I attended
the 8th Linguistic Landscapes International Workshop from 27 to 29 April
2016 at the University of Liverpool. The workshop was organized around the
keywords regeneration, revitalisation and
re-territorialisation. The event
included more than forty presentations so I decided not to report on all of
them. Rather I focus on issues that seem to be the most relevant to my own
research: agency in the linguistic landscape and methodological developments in
linguistic landscape studies. In brief, I am interested in what, who and how
contributes to the creation and interpretation of linguistic landscapes in
various societal settings, including research encounters and academic
discussions.
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| Liverpool's Albert Dock as seen from the Ferris wheel |
In their
opening presentation, workshop organizers Robert
Blackwood, Stefania Tufi and Will Amos illustrated the main topics of the
event with local examples. They mentioned the Albert Dock which had gone
through regeneration. The dock was
closed down in 1972 and then it had been transformed into a tourist destination
with museums and cafés – there’s even a Ferris wheel around the corner. The oldest Chinatown of Europe in situated in Liverpool, and its
community experiences a dynamic revitalization
and a re-articulation of Chinese identity, partly due to Chinese students who
study at the University of Liverpool. To illustrate re-territorialisation, the presenters brought the history of
Liverpool as an example. Liverpool was extraordinarily successful in slave
trade, but later this source of richness turned out to be very shameful. As a
consequence, there have been numerous attempts to de-colonialize and thus
whitewash the history of the city by renaming streets and seldom highlighting the source
of money which was the basis of erecting significant public buildings.
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| Ornamented parking machine in Chinatown |
Agency in the linguistic landscape
Regeneration,
revitalization and re-territorialisation are processes that are initiated,
enhanced, challenged, discussed, interpreted, etc. by various social actors so I
am especially interested in who take part in shaping and making sense of
linguistic landscapes.
A group of
papers dealt with social remembering and history, and the role of various
agents in (re)constructing and (re)interpreting past events. For example, Christian Bendl presented how
commemorial acts are conducted at a historic monument in Vienna. He found that
official events of commemoration contribute to the maintenance of hegemonic
power relations because it is only certain persons (e.g. leading politicians)
who can place a wreath or give a speech at the monument. From a bottom-up
perspective, Rolf Kailuweit and Aldina Quintana analysed grassroots
memorials that reterritorialized public spaces and transformed them into places
of commemoration after terroristic attacks in Madrid (2004) and Paris (2015).
Felix Banda and Hambaba
Jimaima emphasized that artefacts can also be considered ‘active voices’,
for example in museums. Their study shed light to ways in which Dr Livingstone’s
memory is maintained while Cecil Rhodes’ figure is erased from the construction
of Zambian history. Rebecca Todd Garvin
also studied the so called museumscape. She was interested in ways in which
recently established interpretive centres re-tell the story of relocation camps
where Japanese Americans were forced to move during the Second World War.
According to her experience, the existence of such camps is seldom known today
so she discusses this dark story of American history with her students by using
images she took on site.
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| A memorial plaque in the harbor – a sign of rehabilitation? |
Durk Gorter presented certain changes in the linguistic
landscape of Donostia-San Sebastián, highlighting the increasing role of the Basque
language and some counter-diversity processes that make urban landscapes more
uniform than ever. In the latter process, he argued, owners of global brands
and chains play a major role: their logos appear everywhere around the globe,
making shopping streets very similar to each other. Elizabeth Lanza and Hirut
Woldemariam also reflected on the impact of business on linguistic
landscapes, demonstrating how Chinese is becoming more and more visible in
Ethiopia thanks to recent investments by Chinese companies. They argued that Chinese
is now taking over the role of the global language in Addis Ababa, and the
marginalization of English has begun. Maimu
Berezkina pointed to the agency of those editing public administration websites
in Norway. After more than one century of forced Norwegianisation, authorities
started to protect Sámi languages in the 1980s, providing services in those
languages, and today Sámi languages are visible online as well. However, as her
study showed, the official Sámi texts are in general of bad quality and people
tend to prefer Norwegian when gathering information.
