Existential challenges and interactional sociolinguistics/linguistic ethnography

Abstract

I am not a specialist in digital communication, and instead I do interactional sociolinguistics and linguistic ethnography (henceforth ‘IS’ and ‘LE’), a syncretic research programme that draws inter alia on linguistic anthropology, conversation analysis and Goffman, usually cross-referring to relevant work in other disciplines (Rampton, 2022).¹ IS/LE centres on the careful ethnographic observation, recording and analysis of embodied communication, and it investigates communication's embedding in a layered and interweaving multiplicity of social, cultural and material systems and processes. Depending on the questions and arguments that it is addressing, IS/LE certainly varies both in the forms of semiosis and the systems that it attends to (and I myself have tended to focus on spoken interaction in recreational and educational locales affected by racism, social class and securitisation). But when Helen Kelly-Holmes asks whether artificial intelligence (AI) now departs from ‘the known world for sociolinguistics’, it is a timely opportunity to reflect on the possibilities for—or indeed possibility of—IS/LE.

Kelly-Holmes speaks of a ‘seismic shift’ in the scholarly universe, citing Jan Blommaert (2017, p. 7), who also advocated ‘an acute eye for change’, saying that ‘reality changes. The bastard changes all the time; society refuses to sit still’ (Blommaert & Van de Aa, 2020, p. 6). But Blommaert could also be rather equivocal about the significance of these changes, and elsewhere recommends less spectacular adaptations—‘we have to adjust… [and] what you do needs to be relevant, so don't go for the big recipes’ (2020, p. 6). Not knowing more about AI, I cannot gauge authoritatively the magnitude of its implications for IS/LE, but pursuing Blommaert's more muted second option, I can see several ways in which AI can remain a researchable empirical topic (Rampton, 2016, pp. 314–324).

A lot of this can be studied empirically (Georgakopoulou et al., 2020). Yes, these technological developments are likely to stretch IS/LE's methodological repertoire, also warranting the formation of new interdisciplinary collaborations with, for example, different kinds of computer scientist. But digital processes like these are actually drawn into analytical salience by one of IS/LE's foundational preoccupations: ‘algorithmic knowledge and media ideologies are now – alongside other semiotic resources and language ideologies – central in having a voice’ (Maly, 2022, p. 15; emphasis added).

At least two terms figure prominently in this shift, driven by reckonings not only with AI but also with coloniality and the climate emergency (Chakrabarty, 2012; Kell & Budach, 2024; Pennycook, 2018). Post-humanism is one, inter alia proposing a ‘philosophical critique of the Western humanist ideal of the “man of reason” as the allegedly universal measure of all things’ (Braidotti, 2017, p. 16). Post-anthropocentrism is another, resting ‘on the rejection of species hierarchy and human exceptionalism…. propel[ling] us forward to topics we may not feel a particular aptitude for: animals, plants, cells, viruses, bacteria, algorithms’ (Braidotti, 2017, p. 19).

Given the seriousness of these reasons for reorientation, calls for a profound rethink in sociolinguistics are not surprising (e.g. Deumert, 2022; Kerfoot & Stroud, 2024), and as with AI, ecocidal anthropocentrism³ and decolonial challenges to traditional Enlightenment ideas of the human⁴ present sociolinguistics with major practical, theoretical and political challenges. Even so, if you want to understand what happens in the ongoing interaction of culture, economy, environment and society, where different kinds of discourse, person, organism, object, technology and habitat negotiate the unpredictably unfolding present, it is important to try to observe, record and analyse their interweaving as closely as you can. This is one of IS/LE's core commitments (the other being the need engage with other kinds of expert, credentialed or otherwise, to ensure that you're framing questions capable of eventually speaking back to the crucial issues). And even with climate, which looks at first far too huge for any scholarship on language, there is still a lot that it can try to do because ‘climate change… is a social problem. It is also a wicked problem, one that cannot be solved, but must instead be re-solved and renegotiated, over and over again’ (Grundman, 2016, pp. 562–563, cited in Fine & Love-Nichols, 2021, p. 454).

Kelly-Holmes goes on to ask the biggest question: ‘hope or despair’? The thinkers I've cited reject the ‘abstract idea of a “new” pan-humanity, bonded in shared vulnerability or anxiety about survival and extinction’ (Braidotti, 2016, p. 24), and they point towards more local actions, ‘artisanal rather than architectural work, work of committed witnessing rather than clairvoyant leadership’ (Santos, 2012, p. 51). Braidotti herself inclines to hope, drawing on a judicious ‘technophilia’ that looks towards ‘the liberating and even transgressive potential’ of AI technologies (Braidotti, 2016, pp. 16–17). But for Gilroy, ‘it is imperative to remain less interested in who or what we imagine ourselves to be, than in what we can do for one another both in today's emergency conditions and in the grimmer circumstances that surely await us’ (2019). That perspective resonates with Blommaert's admission that ‘whenever I doubted the importance of what I was doing academically (and that happened very frequently, believe me), the answer was given by… activists, trade union people… school teachers’ (Blommaert & Van de Aa, 2020, p. 6). And again, there has been an orientation to ‘artisanal’ practical engagement in IS/LE since its inception (e.g. Gumperz et al., 1979).

So alongside several others, IS/LE is a syncretic sociolinguistic approach to the analysis of how different things come together and develop in the unfolding present, and although it is continually stretched in new directions, I do not see any signs of its value disappearing. That's important because beyond research, the continuing credibility of this kind of approach counts in another crucial forum for Kelly-Holmes’ urgent questions—our teaching, where AI is already pushing a far-reaching rethink (Rudolph et al., 2023; Wingate et al., 2024).

Given how fluently AI can write one, the essay now looks dead as way of grading students (short of going back to pen-and-paper examination halls), and training in the technicalities of, for example, phonetics, functional grammar or conversation analysis may now need less attention because, as ‘Chat’ blandly states in Kelly-Holmes’ paper, AI can do more and more analytically. It is still important of course for students to understand the underlying theory and method in different frameworks, maybe most conspicuously when different frameworks are combined in the analysis of specific strips of communicative practice as in IS/LE (and in class, data sessions are very good for exploring their different affordances (Rampton & Van de Putte: Section 7). But the top pedagogic priority is to persuade students to care about the problem spaces addressed in our courses, motivating the kinds of engagement through which people really learn, immersing themselves in arguments, experiences, theories, methods and data slowly, thoughtfully, reflexively and often collaboratively.⁵ Opening up on ‘So what?’ (or indeed ‘Why bother?’) is one way to achieve this (potentially referencing the big issues above), and it can also lead to the cross-generational discussion of different futures that can count as much for teachers as for students. But AI's flexibility also calls for attention to the institutional environment where students are operating. Many take part-time jobs to pay their way, and with lots of assignments but less time, the pressure to hand the tasks over to AI is going to increase. So, we need to free up space for students to experience, discuss, read and think for themselves, making sure that we are not over-teaching-and-assessing, even if this requires quite a struggle with some of the neo-liberal academy's performance and audit pressures (Perry, 2023).

Plainly, at a time of acute existential uncertainty, there is far more to consider than just types of research. And even then when it actually comes to research, IS/LE is not a ‘big recipe’. But it (and work like it) can still be a useful ‘ingredient’ wherever there is embodied human communication: disclosing neglected communicative resources and hidden waste, feeding unpredictably into dialogue with other perspectives, and exploring with students the light that local practices and things-on-hand can throw on matters of much wider consequence.

The author declares no conflicts of interest.