Training and Events

Mobility, multilingualism and methods: sociolinguistic ethnography in the globalized new economy

02-05-2012

School of Education, University of Birmingham

Master class with Professor Monica Heller
This class will explore the shifting realities of heretofore marginalized linguistic minorities, and ask what consequences these realities have for the questions we ask about minorities, for what counts as data in addressing those questions, for how to generate that data and for what constitutes legitimate knowledge production about "minorities" and "multilingualism". We will begin my examining my own experiences of reshaping my research methods while tracking the changing political economy of francophone Canada from industrial modernity to the globalized new economy. I will show how that shift forced a move away from understanding fieldwork as community"- (or even institution-) based towards an encounter with mobility, and from "language" to a Bakhtinian view of communicative practice. We will then work with participants' concerns to formulate questions which use political economy and mobility as lenses, and to explore what kinds of data and data generation methods might be adequate to explore them.