To ensure smooth communication and collaboration, here are some troubleshooting tips to address common issues:
Check Internet Connection: Verify that you have a stable and reliable internet connection. Use a wired connection when possible, as it tends to be more stable than Wi-Fi. If using Wi-Fi, make sure you have a strong signal.
Update the Browser or App: Ensure that you are using the latest version of the web browser. Developers frequently release updates to address bugs and improve performance.
Clear Browser Cache: Sometimes, cached data can cause conflicts or issues. Clear the browser cache and cookies before joining the meeting.
Test Audio and Video: Before the meeting, check your microphone and camera to ensure they are working correctly. If you are a speaker, you can click on "Start Practice Session" button test to ensure audio and video devices are functioning.
Close Other Applications: Running multiple applications in the background can consume system resources and lead to performance issues. Close unnecessary apps to free up resources for the Dryfta meeting platform.
Restart Your Device: If you encounter persistent issues, try restarting your computer or mobile device. This can help resolve various software-related problems.
Use Supported Browsers: Ensure you are using a browser supported by the meeting platform. Recommended browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Brave.
Allow Necessary Permissions: Make sure the Dryfta meeting platform has the required permissions to access your microphone, camera, and other necessary features.
Disable VPN or Firewall: Sometimes, VPNs or firewalls can interfere with the connection to the meeting platform. Temporarily disable them and see if the issue persists.
Switch Devices: If possible, try joining the meeting from a different device to see if the problem is specific to one device.
Reduce Bandwidth Usage: In cases of slow or unstable internet connections, ask participants to disable video or share video selectively to reduce bandwidth consumption.
Update Drivers and Software: Ensure your operating system, audio drivers, and video drivers are up to date. Outdated drivers can cause compatibility issues with the Dryfta meeting platform.
Contact Support: If none of the above steps resolve the issue, reach out to the platform's support team. They can provide personalized assistance and troubleshoot specific problems.
By following these troubleshooting tips, you can tackle many common problems encountered on Dryfta meeting platform and have a more productive and seamless meeting experience.
20230721T101520230721T1800Europe/Amsterdam[SYMP67] Sociolinguistics, Ethics and the Art of Encountering the OtherHybrid Session (onsite/online)AILA 2023 - 20th Anniversary Congress Lyon Editioncellule.congres@ens-lyon.fr
When we see that kind of language, “someone is going to jail”: Encountering difference ethically in adult basic education
Oral Presentation[SYMP67] Sociolinguistics, Ethics and the Art of Encountering the Other10:15 AM - 01:15 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 11:15:00 UTC
There has been a call for applied linguists to consider situated microethical challenges of research in practice, rather than relying on macroethical principles alone to ensure ethical conduct (Kubanyiova, 2008). In research with immigrants, ethical considerations often involve differences of language, culture, race, and education between participants and researchers. Institutional ethics regimes anticipate such differences from afar, at the level of typification (Bauman, 1993). Yet research in practice may reveal unanticipated dimensions of difference, which we suggest must be met through an ethical construct of responsibility for the Other that seeks neither to erase difference nor compel the Other into a response (Levinas, 1985). We engage with the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of encountering the Other while negotiating consent with participants in adult basic education for immigrants. The aesthetic dimension should not be understood as artistic or creative, but rather as sensorial and emotional. This understanding opens for exploring lived experience and memory, including trauma (Busch & McNamara, 2020), and how these are evoked by the aesthetic characteristics of research encounters. Thus, our aim is to investigate initial negotiations of consent to participate in research as ethical and aesthetic encounters with difference. We draw on data from an ethnographic monitoring project (Hornberger & De Korne, 2017) in adult basic education for immigrants in Norway, including fieldnotes and recorded meetings and interviews with teachers and multilingual research assistants. Our analysis focuses on (1) the semiotic value of artifacts and practices involved in initial consent and (2) the forms of relationality involved in negotiating difference. First, we found that translated and even oral project information initially produced great resistance from potential participants. Notably, the optics of written project information in languages such as Arabic and Tigrinya evoked traumatic memories of repressive regimes in students' pasts (see Busch & McNamara, 2020), rather than the regulatory regime this represented to us. Second, we found that trust built through biographical similarity or affinity spaces was necessary for engaging relationally given unanticipated dimensions of difference. Multilingual staff, research assistants, and teachers proved important not only for conveying information, but for interpreting students' responses to the signs we introduced. An ethico-aesthetic lens enables a better understanding of unpredictability and difference in negotiating participation in research, by seeing research ethics routines as aesthetically laden experiences. Attending to an aesthetic dimension therefore contributes to ethics negotiations that may indeed qualify as ethical encounters, not only procedurally but also relationally. Bauman, Z. (1993). Postmodern ethics. Blackwell. Biesta, G. J. J. (2013). The beautiful risk of education. Paradigm Publishers. Busch, B., & McNamara, T. (2020). Language and trauma: An introduction. Applied Linguistics, 41(3), 323–333. De Korne, H., & Hornberger, N. H. (2017). Countering unequal multilingualism through ethnographic monitoring. In M. Martin-Jones & D. Martin (Eds.), Researching multilingualism: Critical and ethnographic perspectives (pp. 247–258). Routledge. Kubanyiova, M. (2008). Rethinking research ethics in contemporary applied linguistics: The tension between macroethical and microethical perspectives in situated research. Modern Language Journal, 92(4), 503–518. Levinas, E. (1985). Ethics and infinity. Duquesne University Press.
