Interactive Exploration of the Communication of Ethnographies of Language  

(The WLE* Collective)

​

 

During 2022 a group of colleagues, from various universities within and outside the UK, embarked on a dialogue about knowledge production and communication in the studies of language and ethnography. The dialogue started in March 2022, with a workshop organised by Adriana Patiño-Santos (UoS) and Miguel Pérez-Milans (UCL). The initial call invited participants to reflect upon:

 

           1. What works and forms of knowledge have influenced our understanding of the ways in which we 

               communicate our ethnographies?

           2. What are the spaces, sources and practices offering alternative ways of communicating our research?          

               What assumptions about research and knowledge production underpin these?

           3. What are the challenges that the process of crafting our ethnographies brings to our own research?

 

20 colleagues replied to that call by crafting outputs which engaged with disciplines such as literature, theater, history, memory, art... , and with a set of concepts coming from diverse areas. All that richness signaled to us that we were starting an interdisciplinary but also an intergenerational conversation. During the workshop, we realised that two hours were not enough to discuss our challenges in communicating all the complexities of our work. This encouraged the ten exhibitors and curators to continue the conversation through a fortnightly seminar during the Autumn of 2022. It was at the end of that three-month seminar period that we decided to move our conversation forward by including as many views as we could.  

 

This online exhibition is the result of that unfinished conversation. It is an invitation to all of you, to engage in it. We would like you to explore the exhibition, consider the outputs, hear the podcasts, and react creatively to what you have seen.

 

We would like to thank the Linguistic Ethnography Forum (LEF) for their support of the workshop and the exhibition, and Karin Tusting (LU) and Vally Lytra (Goldsmiths) for their constructive discussions on various occasions during the workshops and the Autumn seminar, along with all the colleagues who have engaged with us at different moments.

 

The exhibitors in alphabetical order are:

 

Peter Browning (University College London)

Işıl Erduyan (Boğaziçi University, İstanbul)

Katy Highet (University of the West of Scotland)

Carla Jonsson (Umeå University)

Roula Kitsiou (University of Thessaly)

Miriam Liggins (Newcastle University)

Ulla Lundqvist (Oslo Metropolitan University)

Marie-Anne Mansfield (University of Southampton)

Uta Papen (Lancaster University)

Ben Rampton (King's College London)

 

Original Exhibition Curators: Peter Browning, Katy Highet, Marie-Anne Mansfield, Uta Papen and Adriana Patiño-Santos. 

 

Online Exhibition Curators: Peter Browning, Marie-Anne Mansfield, and Adriana Patiño-Santos. 

 

 

(*WLE: Writing Language Ethnographically)