming to be Mexican or non-Indigenous Guatemalan, or avoiding speaking Spanish or K’iche’ in public. Participants also employed techniques of bodily concealment that were believed to make them less racially identifiable in physical terms. As time went on, youth felt less of a need to defend themselves from stigmas attached to Indigeneity and Guatemalan identity and began to consider possibilities for expressing ethnic and linguistic pride in communal settings. This reflection was enabled by youth’s growing embeddedness in Los Angeles’s multicultural society along with coethnic small group settings that valorized Indigeneity and invited youth to compare their trajectories to those of other immigrant groups. We acknowledge the distinctive challenges that Indigenous youth encounter as immigrants to the US. However, our findings point beyond Indigenous Latinxs’ post-migration experiences of shame, fear, and discrimination to possibilities for language maintenance and cultural pride in the context of long-term sobrevivencia, or survival, in diaspora.","PeriodicalId":52428,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of the Sociology of Language","volume":"2023 1","pages":"155 - 179"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45097476","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Across the world, optimistic educational policy discourses promote early childhood education as a key strategy for combating poverty and for building bright futures for the most vulnerable members of society. Viewed from the ground up, this picture of early childhood education as a path to bright futures for all children is often belied by political and economic entrenchments. This article draws on a four-year ethnographic study of multiple classrooms in one Lebanese public kindergarten school that serves the most vulnerable children in Lebanon – Lebanese, Syrian, and Palestinian children who face daily the insecurities of poverty, displacement, and political violence. Drawing on anthropological theory that illustrates how social identities forged at the level of historical timescales are constructed and contested at the microlevel of everyday life, we pay particular attention to spatio-temporal liminal contexts within which children renounce productions of their own, their peers’, and their families’ marginality.
{"title":"“Miss, our clothes are clean:” contesting liminality in Lebanese kindergarten classrooms","authors":"Thea Renda Abu El-Haj, Samira Chatila","doi":"10.1515/ijsl-2022-0041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2022-0041","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Across the world, optimistic educational policy discourses promote early childhood education as a key strategy for combating poverty and for building bright futures for the most vulnerable members of society. Viewed from the ground up, this picture of early childhood education as a path to bright futures for all children is often belied by political and economic entrenchments. This article draws on a four-year ethnographic study of multiple classrooms in one Lebanese public kindergarten school that serves the most vulnerable children in Lebanon – Lebanese, Syrian, and Palestinian children who face daily the insecurities of poverty, displacement, and political violence. Drawing on anthropological theory that illustrates how social identities forged at the level of historical timescales are constructed and contested at the microlevel of everyday life, we pay particular attention to spatio-temporal liminal contexts within which children renounce productions of their own, their peers’, and their families’ marginality.","PeriodicalId":52428,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of the Sociology of Language","volume":"2023 1","pages":"19 - 40"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45713376","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Beyond Policías y ladrones: an epilogue to liminality?","authors":"Ofelia García","doi":"10.1515/ijsl-2022-0094","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2022-0094","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52428,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of the Sociology of Language","volume":"54 21 1","pages":"181 - 188"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66806821","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"New horizons in the study of language and liminality: an introduction","authors":"Ariana Mangual Figueroa, I. García-Sánchez","doi":"10.1515/ijsl-2022-0097","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2022-0097","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52428,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of the Sociology of Language","volume":"2023 1","pages":"1 - 18"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44721113","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract In this article we introduce the language practices of a group of Indigenous Maya students at an elementary school in northern California. We discuss how liminal experience in migration foregrounds an awareness of becoming and embodying multiple selves and of using multiple languages across the home, school, and community. Through an analysis of interview data from a three and a half-year ethnographic project at the school, we focus on two students’ strategies for learning and stewarding their Indigenous language. Their use and awareness of language offer examples of Indigenous resurgence and futurity as the young generation reclaims language in acts of transnational sovereignty. We argue that these students’ translanguaging practices represent their everyday actions as stewards of the language, and that in the process of learning their Indigenous language, these students enact forms of transnational sovereignty.
