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Convenors:
Prof. Peter L. Patrick
Language & Linguistics
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
Colchester
CO4 3SQ
Essex, UK
+44 (0) 1206 872088

Prof. Monika Schmid Language & Linguistics University of Essex & University of Groningen
+44 (0) 1206 872089  

Dr. Karin Zwaan
Centre for Migration Law Radboud University Nijmegen P.O. Box 9049
6500KK Nijmegen
the Netherlands
+31 24 361.2934

E-mail: larg@essex.ac.uk

Jan Blommaert

Jan Blommaert photoExpertise:

  • Discourse analysis - African linguistics - Ethnography - LADO practitioner

Jan Blommaert is Professor of Language, Culture and Globalization and Director of the Babylon Center at Tilburg University, the Netherlands, and professor of African Linguistics and Sociolinguistics at Ghent University.

Prof. Blommaert has published widely on language ideologies and language inequality in the context of globalization, focusing on institutional sociolinguistic regimes in fields such as education and immigration. Publications include The Sociolinguistics of Globalization (Cambridge University Press, 2010), Grassroots Literacy (Routledge, 2008), Discourse: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Language Ideological Debates (edited, Mouton de Gruyter, 1999). He has consulted in asylum cases, and he was a founding member of the Language & National Origin Group who authored the 2004 Guidelines.

Jan Blommaert was awarded the 2010 Barbara Metzger Prize by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research for an article entitled ‘Language, Asylum and the National Order’ (Current Anthropology 2009).

Jan Blommaert's webpage

Email:

j.blommaert        Please add:    @tilburguniversity.edu

Related Publications

BOOKS

2010. A Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • This book provides a theoretical template for addressing sociolinguistic phenomena in the era of globalization, drawing heavily on analyses of data related to asylum applications.

2008. Grassroots Literacy: Writing, Identity and Voice in Central Africa. London: Routledge.

  • This book presents an attempt at understanding the literacy regimes valid in peripheral areas of the world such as Central Africa. Ethnography of texts from such areas points towards a wide range of literacy problems that can and do become acute in the context of transnational mobility, such as in the case of asylum seekers.

2005. Discourse: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • This book offers a new theoretical framework for the analysis of discourse in the era of globalization, drawing heavily on analyses of asylum seekers’ narratives and procedural encounters.

PAPERS

2009. Language, asylum and the national order. Current Anthropology 50/4: 415-441.

  • An extended analysis of the role of language in an asylum application case in the UK, where the Rwandese applicant was initially dismissed because of his ‘unusual’ language repertoire. The paper argues that asylum seekers are caught between a late-modern sociology of migration and high-modern, national frames used in institutional contexts for addressing this Late-Modern phenomenology. (This paper was awarded the 2010 Barbara Metzger Prize by the Wenner-Gren Foundation)

2008. Bernstein and poetics revisited: Voice, globalization and education. Discourse & Society 19/4: 421-447.

  • A theoretical paper summarizing various issues related to sociolinguistic inequality, and drawing heavily on data from asylum seekers’ cases. The paper argues for a poetics-based analysis of voice both in spoken and in literate discourse.

2006. Applied ethnopoetics. Narrative Inquiry 16/1: 181-190.

  • This paper argues for attention towards Hymes’ ethnopoetic method in applied domains such as asylum application. Ethnopoetic analysis allows perhaps the most detailed analyses of voice, which is an urgent concern in asylum applications.

2005. Bourdieu the ethnographer: The ethnographic grounding of habitus and voice. The Translator 11/2: 219-236.

  • This paper argues for an ethnographic reading of Bourdieu’s work, showing how in asylum applications officials produce an institutional habitus while they are satisfying the on-the-spot requirements of conversational cooperativity.

2004. (coauthor) Guidelines for the use of language analysis in relation to questions of national origin in refugee cases. The International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law: Forensic Linguistics, 11(2): 261-266. Available at http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/

2004. Writing as a problem: African grassroots writing, economies of literacy and globalization. Language in Society 33/5: 643-671.

  • This paper engages with literacy in a globalized context, using an extensive analysis of writings by a Burundese asylum seeker. It argues that writing, while generally seen as empowering, can in effect be one more obstacle in such deeply unequal settings.

2002. (Katrijn Maryns & Jan Blommaert.) Pretextuality and pretextual gaps: On re/defining linguistic inequality. Pragmatics 12/1: 11-30.

  • Drawing on work with asylum applicants, this paper engages with the theoretical and methodological issues of sociolinguistic and narrative inequality, using the notions of pretextuality and pretextual gaps to describe the gaps between expected competence and real competence in such events.

2001. Investigating narrative inequality: African asylum seekers’ stories in Belgium. Discourse & Society 12/4: 413-449.

  • An article that sketches the theoretical, methodological and descriptive issues involved in asylum seekers’ narratives, focusing on the resources used in storytelling and the problem of voice in application contexts.
    Reprinted 2007 in Teun van Dijk (ed.) Discourse Studies, Vol. 1: 207-245. Los Angeles: Sage.