Expanding Ways of Seeing and Hearing through the Ethnography of Communication

ethnography, language and literacy, writing
John J. Gumperz, 1922-2013

I was recently awarded the John J. Gumperz Lifetime Achievement Award from the Language and Social Processes SIG of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). I am sharing here the acceptance speech I gave, reflecting on my own journey in the field of language and social processes, and imagining the future.

The words “honored and humbled” feel a bit hackneyed these days, but I can’t think of better ones to use as I accept the tremendous honor of being awarded the John J. Gumperz Lifetime Achievement Award from the Language and Social Processes SIG. Many thanks to the awards committee and to the outgoing chair of this SIG, Diana Arya, for all your work. And thanks for to all for taking the time to listen – or read – these words. I know we are all bombarded with all kinds of words these days, so your time is a gift.

Life is lived going forward, but only understood looking back, to paraphrase Soren Kierkegaard. From this vantage point, I can see how the paths that John J. Gumperz and others forged made possible what I have been able to know, do, and contribute to the world.  There are too many to name or include on this slide, but I’d like to recognize a few more of the people whose work inspired mine, both directly and indirectly, across the years.

In the top row, my nominator and letter writers who also work in Gumperz’ tradition of the Ethnography of Education – giants on whose shoulders I stand: Judith Green, Fred Erickson, Cynthia Lewis, Carol Lee.

I’d like to thank Judith Green, not just for surprising me with this nomination, but for supporting my work since the start of my career.  I recall driving up to Santa Barbara to meet with her about a manuscript I had submitted to Reading Research Quarterly based on my dissertation work. She was incredibly generous of her time and guided me in what became my first major publication, which centered on how gender constructed literacy, and literacy gender, through texts, talk and their take-up in two bilingual classrooms (Orellana, 1995). I’ve been trying to pay forward the mentoring she gave to me – a total stranger to her at the time – ever since.

Next, my graduate and postgraduate advisors and mentors: Robert Rueda, Nelly Stromquist, Barrie Thorne. I keep trying to pay their mentorship forward as well! Here I’d like to give a shout-out to a forthcoming book that honors the work of Barrie Thorne (Gender Replay: On Kids, Schools and Feminism); I have a chapter in it in which I credit her with much of what I learned about ethnography, especially in terms of working with love and respect for children, and finding joy in the work.

And then, more thinkers and doers who have influenced my work in small and large ways.  I wonder how many you recognize?

You might note that this is a bit of an eclectic group: from diverse disciplines, pursuing different areas of inquiry, in different contexts, with different populations, both in and out of school. I have long taken great pleasure in traversing boundaries in the pursuit of interesting ideas, finding the conceptual frameworks that are best suited to the task at hand, and merging their insights for particular analytical tasks.  I also strive to conjoin different perspectives that point to similar things, bringing those frameworks together rather than marking their distinctions, in the silo-ed approach that academia tends to reinforce and reward.  In my own work, I’ve cited all of these people, and many more (apologies to all that I’ve left out), and also…The Little Prince, Dr. Seuss, Thich Naht Hahn…my children, my students, my large extended family, my friends, the young people with whom I’ve worked over the years, as well as many more-than-human beings and beautiful places and spaces on this planet.

All of these beings have been my teachers and have shaped who I am, what I think about, and how I move in the world, as I strive to be a compassionate, equity-minded, reflective social justice innovator — continuously trying to forge “the next best version of myself” – while acknowledging, even embracing, my own imperfections. (Accepting my own helps me to allow room for others’ as well.)

With many conceptual meanderings, a central through-line in my work has been methodological, working in the tradition that John Gumperz established: the Ethnography of Communication. This approach to combining ethnographic observations of social and cultural processes with close analyses of discourse was foundational for my research on immigrant child language brokering (Orellana, 2009). 

When I set out to study language brokering my intention was to understand the practice in all its complexity, and to map the range and nature of children’s experiences as brokers. To this day, it frustrates me a bit that researchers seem to focus on the questions that most perplexes them:  (1) Is this good, or bad, for children?  And (2) “How do children feel about language brokering?”  And most often, these questions were asked of adults looking back on their experiences, not children themselves.

At the time that I began my research, some 25 years ago, and even to this day, remarkably little research has considered the social and cultural processes that both shape and are shaped by this multidimensional practice; very little research on language brokering has been based on direct observation of actual brokering encounters.  (There are a few important exceptions, such as the work of my colleague Inmaculada García-Sánchez, who has also worked in the tradition of the Ethnography of Communication to study this practice with Morroccan immigrants in Spain.) Using ethnographic methods and discourse analysis within an Ethnography of Communication framework, I was able to show what children do in language brokering, how they do so, and how it matters for their communities as well as for their own learning and development. 

