Embodied Family Choreography


Book Description

Embodied Family Choreography documents the lived and embodied practices employed to establish, maintain, and negotiate intimate social relationships in the family, examining forms of control, care, and creativity. Making use of the extensive video archives of family interaction in the US and Sweden, it presents the first investigation of how touch and interaction between bodies, in conjunction with talk, constitute a primary means of orchestrating activities through directives, thus creating rich relationships through supportive interchanges, and engaging in playful explorations of the world. Through close investigation of the sequential and simultaneous engagement of bodies interacting with other bodies, this book makes visible the important role touch plays in the context of contemporary Western middle class family life and is pioneering in its analysis of how the visual, aural, and haptic senses (usually analysed separately) mutually elaborate one another. As such, Embodied Family Choreography will appeal to scholars of child development, the sociology of the family and ethnomethodology and conversation analysis.




Close Relations


Book Description

This book speaks to the meanings and values that inhere in close relations, focusing on ‘family’ and ‘kinship’ but also looking beyond these categories. Multifaceted, diverse and subject to constant debate, close relations are ubiquitous in human lives on embodied as well as symbolic levels. Closely related to processes of power, legibility and recognition, close relations are surrounded by boundaries that both constrain and enable their practical, symbolical and legal formation. Carefully contextualising close relations in relation to different national contexts, but also in relation to gender, sexuality, race, religion and dis/ability, the volume points to the importance of and variations in how close relations are lived, understood and negotiated. Grounded in a number of academic areas and disciplines, ranging from legal studies, sociology and social work to literary studies and ethnology, this volume also highlights the value of using inter- and multidisciplinary scholarly approaches in research about close relations. Chapter 11 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.




A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology


Book Description

Provides an expansive view of the full field of linguistic anthropology, featuring an all-new team of contributing authors representing diverse new perspectives A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology provides a timely and authoritative overview of the field of study that explores how language influences society and culture. Bringing together more than 30 original essays by an interdisciplinary panel of renowned scholars and younger researchers, this comprehensive volume covers a uniquely wide range of both classic and contemporary topics as well as cutting-edge research methods and emerging areas of investigation. Building upon the success of its predecessor, the acclaimed Blackwell Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, this new edition reflects current trends and developments in research and theory. Entirely new chapters discuss topics such as the relationship between language and experiential phenomena, the use of research data to address social justice, racist language and raciolinguistics, postcolonial discourse, and the challenges and opportunities presented by social media, migration, and global neoliberalism. Innovative new research analyzes racialized language in World of Warcraft, the ethics of public health discourse in South Africa, the construction of religious doubt among Orthodox Jewish bloggers, hybrid forms of sociality in videoconferencing, and more. Presents fresh discussions of topics such as American Indian speech communities, creolization, language mixing, language socialization, deaf communities, endangered languages, and language of the law Addresses recent trends in linguistic anthropological research, including visual documentation, ancient scribes, secrecy, language and racialization, global hip hop, justice and health, and language and experience Utilizes ethnographic illustration to explore topics in the field of linguistic anthropology Includes a new introduction written by the editors and an up-to-date bibliography with over 2,000 entries A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology is a must-have for researchers, scholars, and undergraduate and graduate students in linguistic anthropology, as well as an excellent text for those in related fields such as sociolinguistics, discourse studies, semiotics, sociology of language, communication studies, and language education.




Language Socialization in Chinese Diasporas


Book Description

The monograph provides ethnographically informed analyses of indigenous kin interactions in three Chinese diasporic households in the county of Los Angeles, California, U.S.A. Drawing upon the approach that regards talk as a form of social practice, the book demonstrates different ways in which kin relationships are indigenously orchestrated by foreign Chinese parents and their American-born children. Micro-analytically, social actions of membership categorization, attribution, deference, compliance, commands, and story-telling that unfold in kin interactions are foregrounded as key language devices to discuss ways in which epistemic asymmetry, power hierarchy, and harmony in kin relations are constructed or deconstructed in Chinese diasporic social lives. By way of illustration, the monograph, macro-analytically, speaks to the cultural stereotype of Chinese immigrant/foreign parents’ style of parenting when they pass on the traditional Confucian ideologies in kin interaction. This book can be a useful reference textbook for graduate courses that address the dynamic intricacy among language, culture, and society.