Researchers
of the linguistic landscape are agents with specific agendas, ideologies and
motivations in mind. In the following sections I present some methodological
developments that make it visible how researchers get engaged with their sites
of study, and how they present and interpret their results.
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| Albert Dock now and then: a map navigates visitors to find attractions while a photographs gives an impression about the original setting |
Being ‘on site’: documented and narrated encounters
with the linguistic landscape
Shanleigh Roux, Amiena Peck and Felix Banda reported a team ethnographic project which analysed Old Biscuit Mill, a multi-purpose community space in Cape Town, South Africa. They found
that interaction spaces, products and racial bodies (in contrast with white
bodies) contributed to the reconstruction of some processes of colonizing.
Thanks to the heterogeneity of the research team in terms of gender, age, race
and educational background, they could approach local customers with various backgrounds.
Their self-reflections made it clear that human bodies are integral parts of
the semiotic landscape, influence interaction and constraint the researchers’
possibilities in gaining access to local community members’ lived experiences,
practices and narratives.
David Malinowski, Sébastien Dubreil and Hiram Maxim presented how they use students’ exploratory walking
tours in language teaching and research. Maxim’s
project was organized around integrating minorities into the Austrian society.
He asked students to take guided tours conducted by members of their local host
families in a neighbourhood street. Dubreil
asked his students to document their daily routine of traveling to the
university in Angers (France) and ‘read the city’ around them. He used the term
psychogeography in the study of interaction between
humans and their physical environment. According to him, the walking tours
helped the students in “letting the environment to happen to them”. Malinowski presented projects that make
use of virtual spaces. For example, students guided each other remotely in a
city, with the help of Google Street View and an online call service (e.g.
Skype). In another project, students were invited to imagine a more multilingual
New Haven. The tasks included taking photos of public signs that are only (or
dominantly) in English and create an alternative linguistic landscape with the
help of graphics editor software, adding further languages or substituting
English with other languages, displaying non-Latin scripts, etc. This project
showed how a de-colonialized American linguistic landscape would look like.
Continuing
the motif of walking in the linguistic landscape, Shoshi Waksman and Elana
Shohamy shared their observations of guided tours they attended in Tel
Aviv-Jaffa. They argued that tour guides are interested agents who mobilize and
transform the linguistic landscape by selecting sites for attention (e.g. pointing
to certain directions), and telling certain stories (and not others) about the
communities that live there. They found that tour guides were not especially
interested in the visitors’ points or interests but rather wanted to disseminate
their (politically motivated) agenda about Israel when presenting some historic
sights. I was especially excited by this presentation since I include the role
of a tour guide (or tourist guide) as part of a role play in my fieldwork
method ‘tourist guide technique’ in which I ask school community
members (students, parents and teachers) to lead me and present their community
spaces while we walk through school premises. Waksman and Shohamy’s examples
were encouraging because they demonstrated that the role of a guide is very
agentive so my method also enhances the agency of school community members and
give them a significant chance to influence the research narrative about their
communities.
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| Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight asks questions about the agency of artists, visitors and communities in an exhibition setting. People seemed to be interested in answering them |
In our
joint presentation with Robert A. Troyer
we discussed how videography re-visualises linguistic landscapes. Proposing a classification,
Robert reviewed the literature of videographic methods and placed them among
the situations being recorded (from natural to artificial) and the degree of
manipulating the recordings (from least to most). In my literature review, I
focused on videography in anthropology and ethnography, highlighting how these
fields can enrich our understanding of co-exploring linguistic landscapes with
research participants. Our materials included Robert’s drive-by videos that
showed how linguistic landscapes can be perceived and interpreted from a
researcher-driver’s point of view. Further, I showed excerpts from a video
recorded walking tour led by a parent in a Hungarian school. We emphasized that
it is not only capturing the signs that counts in linguistic landscape studies;
it is also important to show how we researchers navigate and habituate in the
linguistic landscape.