Ethnographic work with many child language brokers taught me that children feel MANY things, because language brokering is not a single thing: it is shaped by the contexts, the demands of the tasks and texts, the nature of the relationships in which they are set, the supports and constraints of the interactions. The Ethnography of Communication helps us to see these complexities. Combining this with sociohistorical perspectives on learning in different time scales, we can think about the cumulative effect of children’s experiences with a wide range of language brokering tasks, over time. This is much more productive than trying to prove the positive or negative effects of the practice, or to answer find a singular answer to how children feel about doing the work.  But from an Ethnography of Communications perspective, I think it’s worth quoting 10-year-old María here, who wrote in this diary entry that how she feels about translating is “excited” b/c it feels like she’s talking to somebody. And indeed, she IS talking to and with her mother, as she reads a text sent home from her brother’s school. And she shows herself talking to her mother, as well as thinking critically about school practices.

Ten-year-old María’s journal entry about translating a dress code letter from her brother’s school
Published by Routledge in 2019

Even as I aimed to unpack the complexities and nuances of this multi-dimensional practice through an Ethnography of Communications framework, collecting a wide range of data including recordings of actual language brokering encounters, and children’s reports on them in diaries like María – my aim was never just to understand the practice as an interactional phenomenon, but to draw implications for teaching and learning, in and out of schools. I began focused attention to making connections between children’s everyday language experiences and the things that schools value and prioritize by taking up Carol Lee’s approach to Cultural Modeling: working with others to design pedagogical approaches that leverage, level, sustain and expand the everyday linguistic competencies of students from non-dominant cultural groups. 

Published by Routledge in 2017

I also helped to design new learning environments in informal learning spaces.  Here, I’d like to give a shout out to UC Links’ model for sustained, engaged university-community partnerships, the legacy of work established by Mike Cole and Olga Vasquez in the 1980s, and that I inherited from Kris Gutierrez at UCLA, where I directed an after-school program called “Bruin Club” for 11 years. Bruin Club became a space for playing with language, and for learning with and alongside kids while we experimented with designing learning spaces and studying them using the tools of the Ethnography of Communication.

This focus on language processes in contexts of linguistic and cultural diversity has been a through-line of my work. As I shared in the LSP newsletter, it wasn’t necessarily a logical place for me to land, given that I was raised in a rather homogeneously white, working class, Catholic, English-speaking town.  But the ethnographic study of communicative practices helped me to understand the world beyond the one I was raised in. It helped me to expand my ways of seeing – and hearing – and to see the beauty and power of language in interaction in bi-, multi- or translingual settings (i.e. the most places in the world). It can help all of us to expand our own ways of knowing, doing, thinking and being. We can use its tools to appreciate both commonalties and differences in the human experience, to listen across and sometimes mediate between divergent perspectives, as child language brokers do every day. 

Published by Routledge 2019

This is the work that I think is most needed for the future, as I call for in my latest, arguably my boldest, book. I think most of us know that the world is increasingly polarized and see the problems in that.  But do we see the problems of perpetuating polarizations within our own fields, our own spaces, our own practices, our own minds?  If we look around, divisions and  polarizations abound even among relatively like-minded people in academia. Getting beyond them – finding connections and commonalties more than marking what divides us –  perhaps using the tools of the ethnography of communication and a mindful (heart-centered, compassionate) approach to ethnography (conjoining mind, heart, and activity in our commitments to profoundly transforming the world) –  is, I think, the greatest challenge of our times.

One concept that has been the subject of some level of polarization in the field of language and social processes, centers around translanguaging, and more generally what has been called the “trans” turn in the social sciences, encapsulated in a proliferation of (relatively) new linguistic terms, including translanguaging, transculturality, transracial, transraciolinguistics, transgender, translocal, transmodalities, transcultural repositioning…. In all of these words, the prefix “trans” suggests movement, fluidity, and change. It calls us into transgressive, transitional and transcendent spaces, inviting us to cross over borders and move through walls that have been erected by humans and reinforced by social institutions. The tensions lie with those who want to keep things more fixed, solid, demarcated, everything in its place

As someone who delights in boundary crossing, I’m thrilled to see and participate in these transgressive and transformational ideas. In terms of translanguaging, I’m happy to tear down some of the walls that got erected between languages in the rise of the modern nation state, and to challenge schools’ roles in reinforcing lines between somewhat (though not completely) arbitrary linguistic forms. I also appreciate the focus on the user’s perspective rather than the institutional ones, as Ofelia García has helped to differentiate.

