Gastvortrag Prof. Ben Rampton, Kings College, London Zeit:Donnerstag, 13. 11. 2014, 16.30-18.00 Ort: Hörsaal A UniCampus Zugang Hof 2 2F-EG-32 Superdiversity and…..?: Sociolinguistics and contemporary governmentalities Superdiversity refers to the huge diversification of national populations that has resulted from neo-liberal globalisation and increased mobility since the early 1990s, and it is seen as a major challenge to established systems of social classification. In response, sociolinguists have, inter alia, purged their analytic frameworks of methodological nationalism, produced new theories and descriptions of the commodification of language(s) and the mobility of texts, and provided detailed ground-level accounts of translanguaging. But superdiversity certainly isn’t a triumph of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque, and alongside widening inequality, new forms of control have been developing (Arnaut 2012). Since the end of the Cold War, a transnational field of security professionals has emerged (Bigo 2002), and both consumption- and security-oriented digital surveillance now proliferates, leaving the old styles of classification behind by focusing on bodies and transactions (Huysmans 2014). These developments are hard to research: the surveillance codes and algorithms are esoteric, and the centres where data are calculated are dispersed and difficult to access. But the experience of surveillance remains under-studied (Ball 2009), and Foucault’s notion of ‘governmentality’ can give this challenge much wider reach. ‘Governmentality’ refers to “ground-level social relations [ordered] according to expertly designed logics of control” (Fraser 2003:162), to “all endeavours to shape, guide, direct the conduct of others, whether these be the crew of a ship, the members of a household, the employees of a boss, the children of a family or the inhabitants of a territory” (Rose 1999:4). Linguistic anthropologists and critical discourse analysts have certainly shown that their situated interactional micro-analyses can illuminate the ‘micro-physics of power’ (Goodwin 1994; Mehan 1996), but how can these new forms of governmentality be tackled? To explore the possibilities, this paper focuses on John Gumperz and interactional sociolinguistics. It points to several rather profound ways in which Gumperz’s approach matches Foucault’s, and explores the ways in which Gumperz’s central interests might be adapted to 21st century governmentalities, providing a sketch of what their empirical study might look like.
Posted on: Tue, 28 Oct 2014 10:05:38 +0000
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