Monthly Archives: March 2024

Pavitra Sundar on her book, Listening with a Feminist Ear

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https://press.umich.edu/Books/L/Listening-with-a-Feminist-Ear2

Anaar Desai-Stephens: One of the primary interventions of the book is this beautiful idea of “listening with a feminist ear,” which you explicate as attending “to aural and oral manifestations of social hierarchies. It is to heed the intersections of gender, sexuality, nation, and other vectors of identity, and to note how the aural forms of these constructs exclude as much as they include” (6). Can you talk us through how you developed this idea? What prevailing conversations – in cinema studies and in studies of South Asian cinema and music – necessitated this intervention?

Pavitra Sundar: Thank you so much for this opportunity to talk through some ideas at the heart of my book! The phrase “listening with a feminist ear” has been with me for a while, as far back as my dissertation, I believe. Initially, it was a nod to that project’s feminist moorings and my interest in how gender, sexuality, and nation were manifest in film soundtracks. This book, though, came into its own around the time sound studies began flourishing as a field. As I started to think of cinematic and musical analysis in relation to sound studies, I realized that we needed to think more about listening itself—what it entails, how we do it, and what listening makes possible. My insistence that we listen to the aural domain of cinema echoes the interventions of film music scholars and other feminist theorists of sound and voice in cinema. Decades on, there is still a need for that intervention, as cinema and media studies remains a very ocularcentric discipline. While South Asian cinema studies does exhibit this preoccupation with the image, ethnomusicologists have done much to elaborate the industrial and representational worlds of Indian film music. There is also robust discussion of the politics of voice (both in terms of playback singing and political speech, particularly in South India) and an emerging interest in sound studies. I’ve tried to build on these various, overlapping conversations to inspire greater attention to Bombay film soundwork and also greater reflexivity about listening.

The challenge is not just to shift or expand our object of analysis—from the visual to the aural, or better yet, to the audiovisual—but also to consider the relationship between that object and our method. What social hierarchies and axes of identity take form because of the particular ways in which we (scholars, audiences, fans) listen to Hindi cinema? How have we adopted certain ways of listening over time, and to what extent have those changed? What might it mean to shake off those conventions and practices? This is what I mean when I say that “listening with a feminist ear” is both critical and utopian in orientation. It tunes in to aural/oral constructs, but in so doing, it also opens a path to listening differently. The recognition that listening is political—that it has the capacity not only to objectify sounds, but also to unsettle wellworn habits of the ear—runs through the broader corpus of feminist scholarship on sound and music. Listening may be a sensory practice into which we are socialized and that we often repeat thoughtlessly, but it needn’t remain just that.

Anaar Desai-Stephens: Woven through the book is an attention to pedagogies of listening, and how we might listen otherwise. Can you say more about how viewers learn to listen in the broad ecosystem that surrounds Hindi cinema? Do you have thoughts about how we might explicitly learn to listen against the grain, that is, to work against our own listening habits?

Pavitra Sundar: An important thread in sound studies, and one that I develop in this book as well, is that listening is not a passive exercise but an engaged, interpretive activity. We cultivate ways of engaging with sounds over time, through exposure to various media and aural cultures. Films themselves direct us to listen in specific ways, as do particular genres and musical traditions. I was recently reminded of Vebhuti Duggal’s wonderful work on “becoming listener.” What exactly does it mean to call oneself a listener? She teaches us that radio listeners conceptualized their practice in layered ways—listening was as much about writing fan letters and running radio clubs as it was about tuning in to a radio station. Likewise, in Isabel Huacuja Alonso’s recent book (also on radio), we learn of how listening and talking are intertwined. My own emphasis is on the interface of listening and seeing, on how these modes of perception interact with and shape each other.

In my first chapter, I reframe playback singing using Michel Chion’s term “audiovisual contract,” which names how audiences give tacit assent to the conjunction of sound and image in cinema. But, of course, it’s because Indian audiences have agreed to a different contract than, say, American film audiences that it is commonplace to hear actors singing in a voice that is not their own in Bombay cinema. I lay out how gendered screen conventions and ideologies trained Hindi film audiences (from the mid-1950s all the way through the 1990s) to hear some women as good and others as sexy, immoral etc. As the media and cultural landscape shifted in the 1990s, so did the way audiences encountered, and interpreted, women’s singing bodies. The changes that economic liberalization wrought, particularly in the television and music industries, are also key to my second chapter. Chapter two traces how the Islamicate genre of the qawwali mobilizes the concept of listening (and listening publics) across seven decades. Generic shifts encourage different conceptions and habits of listening; they push audiences to adopt different understandings of the sound-image relationship. In my final chapter, I identify language politics as another formidable influence on how we listen—in this case, how we listen to speech in cinema. I discuss Hindi cinema’s hybrid tongues (Hindustani, Bambaiyya, and Hinglish) in relation to broader debates on linguistic nationalism, and postcolonial language politics more generally. In listening to characters’ dialects, idiolects, and accents, audiences call up complex racio- and ethnolinguistic imaginaries.

The sheer weight of these cultural and historical forces can be overwhelming. It can make listening seem overdetermined. But, if listening is a matter of embracing historically and socially specific conventions, then we may be able to teach ourselves to listen differently. The first step is attending to how we listen. We need to probe not just what we hear in films, but how we have come to hear femininity, accent, etc. in the ways that we do. I also find that thinking of ourselves as audiences rather than as viewers is helpful. You’ll notice that I use the latter term quite sparingly in the book, relying more often on audience. This word’s auditory roots cues the fact that we are always doing more than watching cinema.

Anaar Desai-Stephens: While reading, I found myself periodically struck and delighted by evocative, counter-intuitive descriptions of listening to cinema, viewing music, hearing bodies, and more. More than just turns-of-phrase, these quasi-synesthetic descriptions seemed central to your project of refiguring how we engage with cinema and cinema sound. How does this multimodal approach connect to your work of re-thinking the relationship between corporeality and sound, and the meanings attached to this relationship, in contemporary Hindi cinema?