Naturalistic Data Collection in Rural Cameroon: Challenges and Ethical Issues
Oral Presentation[SYMP67] Sociolinguistics, Ethics and the Art of Encountering the Other10:15 AM - 01:15 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 11:15:00 UTC
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 lot of grey areas necessitates a qualitative design that gives the researcher a first-hand look; the kind that allows the subjects to be observed in a natural setting and also allows the collection of spontaneous speech data. There has been a humanitarian and political crisis pummeling through the English-speaking Regions of Cameroon since 2016. The severity of this crisis in some rural regions has sent around waves of fear, anxiety, and despair. These feelings in a consultant interfere with the collection of naturalistic data.The use of audio and video recorders for data collection becomes a delicate matter that should be handled with utmost care to safeguard the consultants' emotional and physical well being, as well as the entire research community. The study highlights the need for raising awareness of the researcher's impact and responsibilities especially in a rural community in Cameroon.
Naturalistic Data Collection in Rural Cameroon: Challenges and Ethical Issues 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 lot of grey areas necessitates a qualitative design that gives the researcher a first-hand look; the kind that allows the subjects to be observed in a natural setting and also allows the collection of spontaneous speech data. There has been a humanitarian and political crisis pummeling through the English-speaking Regions of Cameroon since 2016. The severity of this crisis in some rural regions has sent around waves of fear, anxiety, and despair. These feelings in a consultant interfere with the collection of naturalistic data; wearing an obvious lavalier microphone and a recorder and having a video camera on a consultant while they carry about their daily activities has become difficult as this seems precarious to consultants and those around them. Collecting spontaneous speech and naturalistic observation allowed for the exploration of rural multilingualism which is still an uncharted are. Naturalistic data collection favoured a rich, vivid and detailed study but with the current crisis, audio and video recorders could paint the picture of an emissary. Consultants need to be left unharmed in such situations no matter the research goals. This study reports personal, related experiences as an attempt to create awareness on the researchers' impact and their responsibilities towards their consultants especially when this area is rural and many are not used to the presence of research instruments such as large tripod supported video recorders.
