This book offers a close look at the discourse of and around three socially marginalised and vulnerable groups – Irish Travellers, Squatters and Homeless people – in order to understand more about how individuals within them position themselves vis-à-vis mainstream society. It investigates the groups' diverse and provisional relationship with space that challenges mainstream society's spatial logic. Given that the relationship between mobility, space and identity has been explored in migrant contexts, Roberta Piazza proposes a reconsideration of this relationship beyond people's movement from one place to another. Investigating the space-identity nexus among the three groups, she highlights how mobility is not solely a cross-country phenomenon, but a no-less crucial and dramatic reality within an individual nation. Based on close linguistic analysis of interviews collected over many years, Piazza investigates how the participants construct their social and personal identities when talking about themselves and the sites they inhabit, drawing on the concepts of 'heterotopia' and non-sexual desire.

This book offers a close look at the discourse of and around three socially marginalised and vulnerable groups – Irish Travellers, Squatters and Homeless people – in order to understand more about how individuals within them position themselves vis-à-vis mainstream society. It investigates the groups' diverse and provisional relationship with space that challenges mainstream society's spatial logic. Given that the relationship between mobility, space and identity has been explored in migrant contexts, Roberta Piazza proposes a reconsideration of this relationship beyond people's movement from one place to another. Investigating the space-identity nexus among the three groups, she highlights how mobility is not solely a cross-country phenomenon, but a no-less crucial and dramatic reality within an individual nation. Based on close linguistic analysis of interviews collected over many years, Piazza investigates how the participants construct their social and personal identities when talking about themselves and the sites they inhabit, drawing on the concepts of 'heterotopia' and non-sexual desire.

The impact of mobility and superdiversity in recent sociolinguistic research is well-established, yet very few studies deal with issues related to immobility. The chapters in this book focus on the sociolinguistic investigation of the dynamics between mobility and immobility as experienced by migrants, asylum seekers and members of minority or exploited groups. Central to the book is an exploration of how mobilities are affected by and in turn affect power relations and of the kinds of resources used by people to deal with (im)mobility processes. The book brings to light a new critical sociolinguistic imagination that is responsive to 21st century processes of (im)mobilities as socially, discursively and emotionally constructed and negotiated.

Critical Sexuality Studies (CSS) and Lavender Languages/Linguistics (LLL) are leading modes of inquiry in two different fields of sexuality studies. In this edited collection, chapters reveal how these can be combined to produce a new approach to analyzing language use, sexuality and gender, and discourse on authority and power. The book demonstrates how together LLL and CSS iterate each other through their mutual concern with sexuality, gender, and power, especially when considering the materiality of daily life. Authors then compare CSS to other fields of sexuality studies to reveal commonalities and tensions that are addressed via the LLL-based interventions exemplified in this volume. The body of the book organizes examples of Lavender Languages projects around a four-part CSS framework, with an introductory essay for each section indicating the connections between the CSS theme and the LLL examples. The volume concludes with reflections showing how CSS interests in sexuality and power benefits from LLL with its emphasis on socially focused studies of discourse and text. Strengthening pathways to future knowledge-making, this book provides a detailed roadmap for scholarly and activist engagements in language-centered critical sexuality studies.

Providing a series of crucial debates on language, power, difference and social inequality, this volume traces developments and dissonances in critical sociolinguistics. Eminent and emerging academic figures from around the world collaboratively engage with the work of Monica Heller, offering insights into the politics and power formations that surround knowledge of language and society. Challenging disciplinary power dynamics in critical sociolinguistics, this book is an experiment testing new ways of producing knowledge on language and society. Critically discussing central sociolinguistic concepts from critique to political economy, labor to media, education to capitalism, each chapter features a number of scholars offering their distinct social and political perspectives on the place played by language in the social fabric. Through its theoretical, epistemological, and methodological breadth, the volume foregrounds political alliances in how language is known and explored by scholars writing from specific geopolitical spaces that come with diverse political struggles and dynamics of power. Allowing for a diversity of genres, debates, controversies, fragments and programmatic manifestos, the volume prefigures a new mode of knowledge production that multiplies perspectives and starts practicing the more inclusive, just and equal worlds that critical sociolinguists envision.