Pavitra Sundar: Such a pleasure to know that those turns of phrase resonated with you! You’re right—what I’m trying to do is keep alive the recognition that sound and image work together. In a lot of cinema studies scholarship, including in works that focus on film sound, the body is understood primarily as a visual entity. The very notion of the voice-body relationship, for example, suggests that voice is a disembodied construct. Much of my writing on women’s voices, in this book and in other projects, challenges this arbitrary partitioning of the senses. Part of the difficulty is that assumptions about sound and image are baked into our conceptual vocabulary. Key terms used to parse voice and other cinematic sounds anchor listening in the image: concepts like onscreen and offscreen sound, voiceover, and acousmêtre turn on whether or not the purported source of a sound is visible. This image-centric approach flattens the endlessly pliable relationship between the aural and the visual, and ignores other ways of grasping materiality in cinema. While phenomenological critics have recast film spectatorship in tactile and kinaesthetic terms, their insights about corporeality are rarely extended to listening. That sonic and visual perception are intimately related comes through most forcefully in my chapter on playback signing, where I analyze the relatively recent shift to seeing women’s vocal labor, in paratextual material related to films, but also in other contexts and platforms. I argue that this shift in the visual representation of women’s bodies is crucial to how we now hear them. While I do not foreground this argument about the sound-image relationship as much in the rest of the book, I never lose sight (!) of the interplay of the aural and the visual. Multimodal formulations like the ones you mention—and also my choice to use Michele Hilmes’ term “soundwork”—keep me from slipping back into analytical habits that I think we need to shed.

Anaar Desai-Stephens: In the introduction, you write: “Studying soundwork requires that we listen as fans – voraciously and with little heed to conceptual borders that academic disciplines draw around diverse sounds” (11). Why did it feel so important to you to foreground pleasure, enjoyment, and personal proximity? What might this affective emphasis offer to scholars who work on seemingly text based areas such as film and literature?

Pavitra Sundar: Scholarship is an embodied, affective undertaking. It is driven by our personal interests, and shaped by histories of consumption, pleasure, and practice. But we rarely frame our labor in these terms. In not framing it as such, I think we risk reinforcing the divide between our work as academics and the rest of our lives.

Moreover, some of the categories that structure our scholarship do not function so strictly outside academic contexts. Listening cultures are porous and overlapping. People’s aural interests and practices often cut across genre, medium, time period, and language. By adopting a more playful, boundary-crossing approach—one that I suspect we all indulge in when we’re not fretting about disciplinary debates—we can get a better handle on interaurality. That is, we can understand how sound cultures and media that seem far afield from Hindi films can, and do, shape cinematic soundwork and listening practices.

Finally, the affective emphasis you’ve identified is also related to the reparative critical work that I think listening with a feminist ear can accomplish. For Eve Sedgwick, the reparative reading position is one that invites pleasure, experimentation, and surprise. I’ve tried to demonstrate through my analyses of Satya and Aligarh (in chapter three and the coda respectively) that listening across conventional sonic categories and pausing over odd, and oddly pleasurable sonic fragments, can be generative. Listening with a Feminist Ear is not simply a work of critique; it is also a work that dwells in the aural pleasures of Bombay cinema in the hopes of imagining alternative possibilities.

Anaar Desai-Stephens: One of the most exciting parts of the book for me, as a scholar of music, is your theorization of the materiality of speech through attending to language as sound. This is primarily explored in the third section of the book, on speaking, while you spend the first section of the book, on singing, exploring the materiality of the singing voice. How do you think about the relationship between these two forms of vocal materiality, methodologically and in terms of their relative realms of semiotic meaning? What political implications and possibilities are embedded in the shifting relationship between film sound, film speech, and film music in contemporary Hindi cinema?https://ssl.gstatic.com/ui/v1/icons/mail/images/cleardot.gif

Pavitra Sundar: I think of chapters one and three as complementary explorations of sonic materiality. There is a growing body of South Asian scholarship on the materiality of the singing voice, but the materiality of the speaking voice has received less attention. When cinematic speech is discussed, it’s framed as a question of style or political ideology. My own interest is in how listeners make sense of sound in Bombay cinema—the sound of vocal performance. I am less concerned with the semantic meaning of words, whether spoken or sung, than with the semiotics of voice. I am trying to work out how vocal materiality is made meaningful. How are gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity audible and tangible in speech and song? If in chapter one, vocal timbre is used to make moral judgments about women, in chapter three I find that the sound of words (accent, in particular) does similar work in relation to ethnolinguistic identity. In reframing language as sound, I find it helpful to think with Rey Chow, whose notion of the “xenophone” addresses how spoken language gets some cast as foreigners, as other. What I’m also trying to do in that chapter is blur the boundaries between speech and other kinds of cinematic sounds (ambient sounds, sound effects, and song lyrics). My hope is that in closing the distance between these various sonorous markers of place and identity, we can arrive at more capacious conceptions of sound and belonging in cinema.

Joseph Errington on his book, Other Indonesians

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https://global.oup.com/academic/product/other-indonesians-9780197563687?cc=us&lang=en&

Jessica Peng: I would like to begin by asking you to reflect upon the trajectory of your scholarship over the years (perhaps, alongside changes that have taken place in Indonesia) and share how it has led you to ask the questions that you do in this book. More specifically, how do you see this book relating to and/or departing from your earlier work?

Joseph Errington: I left college with an interest in generative grammar, then the emerging high theory of Language. But I wanted also to engage with a little-known ‘exotic’ language: Javanese, to which I had casual exposure via the performing arts.  A glitch in class scheduling during my first quarter of graduate work at the U. of Chicago gave me an opening to take Michael Silverstein’s still new course on language and culture.  Under his mentorship I shifted away from formalist paradigms at the core of linguistics to broader, semiotic issues of form and meaning.

Only towards the end of my 3rd year of graduate classwork did I come to grips with the need, prior to fieldwork, for fulltime language study: Indonesian (with John Wolff at Cornell) and then Javanese (at Gajah Mada University in Indonesia).  This kind of lengthy pre-research preparation would likely be impossible now, but served me as a point of a transition from theory to  particulars, and a resource for continuing research. 

After a year of study in the lively town of Jogjakarta, Java, I moved to Surakarta, a royal polity which had been transformed by nationalist dynamics into a bit of a provincial backwater.  Conversations with older (primarily male) members of the town’s old elite often shifted from language and etiquette to the reasons polite Javanese had become a kind of museum curiosity: widely respected, but little known or used.  I became impressed by the ways change/variation in everyday talk was a diffuse, intimate, intersubjective dimension of large-scale social change.  As a point of convergence between linguistic biography and social history, within and across generations, this became a recurring interest in my later work on Javanese/Indonesian bilingualism, and the kinds of Indonesian described in this book.   

Jessica Peng: As is captured by the title, Other Indonesians: Nationalism in an Unnative Language, your book examines speakers of “other-than-standard” Indonesian, a language you suggest ought to be understood as “unnative” (cf. non-native). It is through this vantage point of exploring this overlapping linguistic feature of other-than-standard and unnativeness in provincial towns that you consider how Indonesian enables its speakers to express themselves as members of a national community in pluralistic ways. I wonder if you can explain what you mean when you describe Indonesian as an unnative language. Further, what are the affordances of focusing on those who speak nonstandard varieties of this unnative language to questions of nationalism?