Intimacy and distance in domestic work relations: Sociolinguistic challenges
Oral Presentation[SYMP67] Sociolinguistics, Ethics and the Art of Encountering the Other10:15 AM - 01:15 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 11:15:00 UTC
"(T)hat which is excluded in the enactment of knowledge-discourse-power practices plays a constitutive role in the production of phenomena - exclusions matter both to bodies that come to matter and those excluded from mattering… these entangled practices are productive, and who and what are excluded through these entangled practices matter" (Barad 2007: 57). I am concerned here with the 'who' and 'what' referred to in the quote above, with the nature of their exclusions in the 'entangled practices' of domestic work and in the entangled relations between paid domestic workers and those for whom they work. And in particular, I am concerned with how these exclusions matter, as well as what they tell us about language practices and how we study them. I started to address these themes in a recently published paper in the Journal of Postcolonial Linguistics (2022, 7, 89-107) and in this paper I take this work further to consider the implications for sociolinguistics and applied linguistics research of taking such exclusions seriously and addressing the ethical implications that are involved. I examine multiple instances, including historical and contemporary examples in the literature on domestic workers as well as empirical research from South Africa, where I focus on interactive relations of intimacy and distance, conviviality and hostility in domestic worker and employer interactions, starting from an example of a slave-owner in pre-abolition England, referring to a 'house-slave' of his: "A slave is a slave and can be sold, but you can eat with him, talk with him, travel with him" (Mason, 1962:29). I start from what Barad (2010: 249) describes as "a discontinuity at the heart of meaning itself" as "the irreducible excess of a disjointure" at the heart of things. Domestic work offers up plenty of such discontinuities and disjointures, where relations of heightened inequality and exploitation counter-exist with relations of familiarity, attachment, conviviality and intimacy, where particular instances of language in social interaction draw on but hide these disjointures. As far as language research is concerned this points to some challenges as to how to go forward, in that particular instances of discursive interaction can be seen to be troubled by an absence or loss, "that which language does not capture" (Butler 1993: 67), thus including "an essential unknowing" which underlies and may undermine what is apparent regarding identity and intention on the part of the people involved, in the language they use. How are intention, identity and agency displaced and rerouted in such entangled practices? How do we consider the buried, accumulated, and interwoven intentions of actors who are less determinate and unitary than we are used to seeing them as being? I draw on particular examples of interactions between and discourses about domestic workers and employers to consider these questions and what they say to us about language and its place in material-discursive practices when we have attempted to dissolve the divides between meaning and materiality, macro and micro, social and technical, along with nature and culture.
Presenters Mastin Prinsloo Emeritus Professor, University Of Cape Town
Towards a Sociolinguistics of in Difference: Stancetaking on Others
Oral Presentation[SYMP67] Sociolinguistics, Ethics and the Art of Encountering the Other10:15 AM - 01:15 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 11:15:00 UTC
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 relationality in difference, that is to say, difference will be taken to be a notion that reveals how multilingual speakers embody relations of difference as in difference, arrived at out of conjecture, determination and contradictions of language in performance. Based on a large qualitative youth multilingual project, I draw on virtual interactional data to illustrate how in difference through stancetaking is entextualized in the embodied performance of parody by an emerging R&B and pop group in Cape Town. This embodied performance, body pop, is a type of the transgressive embodiment of language that challenges the endurance and injury of discourses of difference. I focus on body pop, an (en)genre(ing) of embodied performance, in order to demonstrate the various evaluative, affective and epistemic stancetaking effects the embodied performance had on the audience/readers. In the conclusion, I provide a few threads to follow in the further study of difference.
I adopt the concept of stancetaking to study an embodied YouTube performance of parody by an emerging R&B and pop group in Cape Town. By demonstrating the evaluative, affective and epistemic stancetaking effects on the audience/readers, I also dig into the ethical and aesthetic power of the transgressive embodiment of language to unsettle hegemonic linguistic ears and challenge the discourses of othering.
Oral Presentation[SYMP67] Sociolinguistics, Ethics and the Art of Encountering the Other10:15 AM - 01:15 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 11:15:00 UTC
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 boundaries of what is shared, where diverse ideological beliefs and backgrounds come into contact, may provoke researchers to simplify difference by constructing essentialising categories.
One of the ways in which ethnographers have responded to this apparent crisis of representation in ethnography has been to add the poem to their repertoire. The poem offers a language that retains the complexity of the human encounter when other modes of representation may not be fit for purpose. In this paper I consider the potential of the poem in ethnography in the context of a large, team research project which examined communicative encounters in superdiverse settings.
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 boundaries of what is shared, where diverse ideological beliefs and backgrounds come into contact, may provoke researchers to simplify difference by constructing essentialising categories.
One of the ways in which ethnographers have responded to this apparent crisis of representation in ethnography has been to add the poem to their repertoire. The poem offers a language that retains the complexity of the human encounter when other modes of representation may not be fit for purpose. Ethnographic poems enable researchers to paint social realities in ways that may prove difficult through ethnographic prose. They have the potential to embody the rhythms, time, and space of observed practice. In this paper I consider the potential of the poem in ethnography in the context of a large, team research project which examined communicative encounters in superdiverse settings.
