Videos by William Kelleher
Video presented in the context of the SMUS conference on spatiality and discursive mapping.
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Papers by William Kelleher
Assessing creativity in technology-mediated language tasks
The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Computer-Assisted Language Learning
This entry examines the conceptions, applications and assessment of creativity in technology-medi... more This entry examines the conceptions, applications and assessment of creativity in technology-mediated language teaching (TMLT). It focuses in on the “3P” creativity model of person, process, and product, the interaction of language and technology, and questions of task and result. A practical assessment checklist for creativity in learning and teaching is proposed in order to integrate questions of learner and educator roles, pedagogy and technology.
Multiplex tactics and involvement in small storytelling: a case study from the global South
Signs and Society, 2025
https://doi.org/10.1017/sas.2025.5
This article examines some characteristics and functions of m... more https://doi.org/10.1017/sas.2025.5
This article examines some characteristics and functions of multiplex tactics in small storytelling. It uses a case-study based on three long informal interviews with a participant from the Gauteng, South Africa. Analysis and discussion raise questions of conversational resources and involvement, and thereby of a critical understanding of creativity and cooperation in interactional doing being. Multiplex tactics produce effects on several levels of interactional and discursive organisation simultaneously: signalling participative and narrative framing, footing and stance, whilst also effecting story entry and exit, or providing
coherence between storied elements, for example. Multiplexity is a resource for accessing intersubjective meaning-making and narrative co-construction. Furthermore, it contributes to the vast body of work on indexicality and discourse marking. The article focuses on the creative, affective, and evolutive nature of involvement in interactional work.
A corpus of Stories by members of civil society in Rennes, Bretagne, France
Journal of Open Humanities Data, 2024
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.244
In this paper, we present the data from ‘Ce qui nous co... more DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.244
In this paper, we present the data from ‘Ce qui nous concerne’ (‘What matters to us’), a participative narrative ethnographic research project with civil society organisations in Rennes, France. The data cover a growing corpus of research interviews that are collected with different civil society associations. The data are archived in the Nakala multimodal platform and on an open-access library on the Rennes 2 University WorkAdventure platform. The interviews dataset includes images, .mp3 audio files, transcription text files and rendered versions of the participant stories that make up the interview. The data can be reused for reference, further analysis, and for collaborative initiatives.
Language & Ecology, 2024
Journal web page: https://www.ecolinguistics-association.org/Journal
This article presents findi... more Journal web page: https://www.ecolinguistics-association.org/Journal
This article presents findings from participative small stories narrative research with civil society organisations in Rennes, France. The aim is to explore ecosophical narratology and, thereby, the adoption of ecosophical practices. Rennes has a long history of inclusive politics and civil society engagement which encourages positive discourse analysis and purposive change through research initiatives. 'Ce qui nous concerne' ('What matters to us') is a longitudinal ethnographic project that is in the process of transcribing and collecting Rennes civil society stories as a corpus on the Huma-Num Nakala multimodal corpus platform. The project team is also currently in the process of developing an open-access interactive library on the Rennes 2 University WorkAdventure 2D collaborative platform. The project aims to accompany emancipatory pedagogic practices grounded on co-tellings and re-tellings. This article explores a purposive sample of three stories from the corpus in order to shed light on the linguistic and narrative work that each accomplishes, and the opportunities that each presents for ecosophical workshops and societal change. An ecosophical narratology inverts canonical story arcs, replacing individual overcoming by what Haraway would term "nets" of earthbound multispecies flourishing and imagining, privileging the role of the environment in narrative moment and resolution, timescale and indexicality. Importance is thus given to earth-centred language and process rather than event. Through these stories, associative practices are both recounted and materialised, contributing to social and environmental justice.
Kelleher, W., & Bays, H. (2022). Place-making narrative data: management issues in the context of Open Science and Data Curation in France. Journal of Open Humanities Data, 8(12), 1-13. doi: https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.75, 2022
The word Place designates both a space and an architecture, a sequential organisation or, by deri... more The word Place designates both a space and an architecture, a sequential organisation or, by derivation, an act or an attribution. Between French and English there is a play of hyper- and hyponymy. In French the word [plas] refers to a specific configuration of street and open area (a square) but in English the word ['pleɪs] is less specific, and, in the writings of Massey or de Certeau, comes to refer to the subjective and biographic investment of urban form. The ties to place that people make through lived experience can be opposed to processes of expatriation and transplantation that affect anglophones in France. The narrative research project, Places, wishes to investigate these processes through interviews that take place in an outside location chosen by participants. Such spaces, become, in so doing, an interface between the biographies of participants and their new conditions of socialisation, revealing the tactics that participants rely upon to communicate, to integrate the city and to acquire new ways of being. Given that the participants to the research are expatriated anglophones who have primarily come to France for work reasons, a significant focus of the project is on the business community and the role of English within that community.
The experience of expatriation, with the juxtaposition that it introduces between a country of departure and a country of arrival, leads to a sort of biographic superposition where acts and instincts (the hexis) are no longer endowed with their original meaning, and, instead, are either under- or overdetermined. Similarly, affective relationships such as those of the family, of friendships or of acquaintance undergo rupture. The familiar comes apart and reveals interstices in the social and spatial constitution of the self. Finally, the stories that one tells others, or that one uses to structure one’s experiences for oneself, sustain changes in their linguistic, interactional and performative matrix. Narrative research is a productive avenue for the study of expatriation because the narrative act is also an ontological act (Baynham, Georgakopoulou) that is revealing for those who have been unrooted or displaced and who, perhaps, also recall or reminisce about other places and cities that are no longer present.
