Meaning-making Practices Research Articles

The contested politics of the atmospheric commons: a case study of a mothers’ group fighting particulate matter in South Korea

ABSTRACT This study contends that the politics of the commons framework is essential for identifying inherent political dynamics within atmospheric commons. It highlights boundary work and meaning-making practices as key components of commons politics and ultimately shapes the approach to management. To support this argument, the study presents a case of a South Korean social movement led by a mothers’ group, Call for Response to Particulate Matter. By engaging in boundary work and meaning-making practices to protect children’s health, the group successfully influenced national discourse and collaborated with the government. While this resulted in changes to Korean laws and policies related to PM pollution, the study reveals limitations that prevented the group’s scope and meaning from extending to broader origins of air pollution. Beyond commons management, attention to commons politics raises important questions about who advocates for the commons, who delineates boundaries, and the meanings attributed. Commons management is shaped by these boundaries and meanings, potentially excluding elements outside established boundaries that could aid broader social change or lifestyle adjustments.

Classroom work with literature in basic literacy and second language education for adults

This article examines classroom work with literature in the Swedish for Immigrants (SFI) programme in which adult migrants study Swedish at a basic level. The participants were a teacher and a group of students with limited previous education. The study explores practices that the participants applied during classroom work with an easy-to-read novel. The theoretical and analytical framework includes the four resources model, transactional theory and the concepts of translanguaging and embodied literacy practices. Data for the study were collected in a large action research and linguistic ethnography project by means of classroom observations and focus group conversations with teachers. Findings show that decoding and meaning-making practices were most prominent, while text-using and text-analysing practices were scarcer. Aesthetic reading and efferent reading were in different ways integrated with the different families of practice. Aesthetic reading was connected to multimodal aspects and embodied literacy practices. Efferent reading was found at many levels in the reading and was interconnected with all families of practice. Translanguaging practices often intersected with meaning-making practices.

Positive behavior support in school – a quasi-experimental mixed methods study and a randomized controlled trial

BackgroundWhile positive school climate is important for students’ well-being and mental health, school personnel may experience challenges in creating a nurturing school climate. School-Wide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (SW-PBIS) has shown positive effects on school climate and children’s prosocial behaviors, but fewer studies have been conducted in a European context.AimThis project aims to investigate the effectiveness of SW-PBIS program for students’ social-emotional skills and academic achievement as well as teachers’ and students’ perceptions of classroom learning environment. Furthermore, the study intends to evaluate how school-level factors mediate or moderate the effects of the intervention. In addition, the study includes a qualitative evaluation of the dynamic interaction processes that occur during program implementation in local school contexts.MethodsData on school- and individual-level measures are collected in intervention and control schools. With regard to challenges in retaining control groups over extended time periods, two waves of recruitment are used. In the first wave, an active control group is used and data are collected during three time points. In the second wave, a wait-list control group will be used and data will be collected during two time points during one school year. Hierarchical regression analyses will be conducted to explore the effects of SW-PBIS on the outcomes of the study. An ethno-methodological approach will be applied to provide a detailed examination of the social interactional and meaning-making practices of different school implementation teams, and the negotiation of normative expectations and rules of conduct in peer-teacher-student interactions in different classrooms.DiscussionThe study is expected to contribute to knowledge on the effects of the SW-PBIS program and how these effects may be mediated or moderated by school-level factors. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods to explore the significance of school contexts in the implementation of the SW-PBIS program constitutes the strength of the study. The challenge in the study is the extended period of implementation of SW-PBIS, which entails difficulties in retaining a control group over the required time period. Therefore, two waves of recruitment are used, encompassing different procedures of allocation to intervention or control group.Trial registrationClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT06270914 on the 22nd of February, 2024 (retrospectively registered).

‘Standing with Each Other’: Indigenous-Muslim Relation-Making on Turtle Island

Within the context of the northern part of Turtle Island, the space of relationships between Indigenous and Muslim communities is one intertwined within the history and geopolitical realities of settler-colonialism and immigration. This paper is an exploration of the theme of space, and relationship formation from the perspective of Muslim and Indigenous peoples in Canada who have engaged in building relations over the past two decades. This article is based on a wider qualitative semi-structured interview-based research project, supported by content analyses of existing literature and online resources produced by relevant organizations and initiatives. The research analysis has led me to thematically organize these spaces into four general types of spaces: 1) organization-led spaces of relationship building; 2) spaces of conviviality as pathways to relationship building; 3) relational spaces defined through acts of documentation; and 4) spiritually and emotionally bonded spaces that transcend a secular framework. This analysis led to identifying practices of relational meaning-making that form a preliminary understanding of what characterizes Indigenous-Muslim relations on Turtle Island.