Joe Errington: Native speaker intuition led me to unnative as a term of art before I figured out how English grammar made it more accurate than nonnative.   But its peculiarity gives it rhetorical value for signalling the need to bracket ideologies of native speakership that lack fit with the Indonesian case.   It had an empirical payoff also for framing fine-grained features of biaccentual usage in chapters 2 and 3.  In chapter 4 this accuracy/awkwardness tradeoff played played out in a review of comparative/theoretical approaches to languages-and-nations.  I thought about framing these issues in broadly Bakhtinian terms, but finally decided that Schutz’ quasi-Weberian vocabulary helped make social dimensions of the issue clearer. 

If nothing else, this usage helps identify some of the less obvious naturalizing effects of linguistic nativeness ground for senses of national belonging.

Jessica Peng: Across your analysis of other-than-standard language use among college students in Kupang (Chapter 2) and Pontianak (Chapter 3), I was struck by the ways in which more socially marginalized members of Indonesian society were found to be more oriented towards the regime of the standard. In Kupang, for example, newcomers to the city speak about the values that people back in their rural hometowns place on standard Indonesian. I loved the example of the young newcomer who reminds herself to “flick her tongue” whenever she returns to Alor as to not bring her putatively bad, urban habits of speech back home. Meanwhile, the ethnic Chinese in Pontianak, as a population that has long been perceived as foreign in Indonesia, predominantly use standard Indonesian. I wonder if you can discuss if and how social marginality figures into people’s orientations to the regime of the standard and reflect upon what these examples might suggest about the senses of national belonging felt by these variably marginalized members of the nation?

Joe Errington: Your query raises a paradox darker than that thematized in the book, one illustrated by the Chinese of Pontianak, described in chapter 3.  Some of the most marginalized members of the nation are also those whose use of the national language fits best with the the regime of the standard.  Others live in geopolitically peripheral regions, like NTT, and Papua.  The overtly racial discrimination against fluent Papuan speakers provides obvious, depressing conclusion that hierarchies of language competence may license but do not serve to weaken hierarchies of phenotype. 

Ben Anderson the Indonesianist knew this, and might have referred it to his distinction between nationalism and racism.  Peripheral persons may invest themselves in idea(ls) of a nation biographically through their descendants, who can acquire its language natively as an instrument/symbol/claim to membership.    But such competences, and quasi-official version of nationalism they presuppose, are vulnerable to racist categories–inherited in Indonesia from the Dutch era–that presuppose eternal essences and threats of contamination. 

An upside of this paradox, if there is one, might be Indonesian’s value for overt political mobilization on a subnational basis, as among Dayaks in Kalimantan.  Like the original patriots, they deploy standard Indonesian less to eliminate longstanding prejudice than mitigate its effects.   But they do so in circumstances of marginalization different from those that oppress other groups.

Jessica Peng: At the end of the book, you offer an exciting, revised perspective of the Indonesian story, suggesting that while the widespread state institutionalization of “good and true Indonesian” (Bahasa Indonesia yang baik dan benar) during the New Order era “began as a project oriented to the kinds of modernity found in the West,” the project “has had the unintended result of enabling a plurality of Indonesians” (p. 92). You further suggest that this plurality of Indonesian might serve as “a harbinger for other nations’ ongoing linguistic engagements with globalization” (p. 78). I’d love to invite you to say more about what the Indonesian case might teach us about the possibilities of “plural unities,” as well as share how you hope readers (of various kinds and across different contexts) might take up the insights put forth in this book.

Joe Errington: To keep the book brief, and open to a wider audience, I did not develop this comparison with Silverstein’s (2016) notion of logocratic nation-states (prototypically, the US).  The absence of such a logocracy, I note in chapter 1, leads some to regard Indonesian as peculiar or perhaps deficient.   But it enables also local senses of national belonging.  

In post-new Order Indonesia, as in other nations, post-print mediatizations of (national) languages are circulating—being produced and perceived—through multiple voicings, both plural and translocal.   In chapter 4 I cite sociolinguistic research in Europe which suggests that these dynamics are eroding print-literate logocracies.  But because Indonesia(n) never had this kind of logocracy it might provide a model for other languages which are more overtly plural and less obviously emblematic of shared national identity.

2016    Standards, styles, and signs of the social self. Keynote address, Conference on “Language, Indexicality, and Belonging: Inaugural conference on linguistic anthropology,” Stephen Leonard et al., organizers. Somerville College, University of Oxford, 8 April. Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 9(1). https://www.anthro.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/anthro/documents/media/jaso9_1_2017_134_164.pdf/.

Victoria Bernal, Katrien Pype, and Daivi Rodima-Taylor on their edited volume

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https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/BernalCryptopolitics

In our new edited volume Cryptopolitics: Exposure, Concealment, and Digital Media (Berghahn Books, 2023) we propose the term “cryptopolitics” to draw attention to the significance of hidden information, double meanings, and the constant processes of encoding and decoding messages in negotiating power dynamics. Focusing on African societies, the volume brings together empirically grounded studies of digital media to consider public culture, sociality, and power in all its forms, illustrating the analytical potential of cryptopolitics to elucidate intimate relationships, political protest, and economic strategies in the digital age.

What is cryptopolitics?

Cryptopolitics manifests as secrets, hidden knowledge, skeptical interpretations, and conspiracy theories, which are at the heart of social and political life. Secrecy and decoding are deployed to produce boundaries of exclusion and inclusion, and cryptopolitics are therefore intimately entangled with inequality and difference. Cryptopolitics involves managing communication in ways that play off ambiguity and the distinction between concealed and overt information. Secrecy, deception, and ambiguity are not novel, but cryptopolitics brings these kinds of activities into view under a unified conceptual framework that reveals how they are deployed politically. It focuses attention on the workings of the hidden and the deceptive in relations of power – trying to make sense of signs and forms that obscure and shield.

Cryptopolitics in the era of digital media:

Cryptopolitics takes novel forms and has new consequences when it enters society through digital media. While digital media seemed to promise a new age of transparency and open access to information, it has also created new sources of ambiguity and deception. The recent rise in fake news, conspiracy theories, and misinformation draws attention to powerful ambiguities manipulated for political ends. We suggest that political conflicts, elections, revolt, and other flashpoints bring cryptopolitics dramatically to the fore. Furthermore, everyday interactions and interpersonal relationships are also fields for cryptopolitics as people increasingly manage their connections with others through revelation and concealment, especially as they conduct their lives across online worlds. What needs to be hidden from whom, and what gains power or protection from being hidden, depends on the social and political context. We suggest that anthropological and ethnographic perspectives are therefore key to understanding the dynamics of cryptopolitics in any given situation.

