This article analyzes conversational and material data collected during 12 months of fieldwork at a secondary school in southeast Spain. I focus on the cultivation of stance positions—particularly around gender equality—involving “shadow subjects”: imagined discursive figures that both prompt and constrain empathy for others whose rights have been violated. Within this multicultural context, Moroccan immigrant youth get positioned as defenders of outdated patriarchal mores. I argue that the semiotic burdening and elaboration of stance on behalf of shadow subjects makes this possible and points to inherent biases in operationalizing “universal” egalitarian values among ideologically and experientially diverse communities.
The article examines smartphone use among Middle Eastern refugee families recently resettled in northern New Jersey as an opportunity to reconceptualize the language barrier during the early stages of refugee resettlement. Smartphone access and use among families reveal the interlinguistic conditions of life in resettlement, and ethnographic research demonstrates the way a tech‐savvy population, conventionally considered “digitally unprepared,” creatively approaches communication. We explore smartphones as tools of translanguaging: a strategy in which speakers “mesh” and weave linguistic repertoires together. Qualitative research upends the idea of a language barrier as final or surmountable only through formal language instruction. Instead, smartphones offer multimodal communicative strategies with pragmatic and affective dimensions. We argue that refugees’ own culturally specific interactional norms and priorities can be revalorized within host societies as foundations for linguistic and social integration.
This article examines naturally occurring speech among participants in a young women's halaqa, or study circle, at a mosque in the southwest United States to detail how "tactics of linguistic objectification" provide anchor points for ethical negotiations of difference. By focusing on linguistic micro-practices, including codeswitching and mock "foreign" accents, this paper brings a linguistic anthropological approach to bear upon this inquiry into discourse as a mode of phronesis. It is argued that, during informal conversation, core members of this group of largely second-generation immigrant women highlighted features of non-native English speech to monitor, examine, and mediate their own and their families' hypervisibility as U.S. Muslims. As policy and public opinion paint a picture of Muslims as an existential threat to the west, these women's language use, narratives and laughter act as ingroup responses to social scrutiny that makes acknowledgement and normalization of Muslim difference obligatory. This article is published as part of a collection on discourse studies.
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