Making signs, translanguaging ethnographies is a dialogue between theories of sign-making, translanguaging, and ethnography. This book contributes theoretical, methodological, and analytical insights into meaning-making practices in a superdiverse social context. Through analysis of concrete cases in urban, rural, and educational spaces, this book demonstrates the roles of multimodal semiotic resources in communication (which challenges the primacy status of named languages), and thus contributes to centering of multimodal discourses and to rethinking the philosophical perspective towards meaning-making.
The studies in this book have two commonalities. First, they adopt an ethnographic approach, focusing not only on semiotic signs, but also on situated practices, on the agency of sign-users. Second, the results reveal the dynamic nature of semiotic signs, which is a corollary of the complexity of communication and society. Behind these two commonalities is the philosophical perspective that each instance of sign usage is an instance of sign-making and meaning-making within the constraints of social norms (see ch. 2 by Jan Blommaert, Ofelia García, Gunther Kress, & Diane Larsen-Freeman).
A wide range of data type is covered, including visual signs, artefacts, gestures, working processes, and translanguaging practices. These semiotic resources, which are still marginalized in current linguistic, cultural, and ethnographic research, prove to be fundamental in meaning-making. For instance, images are indices of national and local identities, and the lucky cat is a means to address specific others in a superdiverse socio cultural context (ch. 3 by Elisabetta Adami); gestures help interlocutors confirm mutual understanding and serve grammatical functions (ch. 7 by Nirukshi Perera). These cases are concrete proof that the role of language has been overrated, and multimodal semiotic resources are not given due attention in research.
The cases of translanguaging, on the one hand, provide further proof that language is not the sole primary semiotic resource for meaning-making (ch. 6 by Jessica Bradley & Emilee Moore and ch. 8 by Samantha Goodchild & Miriam Weidl); on the other hand, they point to the mobility and fluidity of semiotic resources. The form and meaning of signs might not travel together across chronotopes (i.e. time-space configurations governed by norms and value judgements), which points to the localized, situated nature of communication (ch. 5 by Felix Banda, Hambaba Jimaima, & Lorato Mokwena), and the same signs/objects have different currency in different chronotopes (ch. 4 by Arlene Archer & Anders Björkvall). These two aspects of sign mobility are a corollary of the creativity of sign users in each instance of sign-making, that is, the fluidity of semiotic resources. Translanguaging practices, as a section of meaning-making, should be extended to refer to the free and interactive employment of any available semiotic resources with an emphasis on the creativity of agents.
Theoretically, this book contributes to the philosophical perspective on the roles of language and other previously marginalized semiotic resources in meaning-making. Methodologically, it advocates an ethnographic approach to reveal a holistic picture of communication in a fast-changing superdiverse society. Analytically, it is an attempt to provide a toolkit to account for meaning-making in a dynamic sociocultural context.
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