QAnon and the Epistemic Communities of the Unreal: A Conceptual Toolkit for a Sociology of Grassroots Conspiracism

The messy politics of combating the COVID-19 pandemic, compounded by the confusion caused by the global (dis)infodemic, have propelled conspiracism from the fringes of society into the public mainstream. Despite the growing political impact of digitally enabled conspiracy theories, they are predominantly delegitimized on three fronts – as psychopathology, pseudoscience, and/or parapolitics. In contrast, this article employs three non-pathologizing conceptual counteroffers borrowed from critical theory, deconstructionist historiography, and citizenship studies – namely, cognitive mapping, narrative emplotment, and performative citizenship – to politicize conspiracy theorizing ‘from below’. Using QAnon as a case-in-point, the article introduces two novel concepts that invite a sociological approach to conspiracism: first, the epistemic communities of the unreal, which designates the participatory, interactive, and decentralized nature of collaboratively creating unreal explanations of the real world; and second, grassroots conspiracism, which denotes the ways in which these bottom-up, horizontal, and collective meaning-making practices and knowledge-production processes are expanding spaces of and for politics.

English as a ‘local’ language in Russia: the practice of meaning-making in in-group communication

The unprecedented global spread of the English language has become the catalyst for its transformation into the local meaning-making resource encoding the communication needs of various speech communities in different parts of the world. This dual process of globalization and localization is particularly evident in the Expanding Circle countries, where originally English had the status of a foreign language and was used primarily to communicate with foreigners. In Russia, which is one of the Expanding Circle countries, various aspects of “glocalization” of English, especially in the sphere of vocabulary, have attracted considerable attention. However, they have not been systemically studied, and our analysis aims to fill this gap. This paper describes the function of English as a language of in-group interaction in Russia. Taking a multiple case study approach and using a constant comparative technique, we reviewed our previous research on the use of English in different communities of practice, namely, the Russian offices of international companies, the young biking community, and the community of popular music professionals. We re-examined all previously collected material, including observational linguistic data and ethnographic interviews, and identified the following three features of English as a “local” language: truncated repertoire, bilingual creativity, or translanguaging, and ingroup-only function. We have also searched the Russian National Corpus for the frequency of several commonly used Anglicisms and English-derived tokens recorded from each community of practice. Based on the multiple case analysis and the Russian National Corpus study, we argue that English and Anglicisms are perceived by community members as an integral part of group repertoire, and group membership hinges on the knowledge of these terms and the ability to use them creatively.

At the intersection of multiliteracies and glocalisation: a case study in a university in Taiwan

ABSTRACT This study introduces a pedagogical framework incorporating multiliteracies, a new literacy concept proposed by the New London Group (1996, A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60–92. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.66.1.17370n67v22j160u), and glocalised marketing, the adaptation of marketing strategies to fit local markets, within an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) setting. The article first reviews ESP research that adopts a multimodal approach and outlines the main features of a multimodal pedagogical framework, which is then expanded to encompass a pedagogy of multiliteracies and glocalised marketing for an English for advertising and marketing curriculum. In doing so, the framework is further connected with disciplinary literacy, a subject-specific skill set combining knowledge construction and language communication that can be cultivated through the pedagogy. The study presents findings from multimodal projects and surveys completed by 28 university students from a university in Taiwan. Using case study analysis, the study investigates the effectiveness of the pedagogical framework in promoting multimodal meaning-making practices and assesses participants’ perceptions of the learning benefits of this approach. The study hopes to provide pedagogical insights for ESP teachers to cultivate learners’ communicative competence in a digitalised and globalised society.

Understanding Translanguaging in Multilingual Education

Translanguaging" has now become a buzzword in every multilingual educational setting, and everybody is eager to exhibit their understanding of it. This paper critically examines the concept of "translanguaging," whereby it identifies the two principal research approaches: "the fixed language approach" and "the fluid languaging approach." Its intention is to clarify the various readings accordingly. This review is helpful in the classification of how 'translanguaging' has been conceptualised within the pedagogy and as a practical theory of language. It classifies studies within the two using conceptual and empirical literature, offering a comprehensive understanding of the approaches. The findings reported here clearly indicate that "translanguaging" is unfolding as part of the meaning-making practices across multilingual classrooms in the Global North and South. Research shows that strategic use of the translanguaging pedagogy enhances learners' curriculum access by leveraging their linguistic repertoires. This review has implications for challenging monolingual ideologies, fostering social justice for marginalised communities, and sustaining teacher-learner relationships. Its review encourages further exploration in diverse linguistic settings while building on translanguaging's strengths as an extremely promising research and practice area for reshaping future language education.

