Language, Culture and Society - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2019

This is a critical analysis of the discourse of an elected state official in the years leading up to the passage of arguably racist legislation. It was submitted to a U.S. court of law to support the plaintiffs’ claim that since the legislator publicly expressed racial bias against the groups of people affected by the law, then his legislation should be voided because the United States Constitution requires that laws treat citizens equally. The fact that critical discourse analytic findings have been entered into the U.S. courts leads to the question whether such analyses of public pronouncements May ever be permitted to serve as legally probative evidence.

In this article, we explore the imbrication of service work with consumer markets and larger structures of inequality, including gender and class divides as well as social and economic differences. In line with current sociolinguistic scholarship on language and work, we are interested in the activity of serving people – both in the sense of being or becoming people who serve as well as in the practice of providing services to people. To do so, we offer an ethnographic account of the regime of labor surveillance as well as the daily work practices of female workers at a Starbucks coffeehouse in London, UK. We wonder about how employers organize the bodies of workers into signs, codes and messages that appeal to customers’ class expectations of this type of consumption. By documenting the regimentation and surveillance of labor at Starbucks, we inquire into the prescribed rules that guide ‘proper’ presentations of physicality; further, we ask questions about the mechanism through which the body at Starbucks is made to express its positioning within a structure of labor and its relationality to others, especially customers.

Although the figure of the English language assistant (ELA) dates back a long while, its current popularity is unprecedented in some areas of the world. Such is the case of Spain, where the goal of raising English standards among the younger generations has become a national obsession. Using critical ethnographic methods, this paper examines the experience of three British LAs placed in secondary schools in Barcelona. It draws on a focused case study of one of them – combined with ethnographic snapshots of the other two, interviews with school teachers and regional programme administrators, relevant programme publications, and social media data. The analysis reveals three major tensions shaping the ELA experience in the 21st century revolving around: (a) the underspecified and unskilled nature of the job; (b) its culturalist imagination and state diplomacy mission; and (c) the native speaker ideology constituting its raison d’être. This paper provides new insights into the intertwining of the ELT infrastructure with global travel and tourism capitalised as skill boosters for employability purposes, and showcases the importance of foreign language education as a soft power tool.

Focusing on fansubbing, the production of unauthorized subtitles by fans of audiovisual media content, this paper calls for a more serious sociolinguistic analysis of the political economy of digital media communication. It argues that fansubbing’s contentious position within regimes of intellectual property and copyright makes it a useful context for considering the crucial role of language ideology in global capitalism’s expanding reach over communicative activity. Through a critical analysis of Korean discourses about fansubbing, this paper considers how tensions between competing ideological conceptions of fansub work shed light on the process by which regimes of intellectual property incorporate digital media communication as a site for profit. Based on this analysis, the paper argues for the need to look beyond the affordances of digital media in terms of translingual, hybrid, and creative linguistic form, to extend our investigations towards language ideologies as a constitutive element in the political economy.

Commentators and analysts in new media studies have taken inspiration from Goffman’s ‘dramaturgical’ approach to interaction as performance, as well as his concepts of ‘face’ and ‘impression management’. Goffman is specifically invoked in discussions of a particular source of interactional trouble that is seen as generated in and by the structure of mediated communication in digital spaces: so-called “context collapse.” Context collapse represents “a crisis of self-presentation” (Wesch, 2008) that is brought about by the ability of digital platforms like Twitter and Facebook to “flatten multiple audiences into one” (Marwick & boyd, 2010, p. 9). Returning to Goffman’s unpublished PhD dissertation (Goffman, 1953) – based on fieldwork on the remote island of Unst in the Shetlands – presents an opportunity to understand more fully both the online phenomenon of “context collapse” and the promise and limitations of Goffman’s work for the study of interaction in digital environments.