Abstract
ABSTRACTThis paper seeks to address the question how people go about intercultural differences in an institutional setting which aims to mediate between the socio-legal system and the ‘outsiders’ of the system, i.e. ordinary citizens, through an investigation of professional interactions between a legal advisor and her clients of Eastern European backgrounds in London. Drawing data from a linguistic ethnography, the analysis foregrounds the practice of resemiotisation and calibration. The second aim is to extend the notion of ‘intercultural moments’ and to explore its analytical benefits in understanding fleeting and seemingly mundane moments in encounters.
Highlights
This article investigates intercultural moments in interactions between an advisor and her clients in a legal advice centre for Eastern Europeans in London
Using the concept of the intercultural moments, we explore the question of how people go about intercultural differences in an institutional setting which aims to mediate between the socio-legal system and the ‘outsiders’ of the system, i.e. ordinary citizens
What makes linguistic ethnography appealing in our case is that it sees interactions as social actions, shaping the context while at the same time being shaped by the context, congruent to our epistemological realism stance on culture
Summary
Through examining sequences of intercultural moments where different levels of expertise on the subject matter under discussion are negotiated turn by turn, Bolden made the case for an ‘interactionally sensitive, emic view’ of intercultural communication and argued that what makes an interaction intercultural is the way interactants orient to differences in their cultural and linguistic knowledges. In terms of institutional practices, the advisors’ roles are to translate clients’ personal narratives into institutionally relevant facts, to fit people into numbers, categories and boxes in forms and to turn spoken words into writing This way of working is a process of resemiotisation, where different semiotics including talk, writing, technology, etc, are chained together We will focus on the roles of a legal advisor in working with clients, and her skills of translating and humanising the system
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