Changing sociolinguistic concerns, linguistic ethnography, and North/South research relations?

This presentation starts with a sketch of 50 years of sociolinguistics, addressing its attention to the state and economy and its relative neglect of security. It then turns to linguistic ethnography, both as a collective endeavour and as a productive framework for exploring securitisation. Where, though, does linguistic ethnography stand in the ‘decolonial turn’, which, according to Masters & Makoni (2019), interrogates “epistemologies that originate in the Global North when they are used in the Global South”, and challenges “the notion and principle of a ‘truth without parenthesis,’ or a truth applicable everywhere”?

Speaker: Ben Rampton, King’s College London

Professor Rampton was the founding Director of the Centre for Language Discourse & Communication at King’s College London. He has been on the editorial board of more than a dozen international journals, including Journal of Sociolinguistics, Language in Society, Applied Linguistics, and Journal of Linguistic Anthropology and Ethnography. He has an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Copenhagen, and is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and the Royal Anthropological Institute. His work involves ethnographic and interactional discourse analysis, cross-referring to work in anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, and more recently, securitisation. His publications focus on language in relation to urban multilingualism, youth, popular culture, ethnicities, class, education, second language learning, and research methodology.