At the same time, I know that walls can be protective. Seedlings get nurtured in small enclosures to ensure their growth. Sometimes we need to disentangle roots that get matted and clumped together, for the health of individual plants. Putting up some protective walls may be especially important for languages that are at threat for extinction and erasure.

I have mostly steered clear of the specifics of the debates between supporters and critics of translanguaging, instead bringing my “middle child” viewpoint, brokering stance, and what I like to think of as a decolonizing orientation,  to see the issues in what Patricia Hill Collins long ago taught me to think of in “both/and” terms.  I see both the power of the concept of translanguaging, and the challenges it presents, both conceptual and practical.   I see the importance of naming languages that have been invisibilized, erased, or murdered, not letting them get lost in a dizzy celebration of hybriditiy. At the same time, I see the creative genius of young people as they mix and remix heritage language forms and emergent ones in exciting, surprising, innovative, transgressive and transformative ways ways – and I look forward to more work that documents and analyzes that creativity, and what it is used to do in the world.

Sociohistorical activity theory has taught me to see all binaries as generative tensions.  The resolution of these dialectical tensions involves not getting caught in them, not reinforcing the polarizations that can pull us apart – but transcending, moving beyond, looking for what may emerge.  Looking for possibility.

I would suggest that moving beyond the binaries that divide us involves attention to language, but not only to language, or at least not just to words.  As Gumperz showed us, we need to see language as intricately bound up in social processes. We need to think about critical social processes of the times we are living: a time of increasing social and political destabilization and potential ecological collapse. We need to listen to what is said, and also what is not said: hearing silences, as Ariana Figueroa Mangual and Claudia Cervantes are doing in their work. We need to hear not just what people say, but what they understand of what others say, as Adrienne Lo and Christhian Fallas Escobar and others are showing as they examine the complexities of the listening subject. And we must listen not just with our heads, and our ears, but with our hearts, as I have been calling for, for some time. We need to listen both over and under the words that others use, with interest and curiosity, like good ethnographers, seeking to understand from emic perspectives.

Some of my former and current students and mentees: the future of the field of Language and Social Processing!

Gumperz was perhaps ahead of his time in bringing appreciation for linguistic and cultural diversity into Academia. I’d like to think that my work has helped to widen that space a bit more, making room for the next generation of scholars to do so in bigger and bolder ways.  I’d like to end by naming the students I have mentored across the years. (These are just the ones I have most closely mentored – students whose committees I chaired and a few “honororary mentees” as well.) I think you’ll recognize many their names and see how the legacy of John Gumperz has extended across the years (and across the world!).

Seeing the work that is being done by my students, and theirs – and imagining the work by others who are growing up today in places where linguistic diversity is the norm – assures me that the future of research in the Ethnography of Communication is in very good hands.  I can only imagine – with wonder and awe – what young scholars of today will be able to do as they carry these legacies forward, honoring those histories, but also mixing, re-mixing, riffing and innovating as they forge new ones of their own.

Embracing contradictions: The beauty and terror of life during a pandemic

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Words, like the virus, are circulating madly through invisible networks of exchange these days: words of conviction and certainty, anxiety and fear, blame and shame, praise and support, anger and outrage, compassion and kindness, hope and wonder, terror and grief.

Most writers take one tack or another.  Some point to the injustices that the coronavirus brings into relief. Others highlight the possibilities that emerge when people work together for collective good. Some find creative ways to send uplifting messages for the future. Others look to the past, seeking someone or something to blame. Some anticipate the Apocalypse. Others see the Dawning of a New Age.

I am trying to embrace all these contradictions, and to feel it all: beautLet everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going ...y and terror, hope and fear, love and anger, humor and horror, joy and grief. I see the best and worst of humanity, and both dread and relish what could lie ahead.

The things I am witnessing are both difficult and wonderful, both terrible and beautiful, both full of possibility and filled with tremendous pain.

They are the result of actions taken or not taken in the past, and caused by things that none of us could ever fully control. We know what we can do to protect ourselves and our loved ones, and we also know these things may not work.

The suffering is, and will continue to be, both shared and unequally distributed. The pandemic will target particularly vulnerable populations and it will hit all sectors in an inexplicable, seemingly random way.  It will likely lead to creative solutions to long-standing social issues and to the deepening and hardening of existing inequities.

We already miss things we can no longer do, even as we are discovering new ways of connecting and of reinvigorating social life.

We will surely weather some aspects of the crisis with grace and strength, and fall apart at other times. We will rise to our best selves and succumb to our worst. This will be true at both an individual and collective level.

In short, there is no single, definitive narrative to tell about the coronavirus, just like life.