Multimodal practices of unpacking and repacking subject-specific knowledge in CLIL physics and chemistry lessons

BackgroundDifferent school subjects have their specific meaning-making practices for building and conveying knowledge. Research drawing on the Semantics dimension of the Legitimation Code Theory has noted the importance of shifting between levels of abstraction and context-dependency in knowledge-building. There is a need to better understand how such shifting between different levels of abstraction is accomplished with multimodal resources in classroom interaction. AimsThis study aims at exploring subject-specific knowledge construction as a form of translanguaging, i.e., as movement between different registers and multimodal resources of meaning-making. DataThe data comes from a Finnish teacher development project aimed at supporting CLIL teachers' professional development. This exploratory study analyses teachers’ knowledge-building practices in two STEM lessons video-recorded in the project, Physics and Chemistry. MethodsThe data is analysed using multimodal conversation analysis and analysis of semantic waves. Analysis focuses on how the teachers engage in unpacking and repacking subject-specific knowledge by talking, gesturing, as well as displaying, handling, and modifying various kinds of multimodal materials and artefacts. ResultsThe teachers were found to use a versatile set of multimodal translanguaging practices for unpacking and repacking. The findings also indicate complexity in semantic waves due to multimodal resources accomplishing simultaneous shifts in semantic gravity and density, with either aligning or diverging functions. ConclusionsThe simultaneous use of different multimodal resources and their potential to serve different functions point to the need to acknowledge the multidimensionality of semantic waves. The multimodal translanguaging approach also has implications for conceptualising subject-specific knowledge-building as inherently multimodal.

Sociotechnical Imaginaries of Sharing and Emerging Postdigital Meaning-Making Practices in the Astronomy Community

For decades, science communities have had digital technology embedded in their everyday work. However, new research infrastructures are amplifying the presence and use of digital technologies for scientists. In that respect, radio astronomy is undergoing a major transformation causing the community to enter a phase of postdigital work, due to the construction of the most sensitive telescope, the Square Kilometer Array Observatory (SKAO), which scales the presence of digital technology and the amount of data generated. As new digital research infrastructure is set up, sociotechnical imaginaries—symbols and visions of a shared future—emerge, while others become obsolete thus impacting structures and practices of meaning-making. In this paper, we explore the disruptive potential of sociotechnical imaginaries and how astronomers using SKA pathfinder and precursor telescope data respond to these imaginaries and incorporate them into their meaning-making. The analysis shows that postdigital imaginaries related to data circulation, storage, archiving, and reuse have been amplified as SKA facilities and services are set up. Two changes are highlighted regarding a new postdigital condition within the astronomy community. Firstly, as astronomers engage in new postdigital forms of collaboration, they need to reach a consensus on what types of analyses to use by agreeing which methods are appropriate. This affects how scientific questions and research proposals are negotiated collectively, impacting the agency of astronomers. Secondly, as digital tools are increasingly part of astronomers’ daily work, they have to rely on new data analysis methods, which determine what evidence is uninteresting. Overall, these changes pose new questions regarding how meaning-making processes are altered and the way science is undertaken because of these new entanglements of human and non-human actors.

Mobilizing middlemen: the Conservative Political Action Conference and the creation of party activists

ABSTRACT How are activists molded into middlemen in a polarized two-party system? Using the case of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), this paper examines the process of activist mobilization that occurs at political gatherings. Using two rounds of interviews and participant observation from CPAC in 2019 and 2020, I argue that contrary to popular media portrayals of CPAC as political theater now rooted in the spectacle of President Trump, the conference is an important site of mobilizing activists into party middlemen. This happens through three processes: first conference attendees are taught conservative policy stances and presented with a bundle of issue positions; second, they are provided with the tools for effective activism formally through provided training and informally through socialization; and finally, their conservative identity is continually defined and reinforced with cultural meaning-making practices throughout the conference.