The project Places raises the issue of the creation of locality (Appadurai) and of anglophone communities of practice. If one takes a city like Paris, its centre has two million inhabitants of which twenty-four thousand are native English speakers. The greater Paris urban area has twelve million inhabitants of which over two million are foreign nationals and sixty thousand are English speakers. This means that one person in six in the metropole speaks a language other than French, and that one in thirty of those people is a native English speaker. Likewise, in a region like Brittany, which is linked to England and Ireland through geographic position and sea routes, in Rennes the British community makes up nearly 15% of foreign residents. There is also a strong community of people from anglophone Africa. Within these communities, socialisation leads to new linguistic varieties and styles.
In turning to public space at the time of measures imposed by COVID-19, the project hopes, furthermore, to foreground the very conditions of our socialisation in urban settings. Public space has come to represent the most important constraints of our era: quarantine, distancing, dematerialised forms of work and the lacks and failings that are linked to age, gender, education and illness. Public places in the city provoke ruptures and breaks that correspond to the demarcations of neighbourhood, city and metropolitan area. These demarcations are in turn relevant to the categories of resident, visitor or worker and relationships of service, hierarchy, friendship, frequentation, habit, diffidence and even mistrust. Concretely, through interviews, accounts and documentation, project Places hopes to allow a better understanding of the overlapping of different tactics used by the participants to the research. It is a biographical and an autobiographical project because both lead researchers are, themselves, expatriates. The data hopes to bring to light ways of doing being, reconstruction of affective links, communicational needs or simply the tactics by which participants invest their new surroundings with meaning through motifs, classifications or the activities with which they are involved.
Finally, with respect to the world of business and the socio-cultural work that is wrought by companies, project Places contributes a study of another significant community. One can note that of the 10 million employees in 120 large French groupings, over 15% are foreign personnel. Similarly, French multinationals employ over six million French nationals overseas, of which a high proportion in anglophone environments.
Throwing a light on oral narrative data in order to inform language and literacy research
Journal for Language Teaching, Special issue 2022 - Festschrift for Adelia Carstens, 2022
Download link: https://doi.org/10.56285/jltVol56iss2a5169
Co-authored with Andries Masenge, Univ... more Download link: https://doi.org/10.56285/jltVol56iss2a5169
Co-authored with Andries Masenge, University of Pretoria
Narrative methodologies are valuable to language and literacy research. Oral narratives told in situations of face-to-face interaction are used in research methodologies and in scaffolding pedagogic activities. Nevertheless oral narratives often present limiting cases in which narrative accounts are less easily distinguishable from other genres such as interrogative, expository, descriptive or argumentative accounts. The resulting confusion around genre has an impact on data selection and weighing and thereby on how narrative is mobilised in research and in pedagogic situations. This paper presents the results of a corpus-based statistical investigation into the interactional features of oral narrative accounts collected during academic literacy interviews. Common claims made about narratives, such as that they are structurally differentiated, that they rely on more turns at talk or that they are a
unique manner of presenting discrete experiences are not supported in a straightforward way in the corpus data. Narratives do promote more involvement, self-reference, complex embeddings and constructed dialogue. Conversely they are less frequent, less on task and are more consistently aligned with their context. In language and literacy research these findings suggest a need to reflect on the relationship between types of participant response, types of solicitation and allocated response times. The study contributes to differentiating discourse types more accurately and emphasises the particularities of oral narrative interaction.
Digital media, the body and agency in a South African education institution from the perspective of narrative research
The Journal for Transdisciplinary Research in Southern Africa, 2020
Download link: http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/td.v16i1.859
In developing countries, digital media h... more Download link: http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/td.v16i1.859
In developing countries, digital media have created uneven nexuses of literacy, power and societal adjustment. Whilst literacy and power have been the subject of much research in South Africa, often supporting a conception of digital media as a resource (the access to and advantages of specific devices or applications), this study also sought to reflect on personal and societal change as bodily and ontological experience. The aim was to contribute to redefining what the digital media represents in education, and to do so through an exploration of the journey of a tertiary education student who used digital media to negotiate his academic and interpersonal environment. This constituted a local, ethnographic investigation into digital media through the narrative analysis of a series of accounts told by the participant over 2 years. The accounts were firstly examined in terms of the three axes of gesture, gaze and audition, and instrumentalisation. These three axes had resulting implications for conceptions of digital media as resource or as bodily and ontological experience. The agentive implications of the accounts were then discussed in terms of the same three axes in order to question orality and community, gestural experimentation, embedding and the co-constitution of the human and the technical. The findings were that digital media engage the body and that aspects of one’s being in the world, such as culture, community and disorders such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), can fundamentally inform and transform what digital media mean and how we interact with them.
Interstitial stories in Sandton, Gauteng, South Africa
Stellenbosch papers in linguistics PLUS, 2022
Download link: https://doi.org/10.5842/64-1-853
Interstices are those residual, left-over, spa... more Download link: https://doi.org/10.5842/64-1-853
Interstices are those residual, left-over, spaces associated with movement across and between urban forms. Interstices in the business district of Sandton, Gauteng, South Africa, represent the insurgence of the lower levels in the vertical push of the high-rise offices, luxury hotels and retail spaces of the district. In interstitial spaces encounters and interactions are often fleeting and contingent. There is a discontinuity of social space. Links between people are spread out over the grid of the city, disassembled and reassembled as people leave their homes, move through different transport nodes to different destinations in the district and there, in turn, continue and discontinue their trajectory. Interstitial stories capture a reticular activity that binds people together through movement and space. In terms of narrative research, interstitial stories, a type of ‘small’ story, offer particularities that concern the intersection of the spatiality and temporality of the real and diagetic worlds, linguistic representational means and social consequentiality. The aim of this article is to explore interstitial stories, as an instantiation of small stories research and as a local storytelling practice, through three extracts that represent three different configurations of space and time: superposed spatialities, temporal and spatial identity, and movement in telling trajectory. In analysing these stories, this article hopes to shed further light on the role that narrative plays in our daily lives and interactions, bringing out local conditions and linguistic repertoires in the global South. Interstices emerge as challenging, cooperative and familiar, and, in contradistinction to what their name could imply, a strong resource for identity construction.