Except, perhaps, the ones we choose to tell, and work to make come true.

Where do we want to put our energy, our thoughts, our time? What words and ideas will we send into the ethosphere?  Which ones will we breathe in, and which will we block with a metaphorical mask? Could we collectively bend the arc of the universe even just a little bit toward justice? Could we tip the balance from terror to wonder, fear to peace, anger to love?

This may be the most disconcerting and liberating lesson we can take from this time.  To some degree, it’s up to us.

The coronavirus may seem like our enemy, but perhaps it is our greatest teacher – and even, despite or because of all of the contradictions it brings – our friend.Life: The Greatest teacher of them all | EdTerra Edventures

Ethnography in a time of social distancing: We are all ethnographers now

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Note: I’m blogging because it feels like something I can do in the face of the crises unfolding all around us, not because I think words are necessarily the medicine we most need right now.  But it helps me to have some sense of purpose, something that I hope could be helpful to others in some small way, as we live through and respond to an unprecedented situation. Perhaps we can draw some lessons from this experience for imagining, and bringing into being, a better world.

My recently published book, Mindful Ethnography: Mind, Heart and Action for Transformative Social Research, is a guide for scholar-activists who want to immerse themselves fully in social contexts: working with the instruments of our beings to see, hear, smell, taste, feel, think and understand the world, and connecting mind, heart and activity in order to do scholarship that contributes to much needed social transformation.  But in the current moment we are being asked to stay home, maintain at least six feet from other people, and work “remotely.” This contradicts the hands-on, grounded, immersive, engaged, participatory ways that are at the heart of ethnographic and socially-transformative research.  What does it mean to be an ethnographer in a time of “social distancing” and in the midst of this unprecedented global COV19 pandemic?download

While the particular field work projects that social science researchers have been pursuing will undoubtedly have to change or be put on hold for some time, I believe that all of us – researchers and the general public alike – can draw on some core principles of ethnography in order to observe, experience, document, and understand the moment we are living in.  Moreover, I think the mindful approaches I call for in my book could serve us all as social beings in a rapidly changing world, and for bringing into being a more just, equitable, loving and transformative one. I distill a few of those lessons from my book here, applying them to the COV19 pandemic. We are all ethnographers now.

The familiar has been made strange for us

We are all participating in, and surely observing, an unprecedented global experiment. The social world we live in is being transformed in uncharted, unpredictable, and unchosen ways. We are transforming it as we respond to calls to change all our everyday habits. And we are experiencing those changes as we make them.

One of the core principles of ethnography is to “make the familiar strange” in order to see in new ways, rather than through unexamined assumptions or established patterns of our culture. Becoming more aware of how we move and operate in the world may help us as we face the immediate threat of COV19: by refraining from touching our faces, shaking hands, or passing the virus in other ways. It may also help us to see things we took for granted, such as the essential labor of grocery store workers, health care providers, and others who were invisible before. The familiar has been made strange for us. All we have to do is look around. But can we do so more awarefully?

Notice everything you think and feel

The conavirus crisis offers us a tremendous opportunity not just to see the world in new ways, but to experience profound changes: in institutions and societal structures, interpersonal relationships, local ecologies, the environment, and more. There is much to be noticed right now. Pay attention to it all.  What do you see, hear, feel, smell, taste, touch and think?  What do you not get to see, hear, feel, smell, touch and taste right now?  (We may come to see what we have taken for granted by experiencing their absence.)  What do we sense, worry, fear, anticipate, intuit and imagine? Using “mindful” practices, we can notice how our thoughts and feelings arise and change as circumstances around us change. Using the skills of ethnography, we can pay attention to the details: what, exactly, do we see, hear, smell, taste, feel and intuit?  Historians might appreciate the efforts we make to document these thoughts and feelings, and to record them as carefully as we can.  But as I suggest in my book, our thoughts and feelings are always intertwined, and we can expect that they will be only more so in a time of such uncertainty and anxiety. So notice how your emotions may shape your perceptions, and vice versa.t3_06_thoughts_feelings_emotions

Pause before you interpret or act

 The human tendency is to immediately judge any changes we experience. Social media is filled with people’s responses to the Conavirus crisis: what people hate about it, what they love, how it personally impacts them. Some of the changes we are being asked to make feel incredibly difficult. Others might feel liberating. People have many opinions about these things, too. And many, many emotional responses.

But in a time of rapid change, we would benefit from slowing down. Here is where a mindfully ethnographic approach can help us. Pay attention. Notice everything we think and feel.   Try to stay close to the direct observations of what you see, hear, smell, taste and touch. Then press pause. Don’t rush to premature interpretations.  And don’t let our perceptions and opinions impulsively drive our actions.