{"title":"Stewards of the language: liminality and transnational sovereignty","authors":"Patricia Baquedano-López, Cristina S. Méndez","doi":"10.1515/ijsl-2022-0040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2022-0040","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this article we introduce the language practices of a group of Indigenous Maya students at an elementary school in northern California. We discuss how liminal experience in migration foregrounds an awareness of becoming and embodying multiple selves and of using multiple languages across the home, school, and community. Through an analysis of interview data from a three and a half-year ethnographic project at the school, we focus on two students’ strategies for learning and stewarding their Indigenous language. Their use and awareness of language offer examples of Indigenous resurgence and futurity as the young generation reclaims language in acts of transnational sovereignty. We argue that these students’ translanguaging practices represent their everyday actions as stewards of the language, and that in the process of learning their Indigenous language, these students enact forms of transnational sovereignty.","PeriodicalId":52428,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of the Sociology of Language","volume":"2023 1","pages":"41 - 69"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47744876","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract This article examines how language, liminality, and social marginalization converge in the institutional lives of two displaced children in Angola. A displaced child is very likely to be placed into institutionalized care, which in Angola exists in the form of centros de acolhimento, residential centers that house minors affected by orphanhood, poverty, displacement, or abandonment. Drawing on one year of ethnographic research in two residential centers, the article argues that despite being sites of care and protection, some children come to desire living on the street as a byproduct of persistent marginalization and forms of liminality in the institutions. Utilizing audiovisual recordings of everyday interactions among children and the center’s staff as data, the focus of the article is a set of communicative practices that routinely positioned certain children as liminal subjects who possessed the negative attributes with which liminality is most often associated: danger, pollution, and being an ambiguous nonentity. As a result, those children occupied marginalized positions within the centers and their attempts at claiming their belonging were repeatedly undermined. The lived experience, talk, and perspectives of two children, a boy and a girl, are closely analyzed to illuminate the micro-processes involved in the discursive production of their liminality and social marginality. More broadly, the article elucidates the everyday forms of liminality that take place in the mundane, rather than in ritualized rites of passage, and questions the traditional notion of liminality as a temporary state.
本文探讨了语言、阈限和社会边缘化在安哥拉两个流离失所儿童的机构生活中是如何融合的。流离失所的儿童很可能被安置在机构照料中,在安哥拉,这种照料以centeros de acolhimento的形式存在,即收容受孤儿、贫困、流离失所或被遗弃影响的未成年人的居住中心。在两个收容中心进行了一年的人种学研究后,文章认为,尽管收容中心是照顾和保护的场所,但由于收容机构中持续的边缘化和各种形式的限制,一些儿童开始渴望在街上生活。利用儿童和中心工作人员之间日常互动的视听记录作为数据,这篇文章的重点是一组交流实践,这些交流实践通常将某些儿童定位为具有负面属性的阈限对象,这些属性与阈限最常相关:危险、污染和模糊的虚无。结果,这些儿童在中心内处于边缘地位,他们要求归属的努力一再遭到破坏。本文仔细分析了两个孩子(一男一女)的生活经历、谈话和观点,以阐明他们的阈限性和社会边缘性的话语生产中涉及的微观过程。更广泛地说,这篇文章阐明了在日常生活中发生的阈限形式,而不是在仪式化的成人仪式中,并质疑了阈限作为一种暂时状态的传统观念。
{"title":"Angolan children’s experiences in residential centers: displacement, liminality, and belonging","authors":"Kristina João Nazimova","doi":"10.1515/ijsl-2022-0038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2022-0038","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article examines how language, liminality, and social marginalization converge in the institutional lives of two displaced children in Angola. A displaced child is very likely to be placed into institutionalized care, which in Angola exists in the form of centros de acolhimento, residential centers that house minors affected by orphanhood, poverty, displacement, or abandonment. Drawing on one year of ethnographic research in two residential centers, the article argues that despite being sites of care and protection, some children come to desire living on the street as a byproduct of persistent marginalization and forms of liminality in the institutions. Utilizing audiovisual recordings of everyday interactions among children and the center’s staff as data, the focus of the article is a set of communicative practices that routinely positioned certain children as liminal subjects who possessed the negative attributes with which liminality is most often associated: danger, pollution, and being an ambiguous nonentity. As a result, those children occupied marginalized positions within the centers and their attempts at claiming their belonging were repeatedly undermined. The lived experience, talk, and perspectives of two children, a boy and a girl, are closely analyzed to illuminate the micro-processes involved in the discursive