New forms of cryptopolitics emerge with digital media—including the veiled, complicit partnerships between states and technology companies that enable surveillance or internet shutdowns in times of elections or other tense political moments, as it happens frequently in Africa and throughout the Global South. A growing number of states rely on telecommunication and technology companies to help limit the circulation of information that threatens their political power. States also seek to use data collected by tech companies for various political ends. In both these efforts the official rationale is often that of what is framed as security, a paramount contemporary domain of cryptopolitics since threats and espionage produce and are produced by secrecy and suspicion.

Why Africa?

This edited volume employs the concept of cryptopolitics as a lens that helps bring into focus a dynamic of power and communication that operates in a wide array of settings. It explores cryptopolitics in diverse African contexts through ethnographic perspectives and in-depth qualitative studies. The authors situate their work at the intersection of cultural anthropology, media studies, and African studies. We contend that ethnographies of African digital cultures provide fertile ground for the exploration of cryptopolitics. Indirectness and the cryptic have been preferred forms of communication in many areas of postcolonial Africa, where citizens often have a long history of distrusting their leaders. Digital media, consumed mostly through smart phones, has rapidly become central to African politics and social life: private companies, humanitarian organizations, religious communities, families and other networks rely on digital technology in one way or another. 

Cryptopolitics itself is not a new phenomenon. Discussions about encryption, fake accounts, and disinformation remind us that deliberate confusion, doublespeak, distrust, and deciphering are often part of human interaction and are always embedded in strategies of power. At the same time, we should keep in mind that cryptopolitics is foundational to the digitized world, as technologies amplify the duality of concealment and revelation, and also magnify the scale, scope, and set of stakeholders associated with any particular instance. In our book, we employ the concept of “cryptopolitics” as an analytical space that is fruitful for new investigations in contemporary power configurations. We hope that the chapters of this volume can serve as an inspiration to engage in similar research beyond the African continent.

Digital technologies and social media platforms:

Digital technologies have fostered new surveillance and security measures used by states and private companies. These stockpiles of data are powerful public secrets that are known of yet hidden from citizens: a form of cryptopolitics. The objection of African governments and the U.S. government to the encryption of communications is testimony to the power that rests in information and in data. Struggles over who controls what is known, what can be revealed, by whom and to whom are being waged globally. 

Such new power formations lead to new power struggles, as the tensions between the European Union and American platform companies show. They also generate new strategies and tactics of resistance. All over the world, to varying degrees, people engage in new, digital and non-digital practices in efforts to escape repression, whether enacted by the state or other actors of authority.

The chapters of this book use cryptopolitics as a tool to illuminate the underlying discourses of power and powerlessness that are mediated by the novel technologies. Enabling new strategies of concealing and revealing information and intentions, the digital technologies are shown to disrupt and reconfigure people’s communicative practices and lifeworlds. However, the chapters also show that the emerging virtual public sphere that allows people to connect through a variety of new media, should not be seen as always enabling free speech and empowerment, but is shaped by complex interaction between a variety of actors—individual and collective, public and private. We can therefore see how cryptopolitical practices are anchored in local cultures and social norms, but also interlink online and offline, public and intimate socialities.

Our rich empirical cases:

This anthology brings together original research on diverse countries in Africa and diasporas, including Somalia, Eritrea, Burundi, Kenya, Tanzania, Mali, South Africa, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. All chapters examine the role of emerging digital technologies and platforms in mediating knowledge production. A common theme is the relationship between the state and society with particular attention to conflicts, migration, ethnic rivalries, and authoritarian systems. The chapters demonstrate how political and social practices are always anchored in local sociality, and suggest that the analysis of the role of social media in Africa is often central to understanding the present-day cryptopolitical dynamics between the powerless and powerful.

The rise of digital communicative platforms can be seen as central to contemporary activities of obfuscation and revelation—offering new possibilities for the empowerment of the marginal, but also creating new mechanisms of surveillance and control. The book casts light on the emerging dynamics of digital platforms in Africa that are often characterized by ambivalent implications to power and agency—the ability of individuals to make their own choices and act upon them. Various social media and internet search platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Google, increasingly feature as an arena for construction and negotiation of alternative meanings and strategies of resistance.  

Our anthology explores the new digital publics that emerge on diverse global and local social media platforms to question and contest the political legitimacy and narratives of the state. It draws attention to important continuities in political cultures, and the ways long-standing cryptopolitical understandings and practices are adapted to digital media. The chapters of our book provide rich empirical material to illustrate these topics. For example, social media in Burundi draws on the patterns of selective concealing that are part of the cultural repertoire in Burundian politics, while providing citizens with new avenues to combat the machinations and violence of the state. In post-conflict Somalia, the enduring struggles to reify and strategically manipulate otherwise fluid and contextual clan identities have been transferred to the digital world of algorithmic search engines. Communication on Congolese digital platforms is shaped by a locally specific aesthetic of ambiguity that foregrounds socially conditioned modes of concealment and revelation, forming an important strategy for managing personal relationships. New digital technologies of identification aimed at regulating and surveilling migrants in Kenya give rise to new strategies among Somali and Burundi refugees who evade and manipulate the state authorities, while providing them with informal ways to draw on their customary ties of sociality and mutual security. Among Eritreans and the diaspora, the double meanings and ambiguities of humor both mirror and decode the cryptopolitics in the narratives of the authoritarian state and expose these to public scrutiny.

While digital media may render participation in political and economic governance more accessible to the masses, the outcomes remain contested and ambiguous. Thus, for example, digital platforms such as Twitter have disrupted state control over the circulation of information in Kenya and introduced new, participatory practices of engaging with institutional politics. At the same time, digital platforms also entail new opportunities for the state to strengthen its repressive regime. Similarly, the restrictions and freedoms produced by the engagement of the users with Western-owned BigTech platforms that often dominate the digital economy landscape in Africa are also ambivalent and context-dependent. In South Africa and Kenya, for example, WhatsApp-mediated informal savings groups have emerged as an alternative to digital group accounts offered by commercial banks and dedicated FinTech platforms. While they build on vernacular templates of mutuality and allow broader financial access to the masses, they have also given rise to rapidly spreading scams, and data capture by technology companies. Fundraising campaigns increasingly combine WhatsApp with offline contribution networks and mobile payment channels, demonstrating the continued importance of integrating offline and online modes of livelihood management. As the chapters show, digital publics in Africa are thus constituted through multiple materialities and communicative forms, and digital spaces shaped by a variety of actors that include individual users, governments, civil society organizations, diasporas, and increasingly, technology companies and investors.