Suspending both evaluation and interpretation, we may identify possibilities that can be acted upon in thoughtful ways to enact long term much-needed transformations in society once we get through the immediate crisis. We can also contribute more thoughtfully to what is needed now if we don’t just react, mindlessly putting our own thoughts and feelings out into the chaos that is swirling around us. We can think carefully about what we can contribute that is truthful, helpful and kind (following Buddhist precepts). 

Don’t assume others’ experiences are the same as yours

Different  kinds of people are being impacted in different ways by the COV19 pandemic. The effects will likely be felt differently along well-established lines of power in society. This is where social science theory can help us: we can ask who is hurt, and who potentially benefits, from this crisis, attending to the important categories of our culture (race/ethnicity, class, gender) as well as other categories of difference. This crisis will surely make visible the privileges that some people enjoy, and the vulnerability of others.  But just  how it will do so isn’t clear, and may not be visible unless we pay attention. We can’t be sure we know all of the ways this crisis will affect people, how they will feel about it, or how they will respond. And we certainly can’t assume that our exact experiences – and responses to them – will be shared with others.  This is a time to observe keenly, listen deeply, and ask critical questions about how this global crisis is impacting us, in both shared and divergent, and good and bad, ways.

Let go

download-6My ulterior motive in writing Mindful Ethnography was to share some of the lessons I have learned about life in general and academia in particular, by working through my own health crises and an extended healing process. (See my previous blog.)  I wrote it with my younger, anxiety-filled, angst-ridden school-girl self in mind, filling it with reassurances for young scholars entering this business, and calls to let go, as best we can, of our fears, worries, plans, hopes and expectations. We are being forced to let go of many plans right now.

We can also let go of our ideas about perfection and completion, or about getting the words “just right” or having “the answer” to complex questions.  Leading to and following from this book, in the face of the existential crises facing our planet, I’m feeling compelled to write in much more personal ways than I ever thought I would dare to in academia (which can be such a critical world). I feel a sense of urgency, and so I’m throwing caution to the wind, and sharing my thoughts in the hope that they will be helpful to some people (as well as truthful and kind)….but not perfect, and not complete.

Stay tuned for more ways I hope to apply my approach to “mindful ethnography” to the contemporary global crisis: by conjoining mind, heart and activity; thinking deeply about the language we use to name our experiences; sitting with paradoxes; and moving beyond dualities as we experience through the COV19 crisis the profound nature of our interconnectedness – in both terrible and wonderful ways.

For social science researchers

Before concluding, let me offer a few more specific lessons for social science researchers.  Some of you may be able to continue doing your fieldwork where-ever you are, just observing with a little more distance, and conducting interviews from six feet apart! But more likely, you may need to withdraw from the field and shift your modes of gathering data, as well as the questions you pursue.  That’s OK. 

Your best laid plans may go out the window

download-2This is not a time to go about business as usual. My heart goes out to the many doctoral students who cannot pursue the projects they have planned for some time – like my own protégé, Sophia Angeles, who was poised to begin her dissertation research this spring, doing participant observation in a Los Angeles high school, to explore the experiences of undocumented, “unaccompanied minor” adolescent youth.  Gaining access to this population will be much more challenging now.

I encourage students to notice your thoughts and feelings about changes to carefully-laid plans. Consider these as lessons for life. We really don’t have as much control over the world as we might like. And we can’t out-think or out-plan it all. What we can do is better respond to a changing world.  So stop. Breathe. Sit with the thoughts and feelings that come up about how this impacts your research agenda. Feel it all: rage, disappointment, fear, confusion. Let it settle through your body and your mind. Don’t try to rush through this stage of the grieving process.

But look through the window to see what lies beyond

download At some point you may be ready to turn your mind in some new directions. And there are very new, important questions that are emerging. Identify the ways this global pandemic impacts the questions you had planned to explore, or were already exploring. For example, in Sophia’s case: How are unaccompanied minor adolescents in the U.S. being affected by COV19 in particular ways? How does the pandemic influence their social, emotional, health and well being, as well as their ideas about possible futures?  What access do they have to health care, and how are their families and communities being impacted? And how are they making sense of this experience?

The challenge for ethnographers is how to pursue these at a distance – e.g. via social media or personal connections that can be leveraged virtually. I don’t want to minimize those challenges. I only want to suggest to young researchers that it is OK to change your questions – and your contributions will likely be so much greater now, as you will be asking questions that none of us really have any answers to at all, and that speak to really pressing matters of the day, and of the futures we might imagine, and work to bring into being.