Linked to
mobile data generation, I found John Callaghan’s
fieldwork method especially interesting. As a team member of the research
project TLANG (Translation and Translanguaging), he explores among others private
linguistic landscapes. In his paper he focused on what cultural heritage means
to research participants in reflection to the arrangement of their homes. He
showed examples from a walkthrough in a woman’s home which gave an opportunity
for reflections on signs on the wall, the arrangement of the furniture and the
display of certain objects that told stories about the values and the history
of the family. Kasper Juffermans’
case also encouraged me that walking tours enhance interaction with research
participants. I found it especially interesting that in his study it was the
participant who invited the researcher to a walking tour, finding it easier to
talk about his migration trajectory on the go.
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| The Thursday papers were presented in the cultural centre Bluecoat. We also enjoyed exhibitions – and were supported in avoiding 'adult content' |
Crowdsourcing: the use of mobile devices and
social media in linguistic landscape studies
The
workshop has introduced several initiatives of crowdsourcing; that is, the use of content provided online
by a large group of people. Since researchers are not unlimitedly mobile,
building georeferenced databases of annotated images and
videos is more and more popular, especially among scholars conducting
quantitative studies. Crowdsourcing, I believe, makes a distance between the
researcher and the site investigated because the researcher does not engage in
interaction with the space in an embodied-sensual way. That is, the
researcher’s position is quite different than in the above mentioned fieldwork
methods.
The
research tool LinguaSnapp (Leonie Gaiser and Yaron
Matras) was launched in 2015 with the goal of mapping multilingualism in
Manchester. Photos of public signage are associated with GoogleMaps (both
street map and street view). Further, annotations are added to the items,
providing information about the alphabets and languages visible. Categories for
annotation in the database are part of the analysis and, in my understanding,
show the ideologies of the developers. For example, there are images of shop
windows in Manchester that include text in Polish. If there is no English
translation provided for a sign, the annotators marked the audience
‘exclusive’, while in the case of a visible English equivalent the audience was
categorized as ‘inclusive’. That is, to me, the annotation seems to be biased
towards English speakers and implicates that the project investigates
multilingualism through an English lens. A similar app Lingscape was promoted during the workshop by
its developer team (led by Christoph
Purschke and Peter Gilles) that aims
at mapping linguistic diversity in Luxembourg.
Using a
Nokia smartphone, I feel disadvantaged since the apps are not developed for
Windows so I can’t experiment with these useful and interesting tools. I learnt
from one of the developers that because of the low number of users, it seems to
be a waste of money to develop the apps for Windows. Maybe I should include an
iPhone in the budget of my next research project… But seriously speaking, the choice
of platforms influences the composition of the databases significantly; in this
case, only Android or iOS users will be able to contribute to crowdsourcing. A
similar issue was raised during the debate of Kate Lyons’ paper that was based on images of the Mission district
of San Francisco, shared and commented on Instagram. She was aware of the fact
that her data included items mainly from white women so she had to consider
this when writing up the analysis.
Venues
The
organizers helped us to experience how various physical environments influence
interaction by choosing different locations for every day. On Wednesday, we gathered
in a university chapel which had a distinct atmosphere. The Thursday papers
were presented – or should I say staged?
– in a theatre hall, and on Friday, we used an ordinary seminar room.
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| Towards linguistic sandscapes: participants of the post-workshop excursion on Saturday formed an LL8 sign on the beach |
LL9
The next
workshop will be organized by the University of Luxembourg around the topic “Movement
and Immobilities”. As this year’s papers showed, the mobility of researchers
and participants as well as mobile data generating methods are becoming central
topics in linguistic landscape studies so I hope I can take part in next year’s
discussions to continue several tracks of thoughts we have just started in
Liverpool.
Further readings
David
Malinowski on recent trends in linguistic landscape studies: “Linguistic Landscape
and Superdiversity”: Reflections on LAUD 2016
LL8 on the blog
of the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Liverpool
Acknowledgements
My
postdoctoral research project is funded by the Kone Foundation (grant number 44-9730). I received a travel grant from the same
foundation to attend the workshop.
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