Linguistic landscapes can play an important role in educating individuals beyond formal pedagogical environments. This book argues that anywhere can be a space for people to learn from displayed texts, images, and other communicated signs, and consequently a space where teachable cultural moments are created. Following language learning trajectories that 'exit through the language classroom' into city streets, public offices, museums and monuments, this volume presents innovative work demonstrating that anyone can learn from the linguistic landscape that surrounds them. Offering a bridge between theoretical research and practical application, chapters consider how we make sense of places by understanding how the landscape is used to express, claim and contest identities and ideologies. In this way, Linguistic Landscapes Beyond the Language Classroom highlights the unexpected potential of the informal settings for learning and for teachers to expand their students' intercultural experience.

Demonstrating the range of linguistic and semiotic practices which are deployed in the construction of war memory, The Burden of Traumascapes investigates the discourses of remembering that are enculturated in the everyday lives of the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Maida Kosatica explores how the memory and narratives of the Bosnian War (1992-5) convey and renegotiate historical acts of violence in quite ordinary, banal ways and extend the war into the present day. Reintroducing the concept of 'traumascapes', this book demonstrates that semiotic landscapes are marked by traumatic legacies of violence in which the sense of trauma establishes its meaning through the discourses of remembering. In this context, this book argues that discourses of remembering, whether constructed in physical or virtual spaces, stem simultaneously from personal and collective needs to follow moral orders and responsibility, as well as from political, pedagogical and economic demands.

Exploring narratives produced by different groups of MENA and SSA migrants or refugees, this book focuses on the spatial and temporal aspects of their experiences. In doing so, the authors examine a wide range of accounts of journeys to host countries and memories (or recreations) of “home”. The spaces that migrants occupy (or not) in their new country; the spaces and times they share with local populations; and different conceptions of space and time across generations are also investigated, as are how feelings surrounding space and time are manifested within these different narratives and their affective-discursive practices. Taking both a traditional, linear view of migration as well as a multilinear, multimodal approach, the book presents an in-depth investigation into the ways in which people inhabit multiple real and digital spaces.

This collection calls for greater attention to the need for a clearer understanding of the role of discourse in the process of placemaking in the digital age and the increasing hybridisation of physical and virtual worlds. The volume outlines a new conceptualisation of place in the time of smartphones, whose technological and social affordances evoke placemaking as a collaborative endeavour which allows users to create and maintain a sense of community around place as shareable or collective experience. Taken together, the chapters argue for a greater emphasis on the ways in which users employ discourse to manage this physical-virtual interface in digital interactions and in turn, produce “remixed” cultural practices that draw on diverse digital semiotic resources and reflect their everyday experiences of place and location. The book explores a wide range of topics and contexts which embody these dynamics, including livestreaming platforms, mourning in the digital age, e-service encounters, and Internet forums. While the overlay of physical and virtual information on location-based media is not a new phenomenon, this volume argues that, in the face of its increasing pervasiveness, we can better understand its unfolding and future directions for research by accounting for the significance of place in today’s interactions. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in discourse analysis, digital communication, pragmatics, and media studies.

Bordering no longer happens only at the borderline separating two sovereign states, but rather through a wide range of practices and decisions that occur in multiple locations within and beyond the state’s territory. Nevertheless, it is too simplistic to suggest that borders are everywhere, since this view fails to acknowledge that particular sites are significant nodes where border work is done. Similarly, border work is more likely to be done by particular people than others. This book investigates the diffusion of bordering narratives and practices by asking ’who borders and how?’ Placing the Border in Everyday Life complicates the connection between borders and sovereign states by identifying the individuals and organizations that engage in border work at a range of scales and places. This edited volume includes contributions from major international scholars in the field of border studies and allied disciplines who analyze where and why border work is done. By combining a new theorization of border work beyond the state with rich empirical case studies, this book makes a ground-breaking contribution to the study of borders and the state in the era of globalization.