Muslims on the Margins


Book Description

"Through multi-sited ethnography in face-to-face North American groups and global online communities of the contemporary marginalized Muslims who emerged from the earlier progressive Muslim movement, Thompson examines the role of language, affect, embodiment, queerness, religious pluralism, and futurity in the creation of inclusive communities"--




Talking with Children


Book Description

Early childhood teachers know that the quality of child-teacher interactions has an impact on children's social and educational outcomes. Talking with children is central to early learning, but the significant details of high quality conversations in early childhood settings are not always obvious. This Handbook brings together experts from across the globe to share evidence of teachers talking with children in early learning environments. It applies the methodology of conversation analysis to questions about early childhood education, and shows why this method of studying discourse can be a valuable resource for professional development in early childhood. Each chapter of this Handbook includes an up-to-date literature review; shows how interactional pedagogy can be achieved in everyday interactions; and demonstrates how to apply this learning in practice. It offers unique insights into real-life early childhood education practices, based on robust research findings, and provides practical advice for teaching and talking with children.




Critical Theory and Marital Quarrels


Book Description

Critical Theory and Marital Quarrels: Dynamics of Passionate Speech analyzes the pneumatics of conflict through a discursive archeology of police reports, court proceedings, psychiatric cases, therapy sessions, eighteenth-century relationship advice literature, and the nineteenth-century fiction. Todor Hristov argues that in order to extract knowledge from the noise of the marital fights, preachers, moralists, physicians, alienists, sociologists discarded the words as a slag, and in consequence, they were unable to explain either the recurrence or the power of discord. This study is intended as an analysis of the discursive mechanism of contentious speech based on concepts derived from critical theory, discourse analysis, speech act theory and semiotics. The discursive mechanism of quarreling is summed up in the concept of passionate speech relevant beyond family scenes, to scenes of political or public contention. This book applies the concept to examine critically the language of contemporary couples therapy and to describe the unintended effects of the passions shared by the clients and the therapists.




Material Interculturality


Book Description

This book shows how objects can create new linguistic and cultural orders, spotlighting the ways in which everyday collections help make the world anew by rearranging its materiality and how multilingual speakers make meanings without words. Adopting an innovative approach to intercultural research drawing on work from visual and multisensorial ethnography, Ros i Solé critically reflects on what we know as interculturality by going beyond the verbal and the more-than-human to understand languages and cultures. This book expands the meaning of interculturality by seeing it as the result of the relations between people, places, and materiality. Using everyday multilingual artefacts such as clothes, cookie-cutters, LPs, books, and pens, it presents a new semiotic multilingual landscape where the intercultural is closely connected to the ground, and it is felt, rehearsed, and re-enacted through the stories and the memories contained in multilingual objects. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in intercultural communication, multilingualism, language education, and applied linguistics.




Complexity of Interaction


Book Description

Everyday social life is deeply tied to the ways in which people talk, interact, and engage in joint activities with each other. This book examines language use and social interaction through the lens of complexity, focusing on how participants establish and maintain shared understanding in multi-layered situations and settings. This book will find readership among students and scholars who use video-based methods and are interested in interaction, intersubjectivity and multimodality.




The Oxford Handbook of Language and Race


Book Description

Over the past two decades, the fields of linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics have complicated traditional understandings of the relationship between language and identity. But while research traditions that explore the linguistic complexities of gender and sexuality have long been established, the study of race as a linguistic issue has only emerged recently. The Oxford Handbook of Language and Race positions issues of race as central to language-based scholarship. In twenty-one chapters divided into four sections-Foundations and Formations; Coloniality and Migration; Embodiment and Intersectionality; and Racism and Representations-authors at the forefront of this rapidly expanding field present state-of-the-art research and establish future directions of research. Covering a range of sites from around the world, the handbook offers theoretical, reflexive takes on language and race, the larger histories and systems that influence these concepts, the bodies that enact and experience them, and the expressions and outcomes that emerge as a result. As the study of language and race continues to take on a growing importance across anthropology, communication studies, cultural studies, education, linguistics, literature, psychology, ethnic studies, sociology, and the academy as a whole, this volume represents a timely, much-needed effort to focus these fields on both the central role that language plays in racialization and on the enduring relevance of race and racism.