A linguistic ethnography of geomapped small stories: Semiotic landscape and narrative interaction
Sociolinguistic Studies, 2020
Download link: https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.38904
This paper explores a conjoint analysis of n... more Download link: https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.38904
This paper explores a conjoint analysis of narrative interactional data and of artefacts of the
semiotic landscape (SL). The data form part of a linguistic ethnography of Sandton, a site
in the Gauteng, South Africa. Sandton is a district of business and conspicuous
consumption, with a wealth gap between it and neighbouring urban areas. The discussion
of the paper focuses on two youth participants ‘born free’ in the 90s, after the end of
Apartheid. Analysis is conducted from the perspective of discourse. A geosemiotic
approach to the SL involves the discourse cycles of social actor, interaction order, place
semiotics and visual semiotics. Narrative positioning analysis is a means of accessing
participant orientation to macro discourses and processes and, here, is concerned with the
interactional co-construction of a small story. The bringing into dialogue of these two
frameworks is made possible by plotting participant interactions against the space of the
site using global positioning system (GPS) technology. The paper aims to investigate
geomapping as one way in which interactional data and SL data can complement each
other, and to do so in relation to participants whose cohort is so pivotal to understanding
the present societal conjuncture and the deep socio-economic rifts in South Africa.
https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.38904
For an ecological critical approach: sociolinguistics in the shadow of climate change // Pour une approche critique écologique : la sociolinguistique à l’ombre du changement climatique
The Mouth: Critical studies on language, culture and society, 2020
Download link: https://themouthjournal.com/issue-no-6/
This article wishes to comment on how s... more Download link: https://themouthjournal.com/issue-no-6/
This article wishes to comment on how sociolinguistics considers ecology and climate change and offers research axes and a case study to allow a deeper con-
sideration. The discussion looks at some recent publications and then explores reasons for the delay, in the field of sociolinguistics, in incorporating ecological issues. Four axes for reflection are proposed: structural relativism, critical discourse analysis, a longer narrative timeframe, and materiality. They prompt a reorientation of research projects towards the inclusion of data from the environmental sciences, and to publishing of results in forums other than those of the humanities. These axes are then applied to a story about the relocation of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, told by the Exchange’s previous Chairman. This story, which has a biographical aspect, also involves considerations of Johannesburg’s geology, water, vegetation and the place and logic of the new business district, Sandton, to which the Exchange migrated.
Narrative iteration and place in a Johannesburg tavern
Journal of postcolonial linguistics, 2020
Download link: https://iacpl.net/journal-of-postcolonial-linguistics-22020/
This article explo... more Download link: https://iacpl.net/journal-of-postcolonial-linguistics-22020/
This article explores how the retelling of a story, or narrative iteration, intersects with place. Data are collected through ethnographic participant observation and consist of a series of seven retellings, and thirteen auxiliary stories. The situation of telling changes from being one-on-one with the researcher to group tellings in a tavern called The Brazen Head in Johannesburg, South Africa. Following Bamberg’s article on twice-told tales (Bamberg 2008), iteration is approached in terms of thematic, structural, interactional and discursive criteria and these criteria serve to compare the series of retellings. Analysis concerns changes in thematic progression, distribution of structural components, spatio-temporal coordinates and changes in interactional positioning. Findings explore how iteration can advance narrative research as this applies to place. The discussion examines how place takes on thematic, material and symbolic dimensions which, in this case, are informed by Orientalism (Said [1978] 2003). This is to say that the participants use the storied setting of the Middle East as a resource, but in so doing discursively construct both the place and the Other.
Narrative materiality and practice: a study of born-free negotiation of periphery and centre
Literator, 2019
Download link: http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/lit.v40i1.1573
This article explores a small story na... more Download link: http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/lit.v40i1.1573
This article explores a small story narrative, the community of practice and the orientations of a group of ‘born-free’ participants as these interact with the material discourses of the Gautrain station in the business district of Sandton in the Gauteng, South Africa. ‘Born frees’ are young people born after the end of Apartheid. They are of interest in social studies because of the enormous demographic, familial and educational changes they represent. The discussion of the article concerns, firstly, the genre of account, and the relation between story and trajectory. Trajectory and the spatial coordinates of the story are introduced to understand what Sandton and its material discourses represent for these participants. The Gautrain station is then approached through geosemiotics. Thirdly, the negotiation of social space implicit in the co-construction of the small story is analysed through axes of intersubjectivity applied to participant orientation and narrativisation. Methodologically, this article follows a new narrative turn that sees narrative as practice. It seeks to introduce materiality to analysis. As storytelling, from this perspective, is embedded within physically co-present texts, signs and representations, the methodology was to map samples of participant talk against a site. This allowed participant stories, isolated using qualitative audio annotation, to be situated in the exact place of their telling, and for analysis to include artefacts of the semiotic landscape, which is to say textual or visual ensembles such as notices, posters and billboards that are displayed in urban public space and that represent a circulation of wider discourses.