Ethnographic researchers have used poetry as a medium for expressing their sense of connection to their field and their subjects. The poet and social scientist share commonalities in approach: both ground their work in meticulous observation of the empirical world, and are reflexive about their experience. But the poem reaches for something more. It is in the enhancement of, and elaboration upon, social research outcomes that the ethnographic poem has rich potential. The poem in ethnography offers a creative response to questions of representation. It has potential to offer analytical and reflexive approaches, as well as a representational form. It is a means of inquiry which challenges notions of authenticity, acknowledges complexity, and contests the single, unimpeachable account of events. Ethnographic poems rely on a belief in the ability of poetry to speak to something universal, or to clarify some part of the human condition. They come into their own as a means to enrich ethnography when researchers want to explore knowledge claims, and write with greater engagement and connection, to mediate understandings, and to reach diverse audiences.
When we allow ourselves to venture outside conventional approaches to writing ethnography, poetry can push us to be self-conscious about what we are saying, who we are including or omitting from the picture, and how we are describing or explaining what is going on. It helps us take less for granted. Ethnographic poetry can be powerful in the represention of social practice. In this paper I demonstrate that poems can reveal what is happening, and propose that in the ethnographic poem the noise of time can be re-experienced as the music of what happens (Burnside 2019). The paper concludes that the poem has the potential to offer a way of seeing, and a way of saying, in the artistic representation of encountering the other.
Burnside, J. (2019) The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century. London: Profile Books.
I understand that I will never understand but I stand with you: Encountering each other as Others through a Black Lives Matter protest placard
Oral Presentation[SYMP67] Sociolinguistics, Ethics and the Art of Encountering the Other03:00 PM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 13:00:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 16:00:00 UTC
Semiotic Repertoires and Relational Ethics: In Search of Openings for Moral Imagination in a Divided Community
Oral Presentation[SYMP67] Sociolinguistics, Ethics and the Art of Encountering the Other03:00 PM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 13:00:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 16:00:00 UTC
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; Kusters et al., 2017), and 2) relational ethics with its emphasis on the (listening) subject's ethical demand to respond to the call of the Other (Levinas, 1972). Data come from three visits to a local village school in a rural settlement in eastern Slovakia over the period of eight months. They include fieldnotes, audio recordings of classroom interactions and children's talk during breaks, informal conversations with staff and students, walking interviews with community members, documentary evidence of the locality's semiotic landscape and selected discursive evidence from the print media over the past decade or so. My aim is not to advance a theory of language but through attention to languaging signal a possibility for a shared future. I ask what openings exist for cultivating the moral imagination in places of stigma and division, how sociolinguistics in synergy with other fields can assist in bringing them into being, and what this means for advancing the sociolinguistics of ethical encounters.
Uncertain Hearing, Responsible Listening. Towards a Theory of Voice in Times of Forced Migration
Oral Presentation[SYMP67] Sociolinguistics, Ethics and the Art of Encountering the Other03:00 PM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 13:00:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 16:00:00 UTC
The socially and linguistically diverse classroom is known to be a setting where visions clash. On the example of Austria and Germany, students with particularly severe experiences (e.g., forced migrants) have been shown to articulate particularly high ambitions for their school careers (Thüne/Brizić 2022). Teachers, by contrast, often evaluate these students as overly ambitious, with a striking focus on the students' physical voice as being 'too loud', 'too silent', or 'too unpredictably alternating between the extremes' – in short: as inappropriate for the institutional setting (Ibid). This centredness around physical voice, however, easily leads to losing sight of the students' learning progress and further contributes to already highly unequal opportunities in European education systems (cf. OECD 2019).
And yet, there is another yet related perception: teachers tend to perceive themselves as highly 'uncomfortable' and 'uncertain' whenever interacting with students with particularly severe experiences. This is documented, above all, in the case of students' whose communities look back on a history of discrimination and persecution. In Germany and Austria, among the most prominent examples are Roma and Sinti as well as Kurdish students who repeatedly seem to cause teachers' uncertainties; and already Jewish students, having fled from Nazi Germany to England, reported their teachers to have felt highly uncomfortable in view of their students' experiences: "Nobody asked me. (...) You could not talk about that ..." (Thüne 2019: 164). In sum, what seems to unsettle the teachers is a perceived loss of the teacher-as-expert role in light of their students' experiences (Gilham & Fürstenau 2020: 31).
