Volunteer tourism is one of the latest branches of the ever expanding globalised tourism. The initiative Workaway, an expression of this trend, was established in the late 90s with the aim of promoting "cultural understanding between different peoples and lands throughout the world". The figure of the workawayer as a new cosmopolitan subjectivity started to take shape. With the growth of the tourism industry, the Workaway scheme has started to be of interest also to tourism entrepreneurs, especially in the global peripheries such as northern Lapland, home to the indigenous minority language community of the Sámi. By signing up as a volunteer in a heritage tourism resort, the workawayer, the cultural adventurer, becomes linked up to the network of the globalised new economy. Drawing on aspects of governmentality studies, discourse studies and ethnographic approaches, this study traces the translocal formation of the figure of the workawayer through two crucial technologies of subjectification: the Internet portal workaway.info and the actuality of everyday work in a Sámi heritage tourist resort in northernmost Finnish Lapland. Although the Workaway initiative positions itself as non-capitalist if not anti-capitalist, the study shows how the workawayer is gradually shaped to meet the requirements of the contemporary neoliberal world of work. If Workaway offers new languages and cultures with a flavour of romanticised multiculturalism, in the tourist resort actual encounters are governed by straightforward market rationality. Here, languages are valued as skills among others, but not above others, since ultimately "you don't necessarily need any language for money transactions".
This study investigates the shifting terrain of pride, profit and power relations in minority language communities under contemporary globalisation. While "pride" associates linguistic-cultural heritage with identity and preservation, "profit" views these as sources of economic gain. In contemporary late capitalism, "pride" seems to be increasingly giving way to "profit". Arguing that this transformation needs to be interrogated in terms of complexity and that a detailed, multilayered semiotic analysis can open a privileged window for such an inquiry, this study combines critical multimodal discourse analysis and an ethnographic approach to analyse processes of semiotic commodification in handicraft production in the indigenous minority language community of the Sámi in northern Lapland. The investigation focuses on the activities of an innovative Sámi artist and entrepreneur, and within these a range of paper notebooks, which are, although designed by the Sámi artist and sold in her handicraft shop in Lapland, produced by women living at the border of Thailand and Laos. The investigation illuminates two critical shifts: how the move towards profit can open up space to contest the ownership of pride within an ethnic community. Second, how this move makes way for new, globalised modes of production of 'indigenous handicrafts' and creates global vectors of power, engaged in both empowerment and exploitation, in the production of both pride and profit. The study thereby contributes to the understanding of the increasingly complex power relations and the ambivalence and multiple effects of practices constituting the apparent shift from "pride" to "profit".
The diversification of the media has opened up new spaces for performances that seek not only to evoke laughter but also to voice social critique. One example of this development is the TV comedy show Märät säpikkäät/Njuoska bittut, created by two young women belonging to the indigenous Sámi people living in Finland, in Northern Europe. This paper focuses on one particularly critical sketch in the show: a counter parody of a popular parody of the Sámi presented by two Finnish male comedians. The original sketch was a parody of ethnicity. As they strike back, however, the female presenters consciously foreground the categories of gender and class, thereby introducing a completely new figure: a white, urban, underclass woman. In this paper we draw on intersectionality and indexicality to analyse this multidimensional performance and its intertextual links to the original sketch. We ask, what do these insurgent discursive practices mean in terms of critique, what do they do under cover of laughter?
While interest in affective processes has led to an affective turn in cultural studies, in sociolinguistics this perspective has been given less attention. This study takes up the ‘lens of affect’ and directs it on two cases exemplifying the circulation of minoritised languages in new media spaces: music video covers from two minority-language contexts, Irish and Sámi, uploaded on YouTube. Combining recent theorising on affect with insights from sociolinguistic research, the study investigates how the YouTube users’ affective investments contribute to a (re)evaluation of the two minoritised languages, their speakers, and the related ethnic/national belongings, and how these investments are expressions of more or less banal nationalism, connected to the colonial histories of Ireland and Finland. The study illustrates how the social media operate as a catalyst of affective investments involved in an ethnolinguistic (re)ordering of languages and their speakers, at the intersection of ‘banal globalisation’ and ‘everyday nationalism’. (Minority languages, affect, discourse, social media, nationalism)*
In the introduction to the special issue “Languaging the worker: globalized governmentalities in/of language in peripheral spaces”, we take up the notion of governmentality as a means to interrogate the complex relationship between language, labor, power and subjectivity in peripheral multilingual spaces. Our aim here is to argue for the study of governmentality as a viable and growing approach in critical sociolinguistic research. As such, in this introduction, we first discuss key concepts germane to our interrogations, including the notions of governmentality, languaging, peripherality and language worker. We proceed to map out five ethnographically and discourse-analytically informed case studies. These examine diverse actors in different settings pertaining to the domain of work. Finally we chart how the case studies construe the issue of languaging the worker through a governmentality frame.
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