Research Seminar Series 2024

Time: 4-5 pm, Friday 21June

Location: 12SW, 558/Zoom:  https://macquarie.zoom.us/j/88546604589?pwd=cFVqbmdCb2hvT04yRTliN1B6VVJtUT09 Password: 798325

On decoupling migrants’ individual resourcefulness and communicative success: questions from the field

Marco Santello, University of Turin, Italy

In this seminar I draw on a research project among migrants who live in a shelter in northeastern Italy to examine in what way individual resourcefulness might not always be a fully adequate dimension to capture communicative success. Theoretically I consider new perspectives on competence as it ‘emerges through finely distributed practices between social networks and material ecologies, motivated by relational ethics’ (Canagarajah 2022: 22) as well as recent insights in linguistic ethnography that raise questions over an understanding of the individual in solipsistic terms (Blackledge & Creese 2023: 131). I also pick up earlier calls that caution against methodological individualism (Canagarajah 2018). I conclude with some points on what the data presented suggest, and discuss possibilities for further empirical and theoretical developments.

References

Blackledge, Adrian, & Angela Creese (2023). Essays in linguistic ethnography: Ethics, aesthetics, encounters. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Canagarajah, Suresh A. (2018). ‘Translingual practice as spatial repertoires: expanding the paradigm beyond structuralist orientations’, Applied Linguistics, 39/1: 31–54.

——. (2022). Language incompetence: learning to communicate through cancer, disability, and anomalous embodiment. Milton Park; New York: Routledge.

Bio

Marco Santello is a researcher at the University of Turin, Italy. He holds a PhD from the University of Sydney and, before joining the University of Turin, he worked as a research fellow at the University of Warwick and subsequently as a lecturer at the University of Leeds, UK. His works have appeared in journals such as Applied Linguistics, Language in Society, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, Language and Intercultural Communication as well as volumes. His research interests revolve around multilingualism, language and migration, and code-switching.