Surface and underneath: a linguistic landscape analysis of the Bosman neighbourhood in Pretoria
Image & Text, 2015
Download link: https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC176322
Paper co-authored with Prof. Tommaso M. ... more Download link: https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC176322
Paper co-authored with Prof. Tommaso M. Milani
This article explores how the study of the linguistic landscape (LL), which is to say the texts visible in public space, allows for a rich and complex understanding of place. More specifically, the article studies the Bosman neighbourhood in Pretoria through a geosemiotic lens. Geosemiotics situates signs in the material world, approaching them as actualisations of a multimodal social semiotic and as a site of encounter of the cycles of habitus, interaction, place semiotics and visual analysis. Walking is adopted as a research methodology, a means of reading the city and also a praxeology with which to constitute place. Aspects of LL that are considered here are reading path, change over time, materials used, represented participants and local and global production. Themes discussed are the habitus of receivers and producers expressed in the LL and mediated practices such as literacy. Language domination, the differentiation in LL according to power and temporality, informal and transgressive texts and the narratives and lives of producers and receivers are also introduced. Bosman emerges as a site of entanglement where origins, aspiration, intimacy and vulnerability merge in unexpected ways.
Chapters by William Kelleher
Moving through a moving (storied) world: small stories and their contribution to ethnographic studies of place.
Small stories research: Tales, tellings and tellers across contexts, 2023
https://www.google.fr/books/edition/Small_Stories_Research/CgjGEAAAQBAJ?hl=fr&gbpv=1
This ch... more https://www.google.fr/books/edition/Small_Stories_Research/CgjGEAAAQBAJ?hl=fr&gbpv=1
This chapter investigates the contribution that small stories make to ethnographies of place through a reflection on trajectories and circulation of tellings. The data presented concern small stories recorded by a participant in Sandton, a financial district in Johannesburg, South Africa. The chapter discusses the relationship between ethnography and small stories and revisits the heuristic ‘ways of telling - sites - tellers’. This heuristic is then adopted to investigate two examples of small storying that involve a change in participation framework. In the first example, told during a commute from home to Sandton Central, the sequencing and positioning of the story are dependent on interlocutor movement, providing a superposition of tale-world and site. In the second example, told at the participant’s place of employment, the embedding of characters, events and dialogue is more accomplished and juxtaposes tale-world and professional environment. The closing discussion draws out the significance of small stories for ethnography. Small stories contribute transversal and practice-orientated genres, superposition of telling and tale, contingent identity work and the possibility of fluid rather than structural analyses.
Escritas urbanas, ler, escrever e agir na Cidade / Écritures urbaines, lire, écrire et agir dans la rue. , 2015
Les écrits urbains - ce que l’on peut aussi considérer comme étant un environnement textuel-visue... more Les écrits urbains - ce que l’on peut aussi considérer comme étant un environnement textuel-visuel ou un ‘paysage linguistique’ - permettent une compréhension diachronique, temporelle, d’un quartier, complexifiant les discours et les significations du lieu tels que ceux-ci peuvent être perçues dans le présent. Ces écrits sont des textes, des visuels, des signes, mais ils sont aussi des artefacts de processus physiques et sociaux qui les font exister. Les écrits donnent une forme matérielle, tangible, aux noms, origines, histoires d’immigration, d’émigration, de commencements humbles, d’ailleurs qui ancrent les personnes qui les lisent dans le présent et dans les lieux. Ceci est dû, peut-être, à la manière dont on interagit avec eux : les graffiti, les tags, les déchirements et les superpositions sont des gestes physiques, pleins de sens, qui capturent le jeu de pouvoir et la matérialité de ces écrits – leur politique corporelle et l’économie de leur espace d’affichage.
La recherche qui est l’objet de cet article porte sur deux sites dans les Nord et le Sud globaux : ‘Bosman’ dans le centre-ville de Pretoria, la capitale exécutive de l’Afrique du Sud, et le ‘Marché du Soleil’, situé dans les quartiers ‘Nord’ de Marseille, en France. Ces sites offrent cet emmêlement des contextes et d’histoires personnelles et culturelles dont parle Nuttall, indiquant «une relation, ou un ensemble de relations sociales, qui est complexe, pleine de pièges, emmêlée, mais qui implique l’humanité dans ses plis» (Nuttall 2009 : 1).
Theses by William Kelleher
Sandton: A linguistic ethnography of small stories in a site of luxury
Doctoral thesis, 2018
Download link: https://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/25897
This is a linguistic ethnograp... more Download link: https://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/25897
This is a linguistic ethnography that focuses on small stories (Bamberg and Georgakopoulou 2008, De Fina 2009, De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2015, Georgakopoulou 2006a and 2006b, 2008, 2014) within Bucholtz and Hall’s (2005) approach to identity and interaction. These two intersecting theoretical scaffoldings are completed by a geosemiotic approach (Scollon and Scollon 2003) to the discursive environment. The research therefore studies narrative interactions within communities of practice (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992, 2007) across the spaces and fields of the research site of Sandton, Johannesburg; investigating both participant behaviour and discursive environment, in particular with respect to the semiotic landscape. It is a ‘new’ ethnography in that its aim is to better understand the new spaces of South Africa’s cities (Duff 2014). Methodologically the narrative interactions of participants are plotted onto the space of Sandton using GIS technology. This allows attention to be brought to the trajectories of participants and thus to change in interactive style, role and behaviour as participants enter, remain within and leave the site. Three principles of identity and interaction are explored and unpacked in depth for this linguistic ethnography: emergence, positionality and relationality. In addition to a focus on the site itself and its socio-historic processes, this thesis examines the trajectories across the space of the site, institutional discourse and practice through four emblematic companies and, finally, the ‘Born Free’ or ‘millenial’ participants. Through the different participants the research seeks to give an account of the subjectivities and understandings that will be relevant to the present, and future, of the site, and of the country. Axes of investigation are emergence of identity work, masculinity, religion, modernity, codeswitching, positionality with respect to macro, meso and micro discourses and interaction, and tactics of intersubjectivity (Bucholtz and Hall 2004b).
