Research Interviewing: Context and Narrative

Neo-liberal urban planning policies: A literature survey 1990–2010

While certain US cities are still depopulating, others have experienced a reversal of aggregate out-migration patterns. Some scholars, politicians and real estate boosters celebrate this urban population influx, as it will likely increase property values and municipal tax bases; however, we know little about the social costs associated with the back-to-the-city movement. This study investigates the consequences of the back-to-the-city movement through a four-year (2009–2012) ethnographic case study of the revitalisation of Washington, DC’s Shaw/U Street neighbourhood. The redevelopment of this African-American neighbourhood is associated with the city’s 5.2 percent population increase, which occurred between 2000 and 2010. While affordable housing efforts help to keep a portion of long-term, low-income residents in place, political and cultural displacement is occurring as upper-income newcomers flock into this neighbourhood. This article contributes to the urban literature by highlighting that population...

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0042098014539403

The back-to-the-city movement: Neighbourhood redevelopment and processes of political and cultural displacement:

In Washington DC's newly gentrified Chinatown, recent commercial establishments, primarily non-Chinese owned chains, use Chinese-language signs as design features targeted towards people who neither read nor have ethnic ties to Chinese. Using this neighborhood as a case study, we advocate a contextualized, historicized and spatialized perspective on linguistic landscape which highlights that landscapes are not simply physical spaces but are instead ideologically charged constructions. Drawing from cultural geography and urban studies, we analyze how written language interacts with other features of the built environment to construct commodified urban places. Taking a contextually informed, qualitative approach, we link micro-level analysis of individual Chinese-language signs to the specific local socio-geographic processes of spatial commodification. Such a qualitative approach to linguistic landscape, which emphasizes the importance of sociohistorical context, and which includes analysis of signage use, function, and history, leads to a greater understanding of the larger sociopolitical meanings of linguistic landscapes.

Commodified language in Chinatown: A contextualized approach to linguistic landscape1

1. White styles: language, race, and youth identities 2. Listening to whiteness: researching language and race in a California high school 3. Cliques, crowds, and crews: social labels in racial space 4. Say word?: Race and style in white teenage slang 5. I'm like yeah but she's all no: innovative quotative markers and preppy whiteness 6. Pretty fly for a white guy: European American hip hop fans and African American English 7. We're through being cool: white nerds, superstandard English, and the rejection of trendiness 8. 'Not that I'm racist': strategies of colorblindness in talk about race and friendship 9. White on black: narratives of fear and resentment 10. 'I guess I'm white': ethnoracial labels and the problem of whiteness 11. Conclusion: audible whiteness.

White Kids: Language, Race, and Styles of Youth Identity

Series Preface. List of Figures. Acknowledgments. Part I: The Ethnography. 1. Sketching the Landscape. 2. Mt. Pleasant History and Social Geography. 3. The Moral Geography of Mt. Pleasant. 4. The Politics of Filth. 5. La Loca vs. the Cultural Vampires. 6. Keeping it in the Family. 7. Home Ties, Winds of Change. Part II: The Making of Turf Wars. 8. Theorizing Discourse. 9. Geography and Social Locations. Addendum: Defining Terms. Bibliography. Index.

Turf Wars: Discourse, Diversity, and the Politics of Place

10. Selling the City: Language, Ethnicity and Commodified Space

While research on business improvement districts (BIDs) has considered the constraints BIDs can place on the negotiation of public space and citizenship, little work has focused on the process of establishing neighborhood BIDs (NBIDs), and few scholars have examined perceptions of public space held by actual neighborhood constituents. This article analyzes a participatory mapping project and messages on a neighborhood e-mail list to compare the visions of place expressed by disempowered community members and by an NBID proposal. Our analysis illuminates how local power relations and inequalities can become inscribed in urban planning projects like NBIDs.

Contesting Public Space and Citizenship: Implications for Neighborhood Business Improvement Districts

The structure and function of a sociolinguistic interview sets up a context that affords informants the opportunity to achieve their own goals. We examine how an informant manipulates the reception format of the speech event, using embedded orientation to characterize information as alternately given or new, and the interviewer consequently as an insider or outsider. Whereas previous analyses have examined how embedded orientation highlights or sheds light on information in complicating action clauses, we posit that the content of embedded orientation clauses is important in and of itself. Rather than serving as simply background information, embedded orientation can do important ideological work. In the case here, embedded orientation introduces into the narrative traces of a local story—the history of local Fascism, a topic that is rarely discussed in the teller's community. (Embedded orientation, narrative, sociolinguistic interview)

Gabriella Modan

Papers

Commodified language in Chinatown: A contextualized approach to linguistic landscape1

Turf Wars: Discourse, Diversity, and the Politics of Place

10. Selling the City: Language, Ethnicity and Commodified Space

Contesting Public Space and Citizenship: Implications for Neighborhood Business Improvement Districts

Positioning the interviewer: Strategic uses of embedded orientation in interview narratives