This paper considers the construction of social difference in the interactions of a couple as they communicate at home and work, with one another, their colleagues, and strangers in a superdiverse English city. In our linguistic ethnographic approach we observed, wrote field notes, audio-recorded key participants, took photographs, made videorecordings, and conducted interviews. We documented the role translanguaging and translation played and showed how these social practices varied across the city's spatial realms as different kinds of relationships are brought into play. While the interactions can be thematically characterized as broadly about money, business, and commerce, they can also be said to draw on widely circulating discourses about social and linguistic difference. We found that the construction of difference varied qualitatively by the distance and intimacy of the relationships in play. We also found that a translanguaging repertoire was particularly evident in navigating sensitive cultural activities, attitudes and beliefs. This points to the usefulness of translanguaging to signpost an openness to, and interest in, social and linguistic diversity in the market place, where buying and selling are the order of the day.

This paper considers the value of Hymesian ethnopoetics as a means of analysing everyday narrative in conditions of mobility and change. The paper offers an account of the development of ethnopoetics as a means to make visible and valorize narrative in the Native American oral tradition, and as a method of revealing culturally specific relations of form and meaning. Hymes’ ethnopoetic approach viewed narrative structure as a reflection of a cultural tradition of meaning‐making. Hymes’ analysis proposed that traditional narrative was a culturally shaped way of speaking, and analysis of narrative structure could reveal and recreate culture. His orientation rested on an assumption that the culture of a group was more or less stable and fixed. This paper adopts an approach to analysis based on ethnopoetics, representing everyday narrative dramatically, organized not only as lines and verses, but also as scenes and acts. Representation in scenes and acts makes visible the dynamic nature of the narrative. The paper asks whether Hymes’ ground‐breaking work on ethnopoetics still has currency and purchase in 21st‐century conditions of mobility, change, and unpredictability. Analysis of everyday narrative in a city market concludes that, notwithstanding the complexity of notions of ‘culture’ and ‘language’ in such conditions, ethnopoetics can be productively applied to everyday contexts for the analysis of narrative.

This article draws on researcher vignettes to explore ethical decisions made in the process of collecting and analysing mobile messaging data as part of a team ethnographic project exploring multilingualism in superdiverse UK cities. The research involves observing key participants at work as well as recording them at home and collecting their digital interactions. The nature of ethnographic research raises ethical issues which highlight the impossibility of divorcing ethics from project decision-making. We therefore take on board a reconceptualisation of research ethics not as an external set of guidelines but as being at the core of research, driving decision-making at all steps of the process. The researcher vignettes on which we draw in exploring this process facilitate a reflexive approach and enable us to identify and address ethical issues in our research. In this article, we focus on the potential impact that digital communication technologies can have on the kinds of relationships that are possible between researchers and research participants, and on the roles that both carry out within the project. In doing so, we explore the part that digital communications play in the co-construction of social distance and closeness in research relationships. Our discussions around these issues highlight the need for an awareness not only of how our participants' media ideologies shape their use and perceptions of digital technologies, but also how our own assumptions inform our handling of the digital data.

Migration is often seen as crossing both space and time, from the traditional past to the modern present, while leading to perceived changes in migrants themselves. This article draws on data from a large ethnographic project to explore the ways in which Chinese translocal families dispersed between China, Hong Kong and the UK exploit mobile messaging apps to negotiate the post-migration value of Chinese-ness and Chinese tradition in geographically dispersed family and social contexts. Drawing on the concept of the mobile chronotope, we show how Chinese families and friends employ textual and multimodal resources to negotiate mobile chronotopes of (non)modernity in translocal mobile messaging interactions. Our discourse analysis focuses on critical junctures at which modernist chronotopic negotiations are most visible. The article contributes to an understanding of the discursive construction of multiple (non)modernities by showing how migrants (re)position themselves along a gradient of chronotopic modernity in everyday mobile messaging encounters.

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