Download link: https://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/15010
The thesis concerns the lingui... more Download link: https://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/15010
The thesis concerns the linguistic landscape (LL) of two neighbourhoods, one in Pretoria, South Africa, and the other in Marseille, France. This is a longitudinal study whose data was collected over two years of site visits. LL are explored in terms of both space and place. In terms of place, they are seen to be constitutive of a sense of place, allowing insights into memory, aspiration, and familial and cultural networks. Spatially, they are seen to realise a politics where design and distribution of LL are markers of power and modality. Analysis takes its point of departure in geosemiotics. Artefacts of LL are interpreted as sites of encounter of four cycles of discourse: the interaction order, habitus, semiotics of place and visual semiotics. The focus is on understanding LL artefacts, their production and reception, as a nexus of practice. Methodologically, walking - as a creative practice, and as an actualisation of the place and space of the neighbourhood - is chosen for photographing LL, for observing interactions and for meeting participants to the research. In examining habitus, the discourses, literacy and narratives of the people who live, work and pass through the site are compared. Deep social and economic similarities are noted between the two sites. Exploration of the semiotics of place brings to light regularities in the features of formal and informal LL, the nature of participation with and subversion of these texts, but also disparities among producers and receivers in terms of literacy, access, the socio-cultural and the socio-economic. Visual semiotic analysis continues these findings and it is noted that global and local discourses of identification, aspiration and self-stylisation circulate transversally in the sites. LL are taken to realise a politics of space when multimodal analysis of composition and modality is extended to the streetscape, as LL ensemble. A key facet of the research is the interpretation of informal LL. Their inclusion challenges existing LL methodologies by flagging the necessity to ground quantitative findings ethnographically.
Conference Presentations by William Kelleher
Climate Hope, 2024
‘What matters to us’ (‘Ce qui nous concerne’) is a small stories (Georgakopoulou, 2007; De Fina &... more ‘What matters to us’ (‘Ce qui nous concerne’) is a small stories (Georgakopoulou, 2007; De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2008) participative ethnographic research project with civil society organisations in Rennes, France. Rennes has a rich history of civil society engagement. This encourages ‘positive’ discourse analysis (Bartlett, 2012) and purposive change through research initiatives. ‘What matters to us’ is a longitudinal project in three phases: i) the composition of a corpus of stories told by members of civil society organisations (reference deleted for peer review), ii) the creation of an interactive library accessible through a 2D virtual world based on the open-source WorkAdventure platform that is locally hosted and ecologically-concerned (Kelleher & Ramella, 2024; Ramella, 2023), and iii) the facilitation of emancipatory pedagogic practices focused on re-tellings and co-tellings. This paper, firstly, explores some stories from the corpus employing an ecosophical narratology (reference deleted for peer review) that concerns the shape of story ‘arcs’ and their time scale (Haraway, 2016; Tsing, 2015), the semiotisation of the story world, and ecosophical (Naess, 1989) and ecological sociolinguistic considerations (Kelleher, 2020). Ecosophical narratology embraces stories that emplot longer-term sharing and interspecies cooperation, or what Haraway (2016: 40) terms stories in ‘nets’, earth-centered language (Rosenfeld, 2019) and associative practices that are both recounted and materialised. The term ‘ecosophy’ has been chosen in lieu of ‘econarratology’ (James & Morel, 2020) since this latter term is strongly associated with literary studies, although this boundary blurs with the work of Caracciolo (see for example Toivonen & Caracciolo, 2023). Following the exploration of the corpus of stories, the paper goes on to present activities from the ‘What matters to us’ project’s second and third phases, relying on the WorkAdventure library whose digital mediation has the potential to change ontological and epistemological boundaries (Hansen, 2006). These phases are workshop-based, and lead to new imaginings and new tellings. Findings suggest that the third sector in Rennes, and its stories, are responsive to ecosophical values and to the links between humans and their environment. The ‘What Matters to Us’ project thus values new and digitally-mediated ways of preserving orality and contributing to social and environmental justice (Blommaert, 2006).
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Videos by William Kelleher
Papers by William Kelleher
This article examines some characteristics and functions of multiplex tactics in small storytelling. It uses a case-study based on three long informal interviews with a participant from the Gauteng, South Africa. Analysis and discussion raise questions of conversational resources and involvement, and thereby of a critical understanding of creativity and cooperation in interactional doing being. Multiplex tactics produce effects on several levels of interactional and discursive organisation simultaneously: signalling participative and narrative framing, footing and stance, whilst also effecting story entry and exit, or providing
coherence between storied elements, for example. Multiplexity is a resource for accessing intersubjective meaning-making and narrative co-construction. Furthermore, it contributes to the vast body of work on indexicality and discourse marking. The article focuses on the creative, affective, and evolutive nature of involvement in interactional work.
In this paper, we present the data from ‘Ce qui nous concerne’ (‘What matters to us’), a participative narrative ethnographic research project with civil society organisations in Rennes, France. The data cover a growing corpus of research interviews that are collected with different civil society associations. The data are archived in the Nakala multimodal platform and on an open-access library on the Rennes 2 University WorkAdventure platform. The interviews dataset includes images, .mp3 audio files, transcription text files and rendered versions of the participant stories that make up the interview. The data can be reused for reference, further analysis, and for collaborative initiatives.
