Narrative Identities, Intersecting Stories and Disparate Trajectories: Constructing and Scaling “Ordinariness” — The Association Specialists
  1. Schedule
  2. SESSION 4: Language, culture, and socialization A
  3. Narrative Identities, Intersecting Stories and Disparate Trajectories: Constructing and Scaling “Ordinariness”

Narrative Identities, Intersecting Stories and Disparate Trajectories: Constructing and Scaling “Ordinariness” (20007)

Huishan Li 1
  1. Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Macau, Macau, Macau SAR, China

Answering SS25’s call to contemplate what ordinariness entails and how it is imposed, the proposed presentation will showcase how “ordinariness” is constructed and scaled in social media discourse. The results are extracted from an ongoing ethnographic research project exploring Chinese doctoral students’ experiences at different stages of their PhD programs. Adopting lenses of global South theory (Hamid, 2022) and academic discourse socialization (Kobayashi et al., 2017), the original project aims to unveil what kinds of and how same dynamics - power, social, structural - function dominantly across contexts, and thereafter how individuals in their trajectories towards target (academic and relevant) communities interact with these dynamics. In other words, the complex natures of patterns, communities, and hierarchies.

Specifically, this presentation will share results from multimodal discourse analysis on a specific social media platform in China: Xiaohongshu (simplified Chinese:小红书; literal meaning: little red book). Starting from the question: how “ordinariness” is represented and interpreted by “ordinary people”, I will discuss how speakers assign themselves and others’ statuses of ordinary or non-ordinary hence achieve perlocutionary effects, through which concepts of ordinary or non-ordinary and specific identities are constantly reconstructed and/or deconstructed in discourse. Ordinariness will be conceptualized as a scalar notion (Fetzer & Weizman, 2019), the spectrum of which demonstrates dynamics of drawing boundaries, transcending groups, and entitling rights in not just online communities but more broadly discourse and society. This tells part of the navigation and negotiation stories around socializing into targeted communities, and in particular the interplay between complex hierarchical dynamics and disparate individual trajectories. The results will contribute to scholarly discussions on inclusivity and decolonization in academia, and how to better cater for research postgraduate students’ needs regarding achievement and wellbeing.

  1. Fetzer, A., & Weizman, E. (Eds.). (2019). The Construction of “Ordinariness’ across Media Genres. John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.307
  2. Hamid, M. O. (2022). English as a Southern language. Language in Society, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404522000069
  3. Kobayashi, M., Zappa-Hollman, S., & Duff, P.A. (2017). Academic Discourse Socialization. In P. Duff & S. May (Eds.), Language Socialization. Encyclopedia of Language and Education (pp. 239–254). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02255-0_18