Soundings and the Politics of Sociolinguistic Listening for Transnational Space

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In a world dominated by the visual, this book presents how a focus on the sounded experience and acts of listening may carve a way to reformulate emerging publics, create space for critical multilingual engagement and deepen recognition of emancipatory practices. Examining the emerging logics and rhythms among a group of post-EU accession UK Polish migrants, this book focuses on the semiotic processes through which contemporary moving bodies and communities place themselves in sociolinguistic landscapes. It considers how they develop metrics to account for sociolinguistic change and authenticate their projects and practices in transnational timespace. In doing so, the book brings power differentials to the centre of language and objectivity debates and foregrounds material semiotics as an approach that enables a new collective potential and redefinition of sociolinguistic listening. By connecting research on scale in migration contexts with studies of embodied soundwork and of stance in semiotics, this book highlights how a focus on the sounded sign may bring us closer to the ways in which bodies and meanings are (re)made, and collective doing and thinking are formed in the globalised world.

Reviews

In this highly innovative and well-researched book, Kozminska brings new, brilliant insights into the sociolinguistics of globalisation. Through the prism of Polish recent graduates and young professionals in the UK, she demonstrates the dynamic enmeshing of language and positionality in transnational spaces. -- Adam Jaworski, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Beautifully written, cogently argued, and politically engaged, this book is a ground-breaking contribution to sociolinguistics. It is a theoretical and analytical tour de force that forces the reader to completely reconsider the notions of sounding/listening in relation to mobility from a material semiotic perspective. A must read! -- Tommaso M. Milani, Pennsylvania State University, USA

Author Bio

Kinga Kozminska is Lecturer in the School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication at Birkbeck, University of London.