Cryptopolitics and ethnographic fieldwork:

Cryptopolitics is not only a topic to study in the lifeworlds of our research subjects. Collecting ethnographic data and publishing research involves strategies of exposing, concealing and obscuring as well. As anthropologists, we have sometimes failed to acknowledge the politics of ethnographic research and scholarship, and the local and global power relations that shape our engagement with the people we write about.

Our usage of pseudonyms or the alterations of various idiosyncratic characteristics of local people with whom we interact are also practices of cryptopolitics, of producing layers of meaning, of hiding and obscuring so that our interlocutors or our relationships with them are not harmed. These processes of anthropological research are well-known. Yet, with the ubiquity of social media, practices of data collection, contacting interlocutors, and maintaining relationships with them are constantly being transformed. Scholars increasingly need to reflect on how digitally stored ethnographic material will be protected from risks such as data hacking or theft. Just as citizens are not always fully in control of the data flow of data they consciously produce or inadvertently generate, neither are researchers. All this points to a need for new approaches and perspectives in the discipline that would allow for more balanced disclosures in an environment of mutual dialogue and respect, to replace the old, extractive modes of knowledge-making.

Lisa Messeri on her book, In the Land of the Unreal

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https://www.dukeupress.edu/in-the-land-of-the-unreal

Stefan Helmreich: Your first book, Placing Outer Space, asked not only how place was imagined on and for such off-Earth entities as exoplanets, but also placed such imaginations within the (mostly) American cultural contexts within which they emerged. In In The Land of the Unreal, you again place a technoscientific imagination with respect to a social address. This time the technoscientific object is virtual reality and the place is Los Angeles. Can you get us up to speed on what difference LA makes to the VR that is created there?

Lisa Messeri: Thanks, Stefan. That comparison between the two books is a great place to start. As you point out, in both books I’m interested in the relationship between place and technoscientific endeavors. In the first, I catalogued how scientific elites made place in the cosmos. In this one, I flipped figure and ground and was interested in how place – in the sense of geographic location – shaped technological work. Ethnographically, it was quickly apparent that conversations and development around VR in specific and tech more generally in LA felt different from my prior experiences in Silicon Valley (and spending a decade immersed in MIT’s tech culture). In the book, I therefore attempt to tease out LA’s technological terroir; the features of local geography, history, and expertise that cultivate a different sensibility around tech. Hollywood’s impact on the political economy of LA is of course a driving factor, but so is the longer history of the region’s aerospace and military histories that, as I came to understand, have long been entangled with the entertainment industry. Alongside these different institutional configurations for tech development is also the simple fact of a geographic removal that provided LA’s VR scene space to be something slightly different than San Francisco’s Silicon Valley dominated activities. To be clear, the differences I attribute to place’s influence on tech development and conversations are subtle. They slowly became apparent throughout a year of ethnographic research. On the surface, one could find many connections between VR as it existed in LA and other globally situated hot spots. But teasing out these subtle differences became essential for understanding how particularly claims about VR – for example, that it could supposedly be an empathy machine – came to hold power, both in LA and beyond.

Stefan Helmreich: Anthropologists have taken an interest in virtual realities for a spell now. I think of early speculations in 1990s cyborg anthropology. And then I turn to Tom Boellstorff’s 2008 Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human and Thomas Malaby’s 2011 Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life— which took somewhat opposed approaches, with Boellstorff doing his fieldwork “in” Second Life and Malaby looking at the physical workplace of Linden Labs. I wonder if you might say something about how you think about the relationship — or, even, difference? — between ethnography in virtual reality and ethnography about virtual reality.

Lisa Messeri: When I first began this project (I can offer my NSF proposal as proof!), I imagined I’d be studying the institutions that develop VR, following Malaby, and the sociality of the virtual, following Boellstorff. While such a “mixed reality” project is possible and admirable, it quickly became clear that they require distinct methods and do not necessarily have intuitive points of connection. In the end, I conducted all of my fieldwork IRL and so even though this is an ethnography about virtual reality (and, to some extent, aims at theorizing the virtual) it is not a virtual/digital ethnography. This was partly because the VR experiences whose creation I was documenting were largely cinematic VR rather than social VR; meaning they were experienced individually and not part of a persistent, inhabited virtual world. While I did a lot of VR during my fieldwork, the sociality I was studying as an anthropologist all occurred outside of the headset.

This distinction is really important, as Boellstorff points out in a recent article, “Toward Anthropologies of the Metaverse.” So maybe the metaverse has already peaked and fallen, but the point he is making is that the virtual (be it Second Life or Meta’s Metaverse) is not necessarily something that is only experienceable in virtual reality. When these two are conflated, the field that is taken to be the virtual or the metaverse is prematurely constricted. I agree with this, but the article limits anthropologies of the metaverse (perhaps we will update this to include anthropologies of spatial computing, in light of Apple’s Vision Pro) to be studies of virtual (in headset or not) sociality. Here I would interject and suggest that anthropology’s potential is to create an anthropology of the virtual/metaverse/spatial computing that capaciously includes both ethnography in the virtual and ethnographies about the virtual. Indeed, the conflation Boellstorff points out between the virtual and virtual reality is ethnographically interesting! How might we understand Apple’s and Meta’s insistence that the future they are promising comes in the form of a headset? And how do we understand the communities that form around the promises of such futures (whether they are formed in good faith [to make a quick buck] or not)? We need to study both the makers of technology and the users of technology. Even if this is not a single project for one investigator, they are necessarily complimentary, as Boellstorff and Malaby’s initial work on Second Life demonstrated.

Stefan Helmreich: Your book is keen to look at the work of women innovators in VR, especially in the immediate (and at the time very encouraging) aftermath of #MeToo. You encountered some women who made claims that their work might generate more compassionate technological development — claims that you usefully complicate by directing the reader to feminist work on the multiple and not always straightforward politics that arrive any time notions of care are invoked. Can you tell us what it was like to be in conversation with some of these innovators — in ways that both heard them out and that offered your own feminist STS expertise to the discussion?

Lisa Messeri: My biggest concern at the start of this project was that I knew I would be in conversation with people whose VR projects I might not fully be behind. After all, the impetus for this project was trying to understand how a community comes to believe that their technology can make the world a better place. Given ALL the studies we have about how well-meaning technologists (and technologies) often … do the opposite, I was very aware of my positionality. Therefore, going into the field, my strategy was that for those who would let me be a participant observer, I would take the participation seriously. I was not going to sit back with my notebook and document practices that (unintentionally!) inscribed problematic politics into VR experiences, but I was going to participate – I was going to offer my feminist STS lens as a resource for these teams. A small example was when I was working on a VR experience about a mission to Mars, I was asked to read a preliminary script. It was riddled with references to “colonizing” Mars. I suggested we find other language, noting how that loaded metaphor presupposes certain social (including human-nonhuman) relations. We rewrote the script and that conversation led to a slightly different ethos behind the fictional Mars world that continued to be built out. Anyway, that was an easy enactment of participation.

