Capital negotiation and identity practices: investigating symbolic capital from the ‘ground up’

Meadows, Bryan

doi:10.1080/17405900802560025

Cited by 28 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…Thus, as Davies and Harré (1999) argue, linguistic practices are an effective mechanism through which interlocutors redefine their social relations and reposition themselves in relation to others. Social structures and their power relationships are therefore recreatable through a bottom-up process initiated by individual speakers (see Meadows 2009 for a similar observation). The concept of power can therefore be conceptualized as a multidimensional top-down, bottom-up process involving relationships that are imposed by the social field or defined by individual social actors.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

The socio-pragmatics of dialectal codeswitching by Al-`Keidaat Bedouin speakers

Albirini

2014

Intercultural Pragmatics

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While the dynamics of dialectal codeswitching in the Arabic-speaking context has been the center of much discussion and research, only a few studies have examined the role of socio-pragmatic factors in the code choices of Arabic speakers in everyday interactions. Using Bourdieu's (1977) social capital theory as a general framework, this study examines the role of pragmatic and capitalrelated factors in codeswitching in an understudied Arabic-speaking group, namely Al-'Keidaat Bedouins in Syria. Audio-recorded data was col lected from two Bedouin wedding parties and 37 interactions involving Bed ouins in the workplace. The data analysis indicates that Bedouin speakers use their multi-dialectal package mainly to manage their self-representation in relation to other speakers, enhance their ability to access different forms of social capital, and maximize their benefit from social interactions with different speakers. Based on the findings, I argue that the speakers' use of their linguistic repertoires is more sociopragmatically driven than based on the often-invoked prestige of specific language varieties. Finally, while it uses Bourdieu's social capital theory as a general framework, the study seeks to expand this theory by reconceptualizing power as a multi-dimensional top-down, bottom-up process of defining social structures and relationships.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

The socio-pragmatics of dialectal codeswitching by Al-`Keidaat Bedouin speakers

Albirini

2014

Intercultural Pragmatics

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“…Equally significant, employing numbers, as a way of vital information, may help Mandela to raise the level of understanding of his masses in regard to the nature of the oppressive political system of South Africa. Leaders, according to Bourdieu (1991)(cited in Meadows, 2009) coin linguistic and semiotic images of the self and connect them with the objectives and aspirations of their audience through the power of discourse.…”

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confidence: 99%

Ideologies in Mandela’s No Easy Walk to Freedom

AbdulhameedFaris

Paramasivam

2016

IJALEL

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Ideology has great influence on the traits and behaviors of leaders. It is the vehicle by which we could understand our leaders and our leaders could understand us. The present paper is an endeavor to reveal the ideological dimension that is embedded in the discourse of Nelson Mandela, with special reference to his address No Easy Walk to Freedom which was delivered in 1953. It is conducted on the approach of Critical Discourse Analysis. Van Dijk's (2004) Political Ideological Strategies and Wodak's (2005) Discursive Strategies of Positive Self-and Negative Other-Presentation were accommodated to achieve the objective of the study. The findings demonstrated that Van Dijk's strategies of actor description, positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation and Wodak's two chosen strategies of argumentation and perspectivation were supportive in exploring the ideologies penetrated in Mandela's discourse. They five strategies proved to be helpful devices in exploring the fundamentally embedded ideologies in Mandela's discourse which are "white superiority" and "black inferiority". White superiority was the ideological foundation of the white minority to establish the apartheid system in South Africa for decades, whereas black inferiority was the ideological foundation of the black majority to sustain different forms of resistance against the white governments. Therefore, it could be perceived that the social acts of both the blacks and the whites were formed and structured in terms of these two ideological foundations.

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“…The objectified state of capital functions to elevate Hanna's position within her tutorial group, giving her a fleeting status (cf. Meadows, 2009) which she struggles to attain elsewhere in this data set. In fact, in these tutorial encounters, her 'lesser' conversational standing is noticeably marked, in direct contrast to the position she assumes in her encounters with Michael.…”

Section: Hanna and Michael -Conversational Data Week 6 Wellingtonmentioning

confidence: 92%

“…To this end, naturally occurring interactional data are an integral part of the linguistic data collection for both phases of my study (e.g. Meadows, 2009Meadows, , 2010Menard-Warwick, 2009b;Menard-Warwick, 2014;Pomerantz, 2008). Going beyond the researcher/participant interview and reliance on participants' perspectives has, as already outlined in chapter 1, been strongly recommended to add rigour to qualitative study abroad research (see Kinginger, 2013).…”