Taking a different approach, this paper regards uncertainty as indispensable for encountering "those we can never fully understand" (cited from Call for Papers). In this spirit, I will define teachers' uncertainties also as a sign of responsibility, grounded not only in (un)informedness, but rather in concerns (cf. Butler 2005: x), e.g., the concern to touch upon traumatic experiences. This allows to re-frame the teachers' hearing not just as uninformed but as meaningful for proceeding to a (self-)conscious listening. The central role of the listening subject, in turn, allows an understanding of the students' voices as sociolinguistic Voice, i.e. the ability to make oneself heard, understood, and considered worth hearing (Hymes 1996: 64), hence with the capacity to elicit an ethical response, here: the teachers' (self-)reflexive Listening. On the example of institutional interactions with teachers, I will outline some basic steps towards a Theory of Voice and discuss its implications for teacher education and practice in times of increasing forced migrations. ---- Gilham, P./Fürstenau, S. 2020. The relationship between teachers' language experience and their inclusion of pupils' home languages in school life. Language and Education 34(1), 36–50. Hymes, D. 1996. Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality: Toward an Understanding of Voice. London. OECD 2019. PISA 2018 Results (Volume II): Where All Students Can Succeed. Paris. Thüne, E.-M. 2019. Gerettet. Berichte von Kindertransport und Auswanderung nach Großbritannien. Berlin. Thüne, E.-M./Brizić, K. 2022. Voices Heard. Autobiographical Accounts of Language Learning after Forced Migration. Language and Education (in preparation).
Encounters of a different kind – Absent-presences and the ethical possibilities of a sociolinguistics of the spectre
[SYMP67] Sociolinguistics, Ethics and the Art of Encountering the Other03:00 PM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 13:00:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 16:00:00 UTC
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 have encouraged linguists to broaden the scope of their work and to consider not only encounters between humans, but also encounters between humans and the rest of the world (e.g. Pennycook 2017). In this paper I build on what I have called 'a sociolinguistics of the spectre' (Deumert forthcoming), and reflect on a small set of interviews (conducted in 2018/2019 in South Africa) where speakers discuss how they engage with those who are not physically visible to them but who are nevertheless present in their lives (spiritual beings, ancestors, etc.). I will explore these interviews by focusing on how speakers enact 'encounters with the other' in contexts where the other does not share our bodily presence, yet is central to the ways in which we construct, and enact, a relational ethics vis à vis the world that surrounds us, including its presences as well as its absent-presences (Derrida 1993).
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 have encouraged linguists to broaden the scope of their work and to consider not only encounters between humans, but also encounters between humans and the rest of the world (e.g. Pennycook 2017). In this paper I build on what I have called 'a sociolinguistics of the spectre' (Deumert forthcoming), and reflect on a small set of interviews (conducted in 2018/2019 in South Africa) where speakers discuss how they engage with those who are not physically visible to them but who are nevertheless present in their lives (spiritual beings, ancestors, etc.). I will explore these interviews by focusing on how speakers enact 'encounters with the other' in contexts where the other does not share our bodily presence, yet is central to the ways in which we construct, and enact, a relational ethics vis à vis the world that surrounds us, including its presences as well as its absent-presences (Derrida 1993). Thus, following Leonie Cornips' (2019) call for an 'inclusive sociolinguistics', I seek to broaden our work beyond the human-centredness of modernity/coloniality. The talk addresses the following two elements of the symposium theme: (i) 'to include a fuller range of lived, embodied and interactional enactments of ethical encounters with the Other', and (ii) to foreground the listening subject in these encounters, making visible complex ontological commitments and ethics.
References
Cornips, L., 2019. The final frontier: Non-human animals on the linguistic research agenda. Linguistics in the Netherlands36: 13-19.
Derrida, J. 1993. Spectres of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. London/New York: Routledge. Deumert, A. Forthcoming. The Sound of Absent-Presence? Formulating a Sociolinguistics of the Spectre. Special Issue, Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, ed. by S. Sultana and D. Izadi.
Pennycook, A. 2017. Posthumanist Applied Linguistics. London/New York: Routledge.
Ingrid Rodrick Beiler
Mastin Prinsloo
Maggie Kubanyiova
Katharina Brizic
