This colloquium brings together contributions that raise awareness on the role of constraints in language practices from a sociolinguistic perspective, speaking directly to the ordinariness and innovation themes of the symposium. Taking into consideration aspects such as the possible lack of full control on circumstances and doing in everyday life, the papers explore the ways in which constraints intertwine with multilingual practices. The colloquium concedes that developing linguistically does not necessarily mean breaking free from the undesired (Canagarajah 2023), also raising questions on whether contemporary sociolinguistic research on fluid language practices lacks a theory of constraints (Santello 2022). The key point that the colloquium wishes to interrogate is, therefore, whether, besides the recognition that standardised forms can make meaning, there could also be value in multilingual practices that operate within constraints rather than going beyond them. This would revisit the assumption around transcendence of boundaries as the touchstone of multilingualism, precisely giving an enhanced consideration of what it means to operate linguistically – and possibly creatively – within something given. These arguments resonate with processes that involve fixity (Prinsloo 2023) and immobilities (De Fina and Mazzaferro 2022) which are currently being brought up by scholars in different settings.

References

Canagarajah, Suresh (2023). A decolonial crip linguistics. Applied Linguistics, 44(1), 1-21

De Fina, Anna & Mazzaferro, Gerardo (2022). Introduction. In Anna De Fina & Gerardo Mazzaferro (eds.), Exploring (im)mobilities: Language practices, discourses, imaginaries, 1-14. Bristol ; Jackson: Multilingual Matters.

Prinsloo, Mastin (2023). Fixity and fluidity in language and language education. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. Ahead of print.

Santello, Marco (2022). Questioning translanguaging creativity through Michel de Certeau. Language and Intercultural Communication, 22(6), 681-93.

Organiser: Marco Santello (University of Turin, Italy)

Presenters:

1. Emilee Moore (Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain)
2. Mastin Prinsloo (University of Cape Town, South Africa)
3. Gabriele Budach (University of Luxemburg, Luxemburg)
4. Birgul Yilmuz (University of Exeter, UK)
5. Marco Santello (University of Turin, Italy)

Discussant: Peter de Costa (Michigan State University, USA)

Contribution 1

Multilingual pre-service teachers’ inhabiting ‘what is given’

Emilee Moore (Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain)

Following de Certeau, Santello (2022) invites a re-theorisation of creativity within translanguaging research in terms of how multilingual people inhabit, rather than transcend, ‘what is given’. Responding to this challenge, in this paper we critically re-visit corpora of ethnographic interviews conducted with multilingual pre-service teachers (see Astorgano et al., 20222; Cioè-Peña et al., 2016). While our previous research has highlighted the ways these pre-service teachers imagine themselves challenging the monolingual habitus of institutions, here I consider the ways their multilingualism is experienced as constrained by social and institutional norms of language use, as well as the ways they imagine themselves inhabiting the status quo as teachers. This research is inspired by, and aims to add to, a growing body critical research with similar cohorts of pre-service teachers, including Cushing’s (2022) research on the ‘linguistic oppression’ encountered during school placements by racial and linguistic minority students in the UK, or Burke et al.’s (2019) work on the linguistic trauma experienced by low SES, indigenous and geographically remote students at a regional Australian university.

References

Astorgano, R. (Director and film-maker), Moore, E. (Coordinator), Llompart-Esbert, J., Masats, D. & Vallejo Rubinstein, C. (Researchers). (2022).Veus [Documentary]. The Listiac Project; Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

Burke, R., Shaw, E. y Baker, S. (2019). Literacy autobiographies in pre-service teacher education: opportunities for therapeutic writing in widening participation contexts. Widening Participation and Lifelong Learning, 21 (3), 151-161.

Cioè-Peña, M., Moore, E., y Martín Rojo, L. (2016).  The burden of ‘nativeness’: Four plurilingual student-teachers’ stories. Bellaterra Journal of Teaching and Learning Languages and Literature, 9 (2), 32-52.

Cushing, I. (2021, 7 December). Racially minoritised pre-service teachers’ experiences of language oppression [Conference]. UCL Institute of Education – Institute for Applied Linguistics.

Santello, M. (2022). Questioning translanguaging creativity through Michel de Certeau. Language and Intercultural Communication, 22 (6), 681-93.

Contribution 2

Fluid and fixed entanglements

Mastin Prinsloo (University of Cape Town, South Africa)

Recent attention to languaging practices in multilingual settings has produced such foci and terms as translanguaging, metrolingualism, and trans-semiotizing, amongst others, where attention is on fluidity and border-crossing with respect to recognised languages and semiotic resources. Such fluid dynamics have generally been researched on and argued for in contrast to what are described as more fixed, rigid, generalised or standardised ideas of languages as distinct from each other and as relatively stable or slow-changing phenomena that are enacted by state-designed national education systems, in particular, and by other state institutions. The persistence and functionality of such standardised language practices are sometimes discounted in research where the focus is on “heteroglossic, fluid, and fuzzy language practices” (Makoni, 2011, 682). I make the case here that the focus on such heteroglossic practices in languaging research also needs to take account of the persistence, effects and affordances of standardisation dynamics. Insistence in fluid languaging research on the creative, critical, resistant and “transcendent” character of fluid languaging (Li, 2018, 27), understood as ‘language from below’, runs the risk of placing excessive emphasis on the modality of languaging rather than what it is part of, what is being done with it. Drawing on my and colleagues’ research I describe processes of entanglement of ‘fixed’ and ‘fluid’ languaging practices in institutional settings and argue that evidence of fluid languaging is not always a cause for celebration.