This article presents findings from participative small stories narrative research with civil society organisations in Rennes, France. The aim is to explore ecosophical narratology and, thereby, the adoption of ecosophical practices. Rennes has a long history of inclusive politics and civil society engagement which encourages positive discourse analysis and purposive change through research initiatives. 'Ce qui nous concerne' ('What matters to us') is a longitudinal ethnographic project that is in the process of transcribing and collecting Rennes civil society stories as a corpus on the Huma-Num Nakala multimodal corpus platform. The project team is also currently in the process of developing an open-access interactive library on the Rennes 2 University WorkAdventure 2D collaborative platform. The project aims to accompany emancipatory pedagogic practices grounded on co-tellings and re-tellings. This article explores a purposive sample of three stories from the corpus in order to shed light on the linguistic and narrative work that each accomplishes, and the opportunities that each presents for ecosophical workshops and societal change. An ecosophical narratology inverts canonical story arcs, replacing individual overcoming by what Haraway would term "nets" of earthbound multispecies flourishing and imagining, privileging the role of the environment in narrative moment and resolution, timescale and indexicality. Importance is thus given to earth-centred language and process rather than event. Through these stories, associative practices are both recounted and materialised, contributing to social and environmental justice.
The experience of expatriation, with the juxtaposition that it introduces between a country of departure and a country of arrival, leads to a sort of biographic superposition where acts and instincts (the hexis) are no longer endowed with their original meaning, and, instead, are either under- or overdetermined. Similarly, affective relationships such as those of the family, of friendships or of acquaintance undergo rupture. The familiar comes apart and reveals interstices in the social and spatial constitution of the self. Finally, the stories that one tells others, or that one uses to structure one’s experiences for oneself, sustain changes in their linguistic, interactional and performative matrix. Narrative research is a productive avenue for the study of expatriation because the narrative act is also an ontological act (Baynham, Georgakopoulou) that is revealing for those who have been unrooted or displaced and who, perhaps, also recall or reminisce about other places and cities that are no longer present.
The project Places raises the issue of the creation of locality (Appadurai) and of anglophone communities of practice. If one takes a city like Paris, its centre has two million inhabitants of which twenty-four thousand are native English speakers. The greater Paris urban area has twelve million inhabitants of which over two million are foreign nationals and sixty thousand are English speakers. This means that one person in six in the metropole speaks a language other than French, and that one in thirty of those people is a native English speaker. Likewise, in a region like Brittany, which is linked to England and Ireland through geographic position and sea routes, in Rennes the British community makes up nearly 15% of foreign residents. There is also a strong community of people from anglophone Africa. Within these communities, socialisation leads to new linguistic varieties and styles.
In turning to public space at the time of measures imposed by COVID-19, the project hopes, furthermore, to foreground the very conditions of our socialisation in urban settings. Public space has come to represent the most important constraints of our era: quarantine, distancing, dematerialised forms of work and the lacks and failings that are linked to age, gender, education and illness. Public places in the city provoke ruptures and breaks that correspond to the demarcations of neighbourhood, city and metropolitan area. These demarcations are in turn relevant to the categories of resident, visitor or worker and relationships of service, hierarchy, friendship, frequentation, habit, diffidence and even mistrust. Concretely, through interviews, accounts and documentation, project Places hopes to allow a better understanding of the overlapping of different tactics used by the participants to the research. It is a biographical and an autobiographical project because both lead researchers are, themselves, expatriates. The data hopes to bring to light ways of doing being, reconstruction of affective links, communicational needs or simply the tactics by which participants invest their new surroundings with meaning through motifs, classifications or the activities with which they are involved.
Finally, with respect to the world of business and the socio-cultural work that is wrought by companies, project Places contributes a study of another significant community. One can note that of the 10 million employees in 120 large French groupings, over 15% are foreign personnel. Similarly, French multinationals employ over six million French nationals overseas, of which a high proportion in anglophone environments.
Co-authored with Andries Masenge, University of Pretoria
Narrative methodologies are valuable to language and literacy research. Oral narratives told in situations of face-to-face interaction are used in research methodologies and in scaffolding pedagogic activities. Nevertheless oral narratives often present limiting cases in which narrative accounts are less easily distinguishable from other genres such as interrogative, expository, descriptive or argumentative accounts. The resulting confusion around genre has an impact on data selection and weighing and thereby on how narrative is mobilised in research and in pedagogic situations. This paper presents the results of a corpus-based statistical investigation into the interactional features of oral narrative accounts collected during academic literacy interviews. Common claims made about narratives, such as that they are structurally differentiated, that they rely on more turns at talk or that they are a
unique manner of presenting discrete experiences are not supported in a straightforward way in the corpus data. Narratives do promote more involvement, self-reference, complex embeddings and constructed dialogue. Conversely they are less frequent, less on task and are more consistently aligned with their context. In language and literacy research these findings suggest a need to reflect on the relationship between types of participant response, types of solicitation and allocated response times. The study contributes to differentiating discourse types more accurately and emphasises the particularities of oral narrative interaction.
In developing countries, digital media have created uneven nexuses of literacy, power and societal adjustment. Whilst literacy and power have been the subject of much research in South Africa, often supporting a conception of digital media as a resource (the access to and advantages of specific devices or applications), this study also sought to reflect on personal and societal change as bodily and ontological experience. The aim was to contribute to redefining what the digital media represents in education, and to do so through an exploration of the journey of a tertiary education student who used digital media to negotiate his academic and interpersonal environment. This constituted a local, ethnographic investigation into digital media through the narrative analysis of a series of accounts told by the participant over 2 years. The accounts were firstly examined in terms of the three axes of gesture, gaze and audition, and instrumentalisation. These three axes had resulting implications for conceptions of digital media as resource or as bodily and ontological experience. The agentive implications of the accounts were then discussed in terms of the same three axes in order to question orality and community, gestural experimentation, embedding and the co-constitution of the human and the technical. The findings were that digital media engage the body and that aspects of one’s being in the world, such as culture, community and disorders such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), can fundamentally inform and transform what digital media mean and how we interact with them.