Section: Naturally-occurring Interactional Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This places credence on the fluid nature of what 'counts' as capital, and emphasises the idea of capital as social practice and as necessarily contingent (cf. Meadows, 2009) rather than fixed attributes or possessions that are uniformly recognised across time and space. Having said this, there were clear assumptions of the symbolic value of (standard) French and notions of Frenchness and Parisian-ness 30 across the exchange settings.…”

Section: Cultural Capitalmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Identities and Ideologies in Study Abroad Contexts: Negotiating Nationality, Gender, and Sexuality

Dawson¹

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<p>This thesis examines the discursive negotiation of identities in study abroad (SA) settings, examining how university exchange students in New Zealand and France use language to enact, reflect on, and problematise social identities in interaction. I push beyond the more common focus on language learning as the end goal of identity scholarship in SA, focusing instead on an emergent approach to social identities for participants as they encounter ‘new’ Discourses and norms in their exchange settings. The post-structural perspective of identities as multiple, dynamic, and a site of struggle is enriched by attending closely to how identities are discursively co-constructed at ‘ground level’ in interactions with attention to wider sociocultural Discourses and ideologies. I approach this complexity by weaving a strong theoretical thread throughout the thesis, acknowledging (and problematising) the social categories, knowledge, Discourses and ideologies we (re)construct for ourselves, yet recognising the structural constraints that these constructions provide for identity negotiations at any point in time in the guise of social reality. Methodologically, I adopt a novel bidirectional approach to examine the whats and hows of identity co-construction for my participants in France and New Zealand. Data collection spanned a period of sixteen months and involved multiple sources, prioritising naturalistic interactional data and interviews. This was supplemented by an ethnographic data collection which included extensive field notes, time spent with participants, interviews with other key people (language buddies and tutors), and social media. Analytically, interactional sociolinguistics provides valuable tools for a rigorous discourse analysis which considers both micro and macro factors. The analytic focus on the processes of identity negotiation in interaction, underpinned by a social realist approach, provides a fertile platform from which to investigate identity construction in its intersubjective complexity, and to move beyond the reliance on student perspectives as the main source of accessing identity in SA. My findings show that particularly salient identities for participants hinge on constructs of nationality (which interacted with ethnicity), as well as gender and sexuality. These identities were often ‘triggered’ by the activation of ‘discursive faultlines’ in exchange settings and ideologies (associated with the above categories) were pervasive in all participants’ ensuing identity negotiations. The emphasis on the social embeddedness of participants and the researcher has rich implications for understandings of the relationship between structure and agency, and analysis shows that even ostensibly agentive acts are constrained by ideological structures, which act as vehicles of power. I conceptualise agency as being co-constructed, dynamic, and multifaceted, and as involving resistance, perpetuation, complicity, and strategic harnessing of Discourses - both conscious and unconscious. Within these broad parameters, my data provides evidence of greater transformative potential in forms of ‘oppositional’ agency, and at the same time, fledgling potential in what I term agency in a germination phase. I argue that ‘seeds of agency’ are planted for some participants in their new settings and that reflecting on the arbitrary nature of ideologies and accepted truths was a more common outcome for participants who had prior experience of marginalisation. In this sense, the study also speaks to notions of study abroad as social change. What study abroad contexts afford, by virtue of movement across geographical and discursive space, is unique access to how identities are negotiated in light of ideological constraints by young people living in an increasingly mobile and globalised world. Moving beyond singular portrayals of SA university students as language learners and adding depth to existing treatments of identity has crucial repercussions for the way we conceptualise study abroad participants. My study firmly positions them as ‘whole people’ who continue to experience real world issues on exchange, in contexts where the revered immersion experience has been replaced by mobility and connectedness through technological advances. The increasing internationalisation of education adds economic implications to the social, emphasising the need for deeper understanding of the connections between language, identity, and ideology as impacting the study abroad experience. These understandings have the potential to benefit many groups of people, including academics, educators, policy writers, and not least the students themselves.</p>

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Capital negotiation and identity practices: investigating symbolic capital from the ‘ground up’

Cited by 28 publications

References 30 publications

The socio-pragmatics of dialectal codeswitching by Al-`Keidaat Bedouin speakers

The socio-pragmatics of dialectal codeswitching by Al-`Keidaat Bedouin speakers

Ideologies in Mandela’s No Easy Walk to Freedom

Identities and Ideologies in Study Abroad Contexts: Negotiating Nationality, Gender, and Sexuality

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