Security, Ethnography and Discourse

Transdisciplinary Encounters

Emma Mc Cluskey, Constadina Charalambous, Emma Mc Cluskey, Constadina Charalambous

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000516852
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politische Freiheit

This interdisciplinary book analyses different contexts where security concerns have an impact on institutional or everyday practices and routines in the lives of ordinary people.

Creating a dialogue between the fields of International Relations, Peace and Conflict Studies, Sociolinguistics, Education and Anthropology, this book addresses core themes associated with conflict and security – peacebuilding, refugee settlement, nationalism, surveillance and sousveillance – and examines them as they manifest in everyday spaces and practices. Seven empirical studies are presented that bring ethnographic and/or close-up interactional lenses to practices of security in schools, refugee centres, care homes, city streets and roadsides. Drawing on fieldwork and data from Cyprus, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sweden, Germany and the US, the chapters explore what notions of suspicion, peace, conflict and threat mean and how they are manifested in people's lived experiences.

This book will be of much interest to students of Critical Security Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Sociolinguistics and International Relations in general.

1 Researching (in)security as a lived experience: Setting the foundations for transdisciplinary dialogue

Emma Mc Cluskey, Ben Rampton, and Constadina Charalambous

DOI: 10.4324/9781003080909-1

This chapter sets out the collaboration that led to the transdisciplinary dialogue presented in this book. In a sense, this first chapter also acts as a sort of “how to” guide in doing transdisciplinary research, by documenting our own intellectual journeys, the challenges and the barriers we had to transcend, and the opportunities it created for theory and research practice. Indeed, we all begin with our own disciplinary training and baggage, and the sheer force of disciplinary habitus is not one which is easy to transcend, nor do we wish to. Our four-year project was just one attempt at building a transversal site for studying security, ethnography and discourse - in the vein of Bourdieu’s “collective intellectual” or Latour’s “methodological laboratory.”

The chapter begins with a sketch of the origins of the Language, (In)security & Everyday Practice group (LIEP)¹ and the common interests and assumptions that bring its contributors together. But there are still a lot of important (and hopefully enriching) differences, so the text then offers two separate perspectives on our collaborative interest in everyday (in)securitisation: The first from International Political Sociology (IPS) and the second from linguistic ethnography. The final part of the chapter revisits the discussion in light of these differences, and reflects upon what it means to do transdisciplinary work around (in)security as a lived experience.

Language, (in)security and everyday practice: Speaking across disciplines

This volume builds on complementary developments in International Relations (IR) and sociolinguistics. In critical IR, recent years have seen a growing interest in the everyday, the vernacular, the local and the banal, extending beyond IR’s traditional focus on the state and supra-state processes, exceptionality, and elite and authoritative actors (see Mc Cluskey, 2017). Meanwhile in sociolinguistics, the study of language and everyday communicative practice in changing social conditions is now starting to address the increasing (in)securitisation of ordinary life, incorporating this within its traditional interest in the relationship of language to class, ethnicity, gender, generation etc., in communities, schools, workplaces, clinics and so forth (Charalambous, 2017). These two trajectories are now converging on (in)securitising discourses and institutions, on the practices of actors with different degrees of authority and influence, and on the lived experiences of people affected by official understandings. The LIEP network was set up to explore whether and how these two developments could be mutually enriching, generating perspectives on everyday (in)securitisation that they couldn’t produce on their own.

The conversation started in 2014, and it was consolidated in 2016 with grants from the British Academy and King’s College London for activities that have included two international colloquia, a short advanced interdisciplinary methods course, and two bibliographies (cited above). Our common interests were clear at a meeting of the International Consortium on Language and Superdiversity (www.incolas.eu), which situated language and communication in new conditions of transnationalism emerging from geopolitical transfigurations, in new technologies, and in the increased and diversified mobility of people across borders. The common ground not only covered substantive processes (migration, globalisation, diversity, (in)security, inequality, governmentality) but also reference points in social theory (Foucault, Bourdieu, Garfinkel, Goffman, etc.), and a shared appreciation of ethnography and anthropology as modalities of knowledge and knowing. In fact, we can bring out a number of areas of congruence through the comparison of a small selection of texts addressing language & superdiversity² on the one hand, and on the other, “the international” in IPS³ – see Table 1.1.