Interstices are those residual, left-over, spaces associated with movement across and between urban forms. Interstices in the business district of Sandton, Gauteng, South Africa, represent the insurgence of the lower levels in the vertical push of the high-rise offices, luxury hotels and retail spaces of the district. In interstitial spaces encounters and interactions are often fleeting and contingent. There is a discontinuity of social space. Links between people are spread out over the grid of the city, disassembled and reassembled as people leave their homes, move through different transport nodes to different destinations in the district and there, in turn, continue and discontinue their trajectory. Interstitial stories capture a reticular activity that binds people together through movement and space. In terms of narrative research, interstitial stories, a type of ‘small’ story, offer particularities that concern the intersection of the spatiality and temporality of the real and diagetic worlds, linguistic representational means and social consequentiality. The aim of this article is to explore interstitial stories, as an instantiation of small stories research and as a local storytelling practice, through three extracts that represent three different configurations of space and time: superposed spatialities, temporal and spatial identity, and movement in telling trajectory. In analysing these stories, this article hopes to shed further light on the role that narrative plays in our daily lives and interactions, bringing out local conditions and linguistic repertoires in the global South. Interstices emerge as challenging, cooperative and familiar, and, in contradistinction to what their name could imply, a strong resource for identity construction.
This paper explores a conjoint analysis of narrative interactional data and of artefacts of the
semiotic landscape (SL). The data form part of a linguistic ethnography of Sandton, a site
in the Gauteng, South Africa. Sandton is a district of business and conspicuous
consumption, with a wealth gap between it and neighbouring urban areas. The discussion
of the paper focuses on two youth participants ‘born free’ in the 90s, after the end of
Apartheid. Analysis is conducted from the perspective of discourse. A geosemiotic
approach to the SL involves the discourse cycles of social actor, interaction order, place
semiotics and visual semiotics. Narrative positioning analysis is a means of accessing
participant orientation to macro discourses and processes and, here, is concerned with the
interactional co-construction of a small story. The bringing into dialogue of these two
frameworks is made possible by plotting participant interactions against the space of the
site using global positioning system (GPS) technology. The paper aims to investigate
geomapping as one way in which interactional data and SL data can complement each
other, and to do so in relation to participants whose cohort is so pivotal to understanding
the present societal conjuncture and the deep socio-economic rifts in South Africa.
https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.38904
This article wishes to comment on how sociolinguistics considers ecology and climate change and offers research axes and a case study to allow a deeper con-
sideration. The discussion looks at some recent publications and then explores reasons for the delay, in the field of sociolinguistics, in incorporating ecological issues. Four axes for reflection are proposed: structural relativism, critical discourse analysis, a longer narrative timeframe, and materiality. They prompt a reorientation of research projects towards the inclusion of data from the environmental sciences, and to publishing of results in forums other than those of the humanities. These axes are then applied to a story about the relocation of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, told by the Exchange’s previous Chairman. This story, which has a biographical aspect, also involves considerations of Johannesburg’s geology, water, vegetation and the place and logic of the new business district, Sandton, to which the Exchange migrated.
This article explores how the retelling of a story, or narrative iteration, intersects with place. Data are collected through ethnographic participant observation and consist of a series of seven retellings, and thirteen auxiliary stories. The situation of telling changes from being one-on-one with the researcher to group tellings in a tavern called The Brazen Head in Johannesburg, South Africa. Following Bamberg’s article on twice-told tales (Bamberg 2008), iteration is approached in terms of thematic, structural, interactional and discursive criteria and these criteria serve to compare the series of retellings. Analysis concerns changes in thematic progression, distribution of structural components, spatio-temporal coordinates and changes in interactional positioning. Findings explore how iteration can advance narrative research as this applies to place. The discussion examines how place takes on thematic, material and symbolic dimensions which, in this case, are informed by Orientalism (Said [1978] 2003). This is to say that the participants use the storied setting of the Middle East as a resource, but in so doing discursively construct both the place and the Other.
This article explores a small story narrative, the community of practice and the orientations of a group of ‘born-free’ participants as these interact with the material discourses of the Gautrain station in the business district of Sandton in the Gauteng, South Africa. ‘Born frees’ are young people born after the end of Apartheid. They are of interest in social studies because of the enormous demographic, familial and educational changes they represent. The discussion of the article concerns, firstly, the genre of account, and the relation between story and trajectory. Trajectory and the spatial coordinates of the story are introduced to understand what Sandton and its material discourses represent for these participants. The Gautrain station is then approached through geosemiotics. Thirdly, the negotiation of social space implicit in the co-construction of the small story is analysed through axes of intersubjectivity applied to participant orientation and narrativisation. Methodologically, this article follows a new narrative turn that sees narrative as practice. It seeks to introduce materiality to analysis. As storytelling, from this perspective, is embedded within physically co-present texts, signs and representations, the methodology was to map samples of participant talk against a site. This allowed participant stories, isolated using qualitative audio annotation, to be situated in the exact place of their telling, and for analysis to include artefacts of the semiotic landscape, which is to say textual or visual ensembles such as notices, posters and billboards that are displayed in urban public space and that represent a circulation of wider discourses.
