Abstracts Archive

How do we encounter others who are not like us, who are different from us? When reflecting on this question, applied linguists have traditionally worked within an empiricist, human-centred framework, and focused on human interaction. Recent contributions by new materialist and posthumanist scholars ...

This study is an experience report based on two ethnographic studies on rural multilingualism, carried out in Lower Fungom, an intensely linguistically diverse, rural area in the Northwest Region of Cameroon. Rural multilingualism is still an under-researched area and to study a phenomenon with a lo...

In this paper, I revisit a cultural studies understanding of difference mediated through genre and intertextuality to advance an approach to stancetaking that foregrounds embodied alignments and disalignments in the encountering of Others. I define difference as the embodied performance of relationa...

The representation of difference in human encounters has presented challenges for ethnography. The urge to explain the 'culture' of the 'other' seems to demand a homogenisation and simplification of experience which leads to a shoring-up of inequitable relations of power. Encounters beyond the bound...

This paper asks about the possibility of human connection in divided communities. I draw on two concepts: 1) semiotic repertoires: communication resources that are embodied and embedded in the physical settings of people's encounters and whose meanings emerge in activity (Canagarajah, 2021; Kust...