There were harder situations where projects were admirable – and too far along in their development to change – but I could see potential pitfalls. I still wanted to document these cases, as it was important that I hear the creators out (as you say) and really try to understand the well-meaning intention behind such projects. As my year of fieldwork progressed, and as these relationships became more trusting, I would be able to discuss some of my concerns and never was there a case where these concerns were rejected. And most of the time, these concerns weren’t even a surprise but ones that the innovators themselves had been privately puzzling over.

When it came to writing, I employed several strategies to layer in the critique. Sometimes, my interlocutors would open the door to critique with their own observations. Other times, I made the object of critique not individuals or even projects, but the structures and situations that make potentially harmful VR experiences seem potentially helpful.

Stefan Helmreich: “Unreal” — Can you talk about what this/word concept means from the point of view of your interlocutors? How and where do their uses of the term resonate — and not — with your use of the idea?

Lisa Messeri: The unreal got stuck in my brain really early in fieldwork. I had gone on a studio tour at Paramount and our guide played a clip from the 1961 Jerry Lewis movie The Errand Boy, which began with an arial shot of Los Angeles that slowly zoomed in on Paramount studio. A voiceover narrated, “This is Hollywood. Land of the real and the unreal.” This was in my mind as I began to better understand LA as a city and VR as a technology. The unreal would pop up in weird places. Usually it was a colloquialism, exclaiming that a really cool VR experience was “unreal.” But after fieldwork, I also came across a 2016 marketing report that was tracing the trend of “unrealities.” This trend included escape rooms and astrology and Snapchat filters and meditation retreats and, of course, virtual reality. These things are all appealing not exclusively because of the fantasy they offer, but because that fantasy is experienced in dialogue with a reality that is being pushed against. In the book, I define the unreal as that which “holds in tension an extraordinary rendering of reality with what might be thought of as an everyday reality.” There have always been multiple realties, but the unreal marks moments when such multiplicity demands attention. So, saying a VR experience is “unreal” is from a delight in knowing your body was in the physical world but having an experience that is deeply at odds with those surroundings.

As I was conducting fieldwork in 2018 – right in the middle of the Trump presidency and its explosion of alternative facts – I marked US politics as also unreal, in so far as many liberals struggled to comprehend Trump’s “extraordinary rendering of reality” with how they understood reality. This political reading comes from an intellectual genealogy of theorizing US politics from LA, from Baudrillard and Eco’s hyperreal to Soja’s real-and-imagined thirdspace. To these 20th century theories, I add the 21st century twist of the unreal.

Stefan Helmreich: You write in the book about VR boosters as sometimes eager to pitch their projects as in the service of empathy. And you point us to the fact that the register of empathy can be a way of avoiding questions to do with institutions, the distribution of resources, politics — with things beyond the scale of the sheerly well-meaning individual. The silicon panic of our time is to do with generative AI — and some thinkers, like Sherry Turkle, have kept their eyes on the rise of tools promising artificial intimacy, thinking here about therapy chatbots that promise artificial empathy. What, if anything, do you think recent AI development has done for/to the promises or VR? Is empathy still important? Or are other terms of conversation now surfacing?

Lisa Messeri: When I was doing fieldwork, VR was in frequent conversation with blockchain and AI as a triumvirate that would usher in the future. I mention this to mark that they are part of the same ecology – and draw on many of the same institutions, resources, people, and so on. So in general, much of what I write about in my book is a primer for today’s genAI moment. And the persistence of empathy as a category is a frightening reminder! An October 7, 2023 headline from the Wall Street Journal asked “Can AI do Empathy Even Better than Humans?”

But all the thinking that has been done about VR and empathy gives us a head start on how to think about AI and empathy. Turkle was one of the first thinkers I looked to when getting at the empathy angle. In a chapter in which she responds directly to claims that VR is an empathy machine, she worries that “the feeling of conversation becomes conversation enough.” Denny Profitt, a psychologist at UVA who provided me with my first exposure to VR, observed to me sometime around 2015 that VR empathy experiences were potentially dangerous because they could induce a feeling of false catharsis. In caring deeply, do you forget to actually act in a way that remedies the problem? Or as Nakamura has put it, what is the morality of “feeling good about feeling bad”?

In figuring out how to think about empathy – be it AI- or VR-induced – I have been guided by Atanasoski and Vora’s Surrogate Humanity. They show how technologies that seek to replace or conceal human labor very often replicate dehumanizing logics of race, gender, and colonialism. So, yes, we need to be incredibly wary of VR that promises instant empathy or AI that does empathy better than a human. But, one of the case studies of my book suggests that replacing or concealing human labor isn’t the only strategy for deploying VR (or possibly AI). Should these technologies instead be used to augment human labor, perhaps there are less destructive applications of these tools. In other words, I don’t think there is something inherently bad about attempts to leverage technologies in an effort to help people and situations become better. In fact, I think such pursuits, done genuinely, are admirable! However, social problems will never have exclusively technological solutions and therefore thinking of solutions in which technologies augment – rather than replace – human labor and sociality seems to be a plausible way forward.

And that will be the hopeful note with which I end this Q&A!

Kinga Koźmińska on her book, Soundings

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https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/soundings-and-the-politics-of-sociolinguistic-listening-for-transnational-space-9781350331303

Leonie Schulte: Can you describe sounding and how as a conceptual lens it allows us to understand power in contexts of migration and linguistic hybridity?

Kinga Koźmińska: I’m interested in contemporary vernacular-cosmopolitan transformations and how the current communicative environment which enables extended capabilities of action and multi-presence in various sites transforms our relations in transnational space, with a focus on what role language plays in these processes. I study sounded signs in contexts of migration to understand emerging linguistic norms and practices, and to unpack processes through which individuals and groups place themselves in socio-linguistic landscapes. The aim of this book is to draw the reader’s attention to the practices of sounding and listening. I called the book Soundings to confront the reader with multiplicity and the reality that sounds of language do things in the world.

By examining the relationship between research practices, communication and knowledge production, I wanted to add to the debates on group formation processes and examine the ways in which we relate to these multiple others and construe difference at the level of language. Working in the context of migrations between Poland and the United Kingdom since 2012 has coincided in time with the most radical changes in European space and increased politicisation of movement. In my work, I explore how beginning with situated audio and audio-visual recordings may enable us to see how these changes were affecting particular individuals and groups.

