#wordswewear: mobile texts, expressive persons, and conviviality in urban spaces

The Asian Conference on Education & International Development 2024 Official Conference Proceedings

“…Age group has been considered in this study. As mentioned in Jaworski and Lou (2021), young generations tend to pay more attention on fashion and have more aspiration in expressing themselves. Identity formation and presentation play a more important role compared with other age groups.…”

“…Studies related to printed clothes mainly focused on T-shirts. T-shirts have become communicative media and index of language ideology and wearers' identities (Jaworski and Lou, 2021). According to Armani (quoted in Harris, 1996, cited in Caldwell, 2017, one of the most famous fashion designers, T-shirt is an anti-status symbol that the rich and the poor can be put on the same level with the white cotton surface.…”

“…Printed clothes have become media of conveying information about culture and identity. Jaworski and Lou (2021) claimed that language elements displaying on people's body have formed a special type of mobile linguistic landscape in the urban areas, including clothes, tattoos, bags, and so on. Being carried by their wearers, these moving languages build a connection between public and private, and they could be seen as an essential part for individual's identity formation and public presentation.…”

“…Recently, studies have also seen these printed language elements on T-shirts as a special kind of moving linguistic landscape. Not only the designers or producers' thoughts but also wearers' agency play an important role in the representation of them in urban space (Jaworski and Lou 2021). Caldwell (2017) built up a comprehensive framework for language elements presented on body as a mode.…”

Crossing borders

“…However, this urban-centric focus in linguistic landscape research has been increasingly problematised by emerging studies of rural, indigenous, and marginal communities that pose critical questions regarding what are considered normative and acceptable practices in public spaces (Pietikäinen, 2014;Bhreithiun and Burke, 2015;Wroblewski, 2020). Recently, there have also been calls for unsettling the notion of language by recentring on its embodiment and materiality, as well as its interaction with other semiotic resources in particular times and spaces (Jaworski and Lou, 2021;Lamb and Sharma, 2021). This trend has motivated a range of research projects focusing on emerging 'scapes', including smellscapes, soundscapes, and skinscapes (see, for example, Peck and Stroud, 2015;Pennycook and Otsuji, 2015).…”