References

Makoni, S. 2011. Sociolinguistics, colonial and postcolonial: an integrationist perspective. Language Sciences, 33, 680-688.

Li, W. 2018. Translanguaging as a practical theory of language. Applied Linguistics, 39(1), 9-30.

Contribution 3

Constraint or potentiality? Multilingual language practices in filmic creation

Gabriele Budach (University of Luxemburg, Luxemburg)

This talk explores what happens when multilingual speakers whose repertoires overlap only partly interact while creating a short stop motion animation film. In this context, rules for linguistic cooperation are constraint by technology and the principles of filmic creation. Objects are staged and moved in small incremental steps to produce a long sequence of photographic frames, later played back as film.

Ethnographic observation in workshops with families, adults and children, from different linguistic backgrounds has shown how the apparatus of film making – based on using an app on a tablet - supersedes the apparatus of linguistic norm. Attention to named languages experienced as a normative focus and devise for (self-)corrective human behavior is shifted to the creative act of producing movement. Multilingual language use flows alongside hand movement and the handling of technology.

This shows, I argue, how material constraints can become a potentiality while guiding multilingual interaction. I agree with Santello (2022) that the fluidity of the participants’ language use, as observed in this case, stems only little from deliberate, subversive acts of transcending (normative) boundaries, but rather from the dynamics of the interaction unfolding within particular constraints, and something situationally given. 

References

Santello, M. (2022). Questioning translanguaging creativity through Michel de Certeau. Language and Intercultural Communication, 22 (6), 681-93.

Contribution 4

Language learning in the asylum: Disorientation, uncertainty and forced migration

Birgul Yilmuz (University of Exeter, UK)

In this presentation I examine how uncertainty and disorientation (De Fina 2003) shape language learning processes of a group of refugees learning English in a political café in Athens. Based on my ethnographic fieldwork since 2018, and video recorded classroom interactions, I explore how language learning practices of my participants, who at the same time lived in a squat temporarily before their journeys to Northern Europe, were shaped by their precarious living conditions. Theoretically, I engage with Turner’s (1974) concept of liminality which in a nutshell refers to the ambiguity and disorientation experienced when individuals go through transitions such as border crossing. I focus on how refugees’ past and future migratory journeys shape their language learning choices as they prepare to leave Athens-- in the hope of finding better lives in countries such as Germany and Switzerland. I demonstrate how uncertainty not only shapes language learning choices of refugees “stuck” in Athens, but also how this transitory phase shape their identities and everyday lived experiences in multilingual spaces. More specifically, I look at the three phases that Turner (based on Van Gennep 1960) proposes in his theorisation of liminality: a) separation b) transition and c) incorporation. By focusing on in-betweenness and ways in which this phase shapes the everyday lived experiences of my participants, I suggest that language learning in the context of forced migration presents several challenges such as the everyday in-betweenness and how this shapes classroom interactions and our understanding of linguistic practice under changing conditions (Rampton 2021).

References

De Fina, A. (2003). Time, space, and disorientation in narrative. Narrative Inquiry, (13)2, 367-391.

Rampton, B. (2021). Linguistic practice in changing conditions. Multilingual Matters.

Turner, V.W. (1974). Liminal to liminoid, in play, flow and ritual: An essay in comparative symbology. Rice University Studies, 60 (3): 53–92.

van Gennep, A. (1960 [1909]). The rites of passage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Contribution 5

Constraints, suffering and surfacing repertoires among Gambian migrants in Italy

Marco Santello (University of Turin, Italy)

Recent sociolinguistic research on language and migration has highlighted aspects creativity through the transcendence of boundaries, hinting at a version of multilingualism that does not feature enough of the speakers' experience of constraints (Santello 2022). This presentation illustrates some results of a project carried out Italy, discussing what being not in full control of circumstances and doing means concretely for a group of Gambian migrants. Adopting an ethnographic approach and drawing theoretically on Michel de Certeau’s (1990) conceptualisation of language use within a space of action, the paper concentrates on how lived experiences of constraints are articulated in interaction. The data, viewed in light of stance-taking (Jaffe 2009) and rapport-in-talk (Goebel 2021), show that constraints are linked to a lack of institutional support and being in a position where certain languages cannot be used, despite concrete help from volunteers and a local NGO as well as personal efforts. Constraints become part and parcel of the practises that migrants use to live their life in more than one language. In this case ‘fully acknowledging ongoing, often deeply entrenched, local constraints’ (Dovchin, 2022, 9) means also considering that they can and sometimes are implicated in the very same multilingualism that one might view in opposition to them.

References

Certeau, Michel de (1990). L’invention du quotidien. 1 Arts de faire. Paris: Gallimard.

Dovchin, Sender (2022) Translingual discrimination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Goebel, Zane (2021). Reimagining rapport. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jaffe, Alexandra (2009). Stance: sociolinguistic perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Santello, Marco (2022). Questioning translanguaging creativity through Michel de Certeau. Language and Intercultural Communication, 22(6), 681-93.

Contribution 6

Discussant session

Peter De Costa (Michigan State University)