Research strength analysis, pedagogical components, and effectiveness of translanguaging: a systematic literature review

ABSTRACT This systematic literature review examined 61 empirical studies published from 2010 to 2022 on translanguaging. The review explored the trends and scientific strengths of the studies, the reported pedagogical components, and the affordances and challenges of translanguaging. 70.49% of the studies took place in elementary schools and in 65.57% in the U.S. contexts. The majority of the studies employed ethnographic methods (27.87%) to collect data. Only 37 of the reviewed papers endorsed translanguaging’s agenda of promoting equity and social justice. Our evaluation of the reviewed studies was generally favourable with strengths identified in researchers’ articulation of research context and theoretical frameworks, connections to existent literature, and methods of data collection. However, data analysis in certain studies did not contain adequate information regarding how themes, concepts, and categories were derived from data, and data were not presented in a way that enables readers to judge the range of evidence being used. Adopting thematic analysis, the systematic literature review identified 11 major pedagogical components of pedagogical translanguaging and the affordances and challenges of both pedagogical and spontaneous translanguaging. The paper ends with recommendations for future research and pedagogical innovations that aim to buttress bilingual and multilingual students’ fluid meaning-making practices.

Bite-sized language teaching in the digital wild: Relational pedagogy and micro-celebrity English teachers on Instagram

While ‘social media influencers’ have predominantly been studied in marketing and advertising, there has been an increase in language teachers' engagement in content creation on social media platforms. Informed by the principles of relational pedagogy (Kern, 2015, 2018), the present study explores how a group of Turkish teachers of English (n = 10) each with over 100,000 followers on Instagram navigate around the material, social, and individual multimodal semiotic resources to create English language teaching content. The data sources which include reels from teachers' public accounts and netnographic fieldwork notes were analyzed informed by the principles of social semiotics (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001). The findings revealed that the teachers create digital artefacts relying on creative relationships between words, contexts, and situations and provide opportunities to practice simple conversations, learn vocabulary in context, and distinguish nuances in the pronunciation of challenging words. The multimodal meaning-making practices demonstrate how social, material, and individual affordances shape, reframe, or recontextualize linguistic meanings in various forms. These findings highlight the facilitative power of social media for noticing linguistic forms, interaction, participation, and multimodal communication with important implications for teacher education, identity, and professional development in the evolving landscape of language teaching in the digital wild.

Contemporary Ritual: Teyyam and the Creation of Its Epistemic World

This article examines the various interpretations of teyyam, a ritual of North Kerala, arguing that new meaning-making practices and fresh experiences of teyyam continue to reinvent the ritual even as it references tradition. We study the meaning-making process through three main modes of understanding: origin stories, the politics of textualisation and performance, and an analysis of contemporary forms of circulation. We draw from these modes of meaning-making to conclude that teyyam functions as a floating signifier gathering possibilities as well as constraints. Furthermore, despite ritual’s close relationship with tradition, ritual is amenable to continuous reinvention due to the inherent adaptability of tradition.

Creative Interpretation and the Politics of Failure

Abstract In this article, I ask what happens to theatrical performance when it fails. By describing a performance as “failed,” I do not necessarily imply its normative dismissal – as a “flawed” enactment or an artistic vision not properly executed. Instead, I use failure as a conceptual starting point for the articulation of alternative meaning-making practices. In this sense, failure is a form of creative interpretation that capitalizes on performance’s constitutive contingency, its structural unreliability that for many is part of its appeal, the very “magic” only a gathering of live bodies can create. Specifically, the article looks at two recent US American plays and one musical in order to discuss the theatrical politics of failure: Moisés Kaufman and Tectonic Theater Project’s The Laramie Project (2000), Ayad Akhtar’s The Who and the What (2014), and Dave Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 (2012). By discussing the ways in which these pieces and their performances creatively address failure, I point to three formal and cultural dimensions in which failure can be mobilized theatrically: first, failure problematizes the easy formal subsumption of performance under production, pointing to the ways in which a specific performance may not adequately actualize the conceptual work of the production, be it because audiences intervene in ways not intended by the production or because performers deviate from the production’s script in one way or another. Second, failure can be mobilized to reveal tacit cultural conventions or standards of success that entrench particular (classist, racist, sexist, ableist, etc.) normative behaviors. And third, failure can enable more creative approaches to the relationship between the labor of theater practitioners and its exchange value for spectators, who paid – at least – the price of a theater ticket and typically expect some form of artistic professionalism as remuneration.