production of their liminality and social marginality. More broadly, the article elucidates the everyday forms of liminality that take place in the mundane, rather than in ritualized rites of passage, and questions the traditional notion of liminality as a temporary state.","PeriodicalId":52428,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of the Sociology of Language","volume":"2023 1","pages":"101 - 129"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43710391","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract This paper focuses on political socialization in a conflict-affected context and looks at how young Greek-Cypriot learners of Turkish debated political positionings and engaged with political and conflict ideologies usually seen as part of the adult world. It draws on data from two linguistic ethnographic projects (2006–2009; 2012–2015) that analysed classroom observations and recordings of controversial Turkish-as-Foreign-Language (MFL) lessons in a Greek-Cypriot Secondary School. The paper employs the concept of liminality, which has been traditionally linked with transition, describing an in-between space, where normal rules, conventions and relations are suspended or transgressed, carrying the potential for the creation of new structures and creative performance. Moving away from romantised approaches to liminality as liberating from structures, the analysis looks “inside liminality” for alternative or enduring patterns and conventions and reveals the affordances and limitations of liminal-like experiences in education settings, and their potential role in young people’s political socialization. Approaching children/teenagers as youthful political agents, the paper analyses first the multiple liminal social and political spaces that young learners of Turkish occupied; then, it focuses particularly on an interactional event, when the usual lesson structures and procedures of the language lesson were suspended, looking at how students, in this liminal-like moment, mobilized knowledge and recourses to form and debate political subjectivities and dominant political ideologies. The analysis points to the resilience of conflict discourses and discourses of othering but it also reveals youngsters’ attempts to articulate a political discourse that introduces new discursive frames for the discussion of social and political relations in a post-conflict manner. This has important implications for young people’s political socialization in conflict-affected contexts, revealing the role that language plays in this process.
{"title":"Navigating liminality: young people’s political socialization in a conflict-affected context","authors":"Constadina Charalambous","doi":"10.1515/ijsl-2022-0036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2022-0036","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper focuses on political socialization in a conflict-affected context and looks at how young Greek-Cypriot learners of Turkish debated political positionings and engaged with political and conflict ideologies usually seen as part of the adult world. It draws on data from two linguistic ethnographic projects (2006–2009; 2012–2015) that analysed classroom observations and recordings of controversial Turkish-as-Foreign-Language (MFL) lessons in a Greek-Cypriot Secondary School. The paper employs the concept of liminality, which has been traditionally linked with transition, describing an in-between space, where normal rules, conventions and relations are suspended or transgressed, carrying the potential for the creation of new structures and creative performance. Moving away from romantised approaches to liminality as liberating from structures, the analysis looks “inside liminality” for alternative or enduring patterns and conventions and reveals the affordances and limitations of liminal-like experiences in education settings, and their potential role in young people’s political socialization. Approaching children/teenagers as youthful political agents, the paper analyses first the multiple liminal social and political spaces that young learners of Turkish occupied; then, it focuses particularly on an interactional event, when the usual lesson structures and procedures of the language lesson were suspended, looking at how students, in this liminal-like moment, mobilized knowledge and recourses to form and debate political subjectivities and dominant political ideologies. The analysis points to the resilience of conflict discourses and discourses of othering but it also reveals youngsters’ attempts to articulate a political discourse that introduces new discursive frames for the discussion of social and political relations in a post-conflict manner. This has important implications for young people’s political socialization in conflict-affected contexts, revealing the role that language plays in this process.","PeriodicalId":52428,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of the Sociology of Language","volume":"2023 1","pages":"131 - 154"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46713731","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}