I began with a simple premise that in human face-to-face interactions, sounds of language are produced by bodies situated in space and time. This enabled me to focus on how the senses were imbuing timescapes and landscapes with their own memory and understanding of social relations. I investigate how the way we pronounce sounds of language is entangled in particular imaginaries about self-other-time-space relations: while some of us may be moving in universal time, others may portray themselves as evolving in stable timespaces and still others may focus on the here and now. I am interested in unpacking how these different imaginaries may be sounded out and how this may lead to some of our rhythms becoming dominant and others being erased or portrayed as less real.

Beginning with situated performances enables me to observe how we remain positioned while we do the work of sounding and listening. My approach to this project was situated within history of specialist knowledge production, which still has a profound impact on how the world works. This book explores how my act of bringing these different soundings in relation with one another may help us see how semiotics of the voice works today, noting shared themes, but never erasing nuances and contradictions of human experience. By doing so, I hope to push my field forward as we deal with the legacy of our troublesome past in linguistics and anthropology.

Leonie: Your book ties together several research areas, including the anthropology of the senses, to expand upon our knowledge of sociolinguistic listening. Can you speak more to the ways in which we can understand both sounding and listening as embodied practices?

Kinga: I started writing this book in October 2021, finishing in early 2023. The context of its production is important: when we started unlocking ourselves post Covid-19-pandemic, and when we had transformations of sensory experiences that were really impossible to ignore. They had a tremendous impact on people around me and made me rethink some key questions about human communication, language and relationality.

Because of this and my work on a family language project (2017-2019) involving audiovisual recordings, I became engaged in discussions in anthropology of the senses. I saw materiality and sociality of the senses as key for emerging transformations and constellations of power. I was reading about projects examining the role of technology for discourse production, such as in studies of deaf communities. At the same time, I was inspired by Bucholtz and Hall’s (2016) call to move beyond materiality-discourse dichotomy in my field. I decided to combine these bodies of research.

When engaging with some arguments in anthropology of the senses, I wasn’t fully convinced that we can actually say that language/semiotics are no longer modes for encountering the sensual cultural world. If you come from a background where you don’t speak one of the dominant languages as your first language, you immediately see that language is interwoven in modes of experiencing the world, and it is really who you are.

To me, we may try to understand the world only if we take language seriously into account, a proposition influenced by language ideological research stressing that rendering language invisible creates social inequality. I wanted to allow for reconfiguration of how we think about linguistic knowledge in the light of current changes, while not ignoring what we know about how language works. I explore how bodily production and response may work today, how we connect with others, how we occupy and push the limits of normative structures.

As the social and sensory orders continue to be (re)made, I argue for seeing sounding/listening as embodied, always multidimensional, embedded in particular energetics of social relations, never neutral/unmediated. This urges me to see my own practice as operating within a particular culture of listening, hopefully carving a way to use the knowledge we have while remaining open to transformations of concepts and realities so that the world may become more liveable for more of us.

Leonie: What I found particularly exciting about reading your book was the richness and variety of data you present, including a depth of ethnographic detail, which really speaks to the ways in which your work engages so many fields of research. Can you speak more to the methodologies which underlie this book?

Kinga: It is important to note that the methodologies that I bring in dialogue are tightly linked to my trajectory within academia and engagement with different questions and audiences. The reader will quickly see that the book goes back to my PhD data. It is my final take on ideas that I have been sitting with for a long time. I was trying to understand what the focus on the sonic dimension of discourse adds to discussions on emerging transformations in transnational space, how it unpacks how we are mobile and still emplaced, how we are singular but multiple. I explore how the ubiquity of and augmentation in human capabilities may influence linguistic norms and innovation, and how that in turn impacts how we develop categories of normality and weirdness, who’s included, who’s excluded. Importantly, the PhD project was followed by work with variously positioned Polish-speaking migrants in Greater London, where I was interested in multi-party talk and multimodal analysis to see how these families were made, how language was embedded in other embodied phenomena and used together with objects and technologies. This project focused on Polish, Somali and Chinese families in the UK. I worked with audiovisual data from 10 families of different types including Polish-Polish-speaking, mixed heritage, biracial, LGBTQ with history of transracial adoption.

There were important societal and methodological questions emerging from that work. Going back to this first project in 2021, looking at the sonic dimension of discourse, I couldn’t ignore other observations. The methodologies that I bring in dialogue are spread over a long period of time. I operated within various corners of seemingly similar debates, but with quite differently positioned migrants in the UK, and in different periods: pre- and post-Brexit. Beginning with performances of collective memory in a community of movement, the book brings the voices of those others who are often silenced in key societal debates to the fore. The book is my own experimentation to understand what has happened, how this is linked to history, what these methodologies enable us to see, and how that can push us forward. Creating a relation between these bodies of research, I hope, new questions may emerge, perhaps allowing us not to go back to assumptions for past times, but gain a new perspective for new times.  

Leonie: Your book offers a very in-depth and longitudinal view of Polish newcomers in the UK, and what has always struck me about your work is how you demonstrate the ways in which processes of belonging, and community formation, but also individual ties to national and local identity and socioeconomic mobility are negotiated linguistically–or rather, how they are sounded out. Can you talk more about the ways in which structures of dominance and marginalisation are unsettled through embodied soundwork?

Kinga: I did something that is rarely done. I decided to explore what may happen if I don’t allow for erasure of minute phonetic detail, but rather follow my participants’ suggestions who at the time were linking features of language to emerging person types in transnational space. I was interested in seeing how my specialist knowledge and tools may be used to shed light on what was going on at that point. Engaged in discussions in theoretical linguistics and anthropology, I decided to examine sound production in detail. To do so, I used discourse analysis and phonetic and statistical software. I wanted to figure out how sound relationships work and are linked to sociocultural dynamics, e.g. social networks or orientation in transnational space. I analysed the emergence of the dominant scale, the use of standardized forms of language and how in transnational space this plays out in a fairly privileged context.

In the final chapter of the book, I put my findings in dialogue with projects focussing on the form of the underheard or silenced, where these uneven language expectations play out with the most intense force, as it was beautifully written, when bodies ‘open themselves up in order to survive and live with others’ (LaBelle 2018: 68). By doing so, I explore how standardisation works in transnational space, what regulatory mechanisms make it work, but also how this underscores that scales are constantly (re)made, with sounds of language acting as scalar connections that make value effects in the world. This illuminates multiple mechanisms that lock us in transnational space, often contributing to experiences of mobility and immobility at the same time. There is no single metric to understand all scenarios of migration. My work is trying to make an intervention with the skills I have to make multiple logics and rhythms our starting point. Trying to critically address my limitations and foregrounding adjustments that must be made, I propose to see sociolinguistic listening as curatorship, hopefully, enabling healing of these multiple publics that I bring in dialogue.