Radical design praxis and the problematics of intent

ABSTRACT This article explores counter-design as a radical meaning-making practice for community co-design. Radicalism, here, is an ongoing process of complicating and unsettling daily practices to reveal and thus acknowledge socio-political context. Semiotic analysis of ethnographic research with grassroots organisations is taken as the point of departure to understand how communities co-design meaning, and in turn how we might co-design new meanings through countering. Through counter-design in place, we observe small semiotic moments that problematise the rhetoric of horizontal democratic organising amongst the realities of coercion and power asymmetries. These semiotic moments are thus significant for how they reveal the reproduction of meaning and how this constructs, and can subsequently limit, the possible actions for these communities. In this sense, our approach constitutes a design praxis, through which we analyse what it means to employ countering against existing institutional power, both for our participants and for ourselves as designers. Here, we reveal the tenuousness of (designer/ly) intent in relation to and in combination with the artifice of readymade community designs, as these are shaped by work ‘on the ground’ and consider how this might impact the co-creation of democratic communities.

Making time: Knitting as temporal-material entanglement

This article presents data from interviews with amateur knitters to explore the temporal-material entanglements which constitute meaning-making in everyday life, and the potential of thinking with knitting to better understand these entanglements. It follows three strands which reflect different aspects of the temporal-material in how knitting comes to matter for amateur makers. Firstly, knitters discuss the threads to and from the past which recursively shape their ongoing thinking and feeling about their craft. Secondly, temporal dimensions entwine with the material as participants describe the process of turning threads into a knitted surface. Thirdly, participants’ experiences of un-making and re-making, and the role of ‘stash’, challenge unilinear models of both time and meaning. Thinking with knitting not only re-opens ways of understanding it as a significant meaning-making practice in the present, it also dynamically re-connects us to the past and offers ways of re-imagining the future and how we make this together.

(Un)doing regimentation in reflexive practices: on-site processes of sociolinguistic differentiation – a commentary

Abstract This article discusses Volume 42(6) where the editors (Gilles Merminod and Raymund Vitorio) push for a metapragmatic approach to reflexive practices of sociolinguistic differentiation. With reference to my own trajectory, I review this lens as suitable to accounting for how people affectively take part in the making of difference and similarities between signs, social situations and positions in daily meaning-making practices and the larger inequalities that these practices may contribute to sustain and interrogate. In doing so, I focus on story-telling templates in professional communication, citizenship narratives in research interviews, English-oriented forms of self-evaluation in the workplace and ritualised instances of self-presentation in interaction and evaluations of others’ self-presentation in networking events as indexical signs that articulate a range of moralised meanings and categories of “ideal” versus “non-ideal” social persona upon which arrangements of social life and work get (re)instituted. I also discuss the socioeconomic hierarchies and forms of distinction that such arrangements (re)produce in different settings. Finally, I suggest further epistemological avenues for research exploring linkages across events and for following more closely the consequences that such events have for certain people, with attention to existing disciplinary synergies (and social theories) within and beyond the language disciplines.

From boundaries to entangled story lines: untangling young people’s material and immaterial storied practices

ABSTRACT In this article, we consider the notion of entangled stories to account for ways that young people assemble stories in generative ways. We draw on Tim Ingold’s theorising of lines, movement, and storied knowledge to account for the visible/material and invisible/immaterial entanglements that happen when young people design multimodal storied worlds and illustrate these entanglements through three school projects in Canada, Norway, and Chile. Literacy studies and the learning sciences have made important contributions to understanding the complexities of meaning-making practices with digital technologies across formal and informal contexts. Yet, there is still work to be done to describe, extrapolate, and theorise digital-material practices and trajectories that young people engage in when they design and craft multimodal compositions.

Critical ethnography and its others: Entanglement of matter/meaning/madness.

Beginning with a critical examination of the humanist assumptions of critical ethnography, this article interrogates and surfaces problems with the ontological and epistemological orientations of this research methodology. In drawing on exemplar empirical data from an arts-based project, the article demonstrates the limitations in the humanist-based qualitative research approach and advances a postdualist, postrepresentationalist direction for critical ethnography called entangled ethnography. Using data from a larger study that examined the perspectives of racialized mad artists, what is demonstrated in this inquiry is that the entanglement of bodies, objects, and meaning-making practices is central to working with the ontologically excluded, such as those who find themselves in various states of disembodiment and/or corporeal and psychic distribution. We propose the redevelopment of critical ethnography, extended by entanglement theory (a critical posthuman theory), and suggest that for it to be an inclusive methodology, critical ethnography must be conceptualized as in the process of becoming and always in regeneration, open to critique, extension, and redevelopment.