TY - UNPB
T1 - Worlds in grains of sand
T2 - Interactional sociolinguistics and linguistic ethnography
AU - Rampton, Ben
PY - 2024
Y1 - 2024
N2 - In a contribution to Milak & Tankosić’s Becoming a Linguist (Routledge), this paper begins with a brief sketch of interactional sociolinguistics and linguistic ethnography (IS & LE) and then describes the experience of linguistic racism in education that motivated my move from school-teaching to research, as well as uncertainties about my project’s focus that were decisively resolved by ethnographic fieldwork among young people (where linguistic practice not only carried its own critical commentary but also redrew the lines of community). Then gradually over time, I became more involved in fights for academic space, but links beyond were always vital and we consolidated these in the Linguistic Ethnography Forum and working papers that try to maintain a sense of freedom and purpose amidst higher education’s market pressures. IS and LE provide lots of scope for serious dialogue with subject-specialists, scholars in other disciplines and people outside the academy, but it’s hard to do everything at once. But you can probably get there with teamwork, patience as well as some undergraduate teaching, using data-sessions to hold it all together
AB - In a contribution to Milak & Tankosić’s Becoming a Linguist (Routledge), this paper begins with a brief sketch of interactional sociolinguistics and linguistic ethnography (IS & LE) and then describes the experience of linguistic racism in education that motivated my move from school-teaching to research, as well as uncertainties about my project’s focus that were decisively resolved by ethnographic fieldwork among young people (where linguistic practice not only carried its own critical commentary but also redrew the lines of community). Then gradually over time, I became more involved in fights for academic space, but links beyond were always vital and we consolidated these in the Linguistic Ethnography Forum and working papers that try to maintain a sense of freedom and purpose amidst higher education’s market pressures. IS and LE provide lots of scope for serious dialogue with subject-specialists, scholars in other disciplines and people outside the academy, but it’s hard to do everything at once. But you can probably get there with teamwork, patience as well as some undergraduate teaching, using data-sessions to hold it all together
M3 - Working paper
T3 - Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies
BT - Worlds in grains of sand
ER -