Re-conceptualising Field: the study of variation in English across shifting contexts

Pamela Knight, PhD

Senior Research Fellow, Anglia Ruskin University, Chelmsford, United Kingdom

Abstract

In this address, I will reflect on traditional notions of field and fieldwork in variationist sociolinguistics and how these have been conceptualised and operationalised. I draw on seminal and influential accounts of fieldwork methods, such as, Labov’s sociolinguistic interview and his efforts to address the observer’s paradox and social class variation; notions of the anthropological ‘folklorist’ lone researcher described by Jackson, Schilling-Estes’ work on personal networks, and interactionally grounded approaches to identity and style (e.g. Schilling-Estes and Rampton).

Additionally, I build on my own research experiences in medical settings with socially diverse and geographically mobile communities, to explicate how identities are continually shaped and reshaped across contexts, and how interactional dynamics, rather than stable speaker characteristics or fixed locales, often drive linguistic practice.

The talk invites early career scholars to reconsider how dynamic social processes may elude conventional approaches to fieldwork and variationist analysis, and to reflect on what this might imply for their own methodological choices, analytical frameworks, and engagements with sociolinguistic data. 

References

Jackson, B., 1987, Fieldwork. University of Illinois Press

Labov, W., 1986 THE SOCIAL STRATIFICATION OF (r) IN NEW YORK CITY DEPARTMENT STORES, available @ https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/labov1986.pdf, accessed 20/04/26

Rampton, B., Fieldwork Methods in Language Variation, 2010, IN Wodak, R., Johnstone, B., and

Kerswill, P., 2010, The Sage Handbook of Sociolinguistics

Rickford, J., 2017, The Joy of Sociolinguistic Fieldwork, IN Mallinson, C., Childs, B., and Van Herk, V., 2017, Data Collection in Sociolinguistics, 2nd Edition.

Inhabiting the House of Fiction in the 21st Century

Starting from a brief exploration of past conceptualisations of the act of reading, this paper will then focus on our present and the ways in which we currently translate texts into meaning. Shifting from the Victorian conception of reading to Modernist and Postmodernist reading practices, it will approach the realm of distributed cognition. While the digital age has invited various forms of distant reading, also in the attempt to map the vast fields of world literature and popular literature, professional interpreters still get to grip with texts in their singularity, still enter into dialogue with them, following their inner compass. Of course, a new actor has appeared on stage – the AI, in the form of Chatbots that invite joint reflections, combining the ‘otherness’ of their cognitive processes with superhuman resources and a disarming readiness to collaborate. At this crucial juncture – in which new vistas are opening up and our agency needs to be re-negotiated within an expanding cognitive environment – we can strategically look backward – not in the name of nostalgia, but rather of awareness – in order to look forward. Knowing who we are is arguably an effective way to understand what we want to become.

Maurizio Ascari teaches English Literature at the University of Bologna (Italy). He has published books and essays on crime fiction (A Counter-History of Crime Fiction, 2007, nominated for the Edgar Awards), transcultural literature (Literature of the Global Age, 2011) and interart exchanges (Cinema and the Imagination in Katherine Mansfield’s Writing, 2014). His publications include an essay titled ‘The dangers of distant reading: reassessing Moretti’s approach to literary genres’ (Genre, 47.1, Spring 2014).

A case for theory and situated knowledge: Gender and Cultural Studies

What motivates scholars to choose a topic and an objective for their research? For some, the choice may be based on what is currently in vogue or most widely accepted in academia; for others, their academic interests are closely tied to their experiences and their situation as social subjects. Gender and Cultural Studies, which employ the analytical categories of “gender”, “sexuality”, “race”, “class”, are based on the theoretical premise of the socially situated nature of the subject of knowledge, one of the key insights of 20th-century thought. They take a critical stance towards the concept of Science with a capital ‘S’, that is, the myth of “Pure, Neutral, Universal Science”, as “all intellectual practices are rooted in a class position, whether consciously or not” (Christine Delphy 1981).

Although today they are often framed in the identity-based version of the “celebration of differences” and “diversity”, and thus co-opted by the institutional rhetoric of inclusivity, Women’s Studies, Gender Studies, as well as Black Studies and Critical Race Theory, have their roots in the political reflections arising from the major protest movements of the 1960s and the 1970s, which mounted a radical critique of the principal axes of oppression that structure the social system. 

This talk proposes to discuss the political and ethical dimensions in the study of culture, whether in its linguistic or literary aspects. It will also provide an overview of the various, often conflicting, theories developed over the last fifty years around the category of gender and the sex/gender dichotomy, now grouped under the umbrella term “gender studies”. In Jonathan Culler’s definition, “Theory is a critique of common sense, of concepts taken as natural” (1997), which implies an enquiry into the categories we use in our discursive practices. Once we grasp the theory, we will be able to ask different questions in our research, and we will be more aware of the implications of the questions we put to the object of our study.

STEFANIA ARCARA is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Catania, and Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Gender Studies “GENUS”. Her interests focus on feminist criticism, Gender and Cultural Studies, and Translation Studies. She has published in the areas of travel writing, early modern and Victorian literature, and 20th-century feminist writing. She has translated and edited literary works by 17th-century Quaker women, Victorian women travellers, Aphra Behn, Elizabeth Siddal, Oscar Wilde, Vita Sackville-West, Gertrude Stein, and political texts of 20th-century American feminism previously unpublished in Italy. 

She is Associate Investigator in the PRIN research project Between Text and Performance: Race and Gender in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (1970s-today).

She represents Italy on the International Editorial Board of Nouvelle Questions Féministes, the review founded by Simone de Beauvoir. 

Her recent publications include: 

-       “Feminists of All Languages Unite: Translation as Political Practice in the 1970s”, in The Routledge Handbook of Translation History (2022);

-       “Il bacio di Sally. Erotismo, lesbismo e femminismo in Mrs Dalloway di Virginia Woolf, in Critica del testo(2022);

-       “‘Nominare l’innominabile’: Pat Parker, poeta e militante del lesbofemminismo nero”, in Testo e performance. Razza e genere nelle letterature e culture anglofone dagli anni Settanta a oggi (2026).