Table 1.1 Comparing sociolinguistic studies of superdiversity and IPS studying the international

	Sociolinguistic studies of superdiversity	IPS approach of “the international”
Moving away from a view of society as orderly, organised in clear categories, and innovating to account for new processes	“Rather than working with homogeneity, stability and boundedness as the starting assumptions, mobility, mixing, political dynamics and historical embedding are now central concerns in the study of languages, language groups and communication” (Blommaert & Rampton, 2011: 24) “work on ideologies of language … denaturalises the idea that there are distinct languages, and that a proper language is bounded, pure and composed of structured sounds, grammar and vocabulary designed for referring to things” (ibid)	an understanding of the international as merely a “level” above the “national” is rejected, moving away from the “territorial state” as the basic unit of analysis in international relations there is a rejection of the traditional views of politics as organised “via an interstate system regulating power between territorial states … connected formally as a system of states via diplomatic agreements” (Bigo 2017: 27)
Keywords pointing to complex interconnections, not just the relations between clearly defined objects of analysis	superdiversity simultaneity complexity mixing/crossing/hybridisation poly/pluri-lingualism intersection entanglement	transversal interconnections hybridisation multipositioning dispersion/disjuncture heterogeneity
Focusing on practices, processes and relations rather than communities	“‘Speech community’ has been superseded by a more empirically anchored and differentiating vocabulary which includes ‘communities of practice,’ ‘institutions’ and ‘networks’ as the often mobile and flexible sites and links in which representations of group emerge, move and circulate.” (Blommaert & Rampton, 2011: 25)	“international, society, state exist as powerful symbolic representations, and performatives when they are called upon, but they are, in practice, a reconstruction of the fragmented and heterogeneous circulation of plural forms of power in a myriad of different fields, reduced to a specific range of ‘levels’ that try to synthetise and reduce the complexity of the scales at work as well as the dynamics of passage between them” (Bigo 2017: 26)
Attending both to centripetal and centrifugal forces	“It is vital to remember just how far normativity (or ‘ought-ness’) reaches into semiosis and communication … There is considerable scope for variation in the norms that individuals orient to … normative expectations circulate through social networks that range very considerably in scale … All this necessarily complicates any claims we might want to make about the play of structure and agency … innovation on one dimension may be framed by stability at others …” (Blommaert & Rampton, 2011: 37) Instead of language study's traditional assumptions of common ground and the prospects for achieving inter-subjectivity, “non-shared knowledge grows in its potential significance for communicative processes” (ibid. p. 29)	a focus on change and struggle, the proliferation of borders, trajectories and relations stretching across transversal lines “awareness of the many possible futures linked with an acceleration and a multiplication of lines and dots that are heterogeneous, and do not constitute geometrical figures distributing easily an inside and an outside” (Bigo 2017: 30) “practices of actors are always simultaneously deployed in fields that have different dynamics. It is not their individual enactment which is important, but the set of relations and process in which they participate. Actors are plural and are always engaged in a multitude of games of different scales at the same moment, even if they may not be aware of it.” (Bigo 2017: 36)
Historicity rejecting ahistorical notions, studying practices situated in time and space	“Every aspect of the synchronically observable practice […] is historically loaded, so to speak, it drags with it its histories of use, abuse and evaluation. Thus, whenever we ethnographically investigate a synchronic social act, we have to see it as the repository of a process of genesis, development, transformation. If we see it like this, we will see it in its sociocultural fullness, because we can then begin to understand the shared, conventional aspects of it, and see it as a moment of social and cultural transmission.” (Blommaert & Rampton, 2011: 37)	“fields of power have boundaries moulded by their trajectories and very specific histories that cannot be resumed into major synthetic categories, such as economics, politics, communication, culture” (Bigo, 2017: 25)“This requires also studying the practices in ‘situation’ both spatially and temporally, in order to avoid building transhistorical categories as ‘the international community,’ ‘the state’ or ‘the governed’ which results in speaking of them as if these categories were a person with intentions” (Bigo 2017: 31–32)

That said, there are still a lot of obvious differences.⁴ Discourse and politics may feature in both, but in sociolinguistics the former is absolutely central and the latter somewhat subsidiary, while in IR the...