Paper co-authored with Prof. Tommaso M. Milani
This article explores how the study of the linguistic landscape (LL), which is to say the texts visible in public space, allows for a rich and complex understanding of place. More specifically, the article studies the Bosman neighbourhood in Pretoria through a geosemiotic lens. Geosemiotics situates signs in the material world, approaching them as actualisations of a multimodal social semiotic and as a site of encounter of the cycles of habitus, interaction, place semiotics and visual analysis. Walking is adopted as a research methodology, a means of reading the city and also a praxeology with which to constitute place. Aspects of LL that are considered here are reading path, change over time, materials used, represented participants and local and global production. Themes discussed are the habitus of receivers and producers expressed in the LL and mediated practices such as literacy. Language domination, the differentiation in LL according to power and temporality, informal and transgressive texts and the narratives and lives of producers and receivers are also introduced. Bosman emerges as a site of entanglement where origins, aspiration, intimacy and vulnerability merge in unexpected ways.
Chapters by William Kelleher
This chapter investigates the contribution that small stories make to ethnographies of place through a reflection on trajectories and circulation of tellings. The data presented concern small stories recorded by a participant in Sandton, a financial district in Johannesburg, South Africa. The chapter discusses the relationship between ethnography and small stories and revisits the heuristic ‘ways of telling - sites - tellers’. This heuristic is then adopted to investigate two examples of small storying that involve a change in participation framework. In the first example, told during a commute from home to Sandton Central, the sequencing and positioning of the story are dependent on interlocutor movement, providing a superposition of tale-world and site. In the second example, told at the participant’s place of employment, the embedding of characters, events and dialogue is more accomplished and juxtaposes tale-world and professional environment. The closing discussion draws out the significance of small stories for ethnography. Small stories contribute transversal and practice-orientated genres, superposition of telling and tale, contingent identity work and the possibility of fluid rather than structural analyses.
La recherche qui est l’objet de cet article porte sur deux sites dans les Nord et le Sud globaux : ‘Bosman’ dans le centre-ville de Pretoria, la capitale exécutive de l’Afrique du Sud, et le ‘Marché du Soleil’, situé dans les quartiers ‘Nord’ de Marseille, en France. Ces sites offrent cet emmêlement des contextes et d’histoires personnelles et culturelles dont parle Nuttall, indiquant «une relation, ou un ensemble de relations sociales, qui est complexe, pleine de pièges, emmêlée, mais qui implique l’humanité dans ses plis» (Nuttall 2009 : 1).
Theses by William Kelleher
This is a linguistic ethnography that focuses on small stories (Bamberg and Georgakopoulou 2008, De Fina 2009, De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2015, Georgakopoulou 2006a and 2006b, 2008, 2014) within Bucholtz and Hall’s (2005) approach to identity and interaction. These two intersecting theoretical scaffoldings are completed by a geosemiotic approach (Scollon and Scollon 2003) to the discursive environment. The research therefore studies narrative interactions within communities of practice (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992, 2007) across the spaces and fields of the research site of Sandton, Johannesburg; investigating both participant behaviour and discursive environment, in particular with respect to the semiotic landscape. It is a ‘new’ ethnography in that its aim is to better understand the new spaces of South Africa’s cities (Duff 2014). Methodologically the narrative interactions of participants are plotted onto the space of Sandton using GIS technology. This allows attention to be brought to the trajectories of participants and thus to change in interactive style, role and behaviour as participants enter, remain within and leave the site. Three principles of identity and interaction are explored and unpacked in depth for this linguistic ethnography: emergence, positionality and relationality. In addition to a focus on the site itself and its socio-historic processes, this thesis examines the trajectories across the space of the site, institutional discourse and practice through four emblematic companies and, finally, the ‘Born Free’ or ‘millenial’ participants. Through the different participants the research seeks to give an account of the subjectivities and understandings that will be relevant to the present, and future, of the site, and of the country. Axes of investigation are emergence of identity work, masculinity, religion, modernity, codeswitching, positionality with respect to macro, meso and micro discourses and interaction, and tactics of intersubjectivity (Bucholtz and Hall 2004b).
The thesis concerns the linguistic landscape (LL) of two neighbourhoods, one in Pretoria, South Africa, and the other in Marseille, France. This is a longitudinal study whose data was collected over two years of site visits. LL are explored in terms of both space and place. In terms of place, they are seen to be constitutive of a sense of place, allowing insights into memory, aspiration, and familial and cultural networks. Spatially, they are seen to realise a politics where design and distribution of LL are markers of power and modality. Analysis takes its point of departure in geosemiotics. Artefacts of LL are interpreted as sites of encounter of four cycles of discourse: the interaction order, habitus, semiotics of place and visual semiotics. The focus is on understanding LL artefacts, their production and reception, as a nexus of practice. Methodologically, walking - as a creative practice, and as an actualisation of the place and space of the neighbourhood - is chosen for photographing LL, for observing interactions and for meeting participants to the research. In examining habitus, the discourses, literacy and narratives of the people who live, work and pass through the site are compared. Deep social and economic similarities are noted between the two sites. Exploration of the semiotics of place brings to light regularities in the features of formal and informal LL, the nature of participation with and subversion of these texts, but also disparities among producers and receivers in terms of literacy, access, the socio-cultural and the socio-economic. Visual semiotic analysis continues these findings and it is noted that global and local discourses of identification, aspiration and self-stylisation circulate transversally in the sites. LL are taken to realise a politics of space when multimodal analysis of composition and modality is extended to the streetscape, as LL ensemble. A key facet of the research is the interpretation of informal LL. Their inclusion challenges existing LL methodologies by flagging the necessity to ground quantitative findings ethnographically.
Conference Presentations by William Kelleher