Exploring the fluidity of communicative repertoires in online and offline contexts of mobility: a case of four Algerian academic sojourners in the UK

Taibi, Hadjer (2022) Exploring the fluidity of communicative repertoires in online and offline contexts of mobility: a case of four Algerian academic sojourners in the UK. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

This study looks at the impact of mobility on the online and offline use and emergence of the communicative repertoires of four Algerian PhD students in the UK. It falls within the new paradigm of the sociolinguistics of mobility that seeks to shift the focus from attention to ‘codes’ to analysis of speakers’ growing and expanding ‘repertoires’ (Badwan and Hall, 2020; Pennycook, 2018; Canagarajah, 2013). In this paradigm, the complex process of communication goes beyond fixed, unitary entities of named languages and speakers fluidly deploy a range of linguistic and non-linguistic repertoires in order to make meaning. Following this line of thinking seems to offer a more inclusive and expansive approach to communication that captures the human (identity, ideology, language histories and trajectories) (Blommaert and Backus, 2011) and the post-human (the affordances created by digital platforms) (Pennycook, 2018) and leads to a collage of communicative repertoires that besides language can include a wide range of semiotic resources (Rymes, 2014). Through going beyond the offline and considering the online use of the communicative repertoires, this study responds to calls within the field to study the interaction between online and offline communication (Blommaert, 2016). To meet the aims of this research, data was collected through ethnographic interviews and online observation and analyzed using a combination of Androutsopoulos’s (2013, 2015) “online ethnography” approach and thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006). In online and offline interactions, participants re-negotiated and deconstructed their communicative repertoires into new and emerging ones. Findings render the online/offline distinction less relevant and suggest that the impact of mobility on the communicative repertoires of participants can be understood through an on-going process of repertoires’ construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction that unfolds within time and across space. This process offers a theoretical and a methodological lens through which communicative repertoires can be studied. By foregrounding the diversity, complexity and fluidity of languaging practices in the lives experiences of mobile individuals, this study challenges discourses of linguistic fixity which could produce mechanisms of othering, essentialism, and exclusion, as well a raise serious concerns for social justice (Piller, 2015; Badwan, 2021a). As such, the study provides a roadmap for widening the scope of relevance when researching language in motion; one that embraces fluidity, online/offline integration, and inclusion. Moreover, the study has important pedagogical implications such as calling for re-thinking the notion of ‘linguistic competence’ and normalizing fluid linguistic practices in teaching, learning and researching in Higher Education.