Johanna Woydack on her book, Linguistic Ethnography of a Multilingual Call Center

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https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-93323-8

Kristina Nielsen: Call Centers have been the study of multiple linguistic and cultural studies that often focus on the topic of outsourcing labor or the spread of neoliberal values. Your book seems remarkably different in its focus in that it takes place in London and focuses on calling scripts, could you please explain how your book frames call center work in a different light than other scholars who have studied this kind of workplace and why that is so important?

Johanna Woydack: As a global city, London has been a hub, if not the hub, of Europe’s call center industry, making and taking calls worldwide. Call centers support numerous industries, such as financial services, fintech, and the tech industry by relying on highly educated multilingual migrants who, taken together, form a capable workforce. It is not unusual in London call centers to find someone working from the EU or the Commonwealth making calls to places across the globe including the US, Gulf countries, the EU, Asia, South America or New Zealand and doing so in multiple languages. As a result London is an important focus for call center work.

As you mentioned, a lot of the other call center literature focuses on offshore (monolingual) call centers as part of the spread of neoliberal and (neo)colonial values, allowing researchers to highlight topics such as globalization. Typical emphases in the literature are the novelty, exploitation, and exoticness of call centers and offshoring of services from the Global North to South including time-space compression. Although this has been important research, it perhaps paints a misleading picture by downplaying the importance of onshore call centers, which outnumber offshore call centers in terms of employment workforce percentages. By contrast even vibrant and vital Western call center hubs such as Toronto, Dublin or London, sites of incredibly large numbers of call centers, look odd. Yet these centers are integral to the global and local economies and allow us to study globalization, post-fordism, migration and integration, standardization, organizations, surveillance, gender, social class, language learning, and upskilling among other things.

I was fortunate to be able to enter the call center industry as both an employee and researcher thus giving me unusual access for a researcher to daily practices. To my knowledge, there is no other long-term ethnography of a call center. Based on my four years of fieldwork and over one hundred interviews, I found that a call center is a lot more than just a place where people read from scripts and are monitored round the clock and as a result become robotic and deskilled.  In fact, I observed  that scripts aided second language learning and grounded increasing professional, cultural and linguistic competencies. I focused on scripts because they were not only representative of call centers and their standardization, but linked different levels of the company: corporate management, middle management, and agents. My work is inspired by classic ethnographies of workplaces such as Michael Burawoy’s Manufacturing Consent and Donald Roy’s Banana Time, but also Erving Goffman’s books Asylum and Stigma. I applied an innovative methodology combining Dorothy Smith’s ‘institutional ethnography’ with Greg Urban and Michael Silverstein’s ‘transcontextual analysis’. I call this framework ‘institutional transpositional analysis’, a method by which I follow the career of a script to investigate why it is created, changed and performed as it travels through the organization and how different actors contribute to an organization and express their agency. I believe this method can be applied to studying other organizations, not just call centers.

Kristina Nielsen: In this book, you follow the social life of a call center script, how does focusing on following a script’s career rather than a person’s career allow you to tell a story that is not often told about the workplace?

Johanna Woydack: There is a tradition to design research around chains, threads, and trajectories to follow the flow of objects to create multi-sided ethnography. I am thinking, for example, of Sidney Mintz’s and Ulf Hannerz’s work.  By following text trajectories, in this case, the social life of a script from its creation to its death, I created an ethnography within an organization that is integrally multi-sided in terms of the corporate hierarchy, employees of diverse backgrounds, and clients around the world. Following a person’s career would not have highlighted this multiplicity. My methods further allowed me to explore what standardization means in the call center. As the call center’s controversial raison d’être, standardization raises questions of agency, surveillance, resistance and compliance by multiple actors from (corporate) management, to team leaders and finally to call agents. Besides that, I was inspired by Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban’s seminal book on The Natural History of Discourse, especially Richard Bauman’s chapter on the “Transformation of the Word in the Production of Mexican Festival Drama” which also explores how a script is re-contextualized and re-entextualized, although in a different context.

Kristina Nielsen: Working with corporations while in the field poses its own sets of challenges to fieldwork, could you tell us about your approach to working within a corporate setting?

Johanna Woydack: As many other ethnographers who have done fieldwork in corporations or on factory floors, I was also an employee and gained full access as an insider.  I first worked the phones and then was promoted to team leader. One challenge in such research, especially when the agenda is developed outside the corporation, is to gain management approval. I asked management whether they would allow me to do research and interview fellow co-workers while working myself as an employee and they agreed. It was my impression that they appreciated my application of linguistics not only in my own work for the corporation and in my research but also in training and helping co-workers interact on the phone and improve their performances so that corporate targets were met.

Kristina Nielsen: One of the theoretical frameworks you engage with in your book is the notion of standard which has been a mainstay of linguistics but is often looked at as a phenomenon that is resisted from the bottom and controlled from the top. How does your account of standardization show some of the nuances and motivations that might not be clear from previous accounts?

Johanna Woydack: My account of standardization offers insights into types of participants marginalized or overlooked in previous non-ethnographic studies such as middle management and team leaders, not just the agents.

These insights emerged through the mapping of a script’s textual trajectories encompassing the entire organization, and through field notes on the surrounding real life back-stage activities during a script’s career. Campaign managers and team leaders are important figures whose interpretations and actions influence proceedings on the floor. Ethnographic observation allows one to see how they perceive standardization or work with it on a daily basis. Discussion of team leaders or middle managers in previous call center studies has been limited to mention of supervisors who are part of a system, but has not recognized these employees as a significant interest group with the capability to act differently from their line managers.

The trajectories of the script and many of my fieldnotes not only highlight the actual existence of different interest groups within the organization, but also show that in real time all participants (agents, team leaders or middle managers) have agency, for example, when they recontextualize a script in a new context, orally or through hand-written annotations. This is an important form of agency overlooked in most previous studies that draw only on interviews or questionnaires. Ethnographic insights reveal that it is not the sole purpose of a script to regulate activities within the organization. Only corporate management and the client believe  a script is static. Participants further down the hierarchy conceptualize a script as part of a textual trajectory and therefore transforming throughout its journey. Changing a script is not an act of resistance but of performative improvement of benefit to the company and its clients, as well as agents. Hence, scripts and standardization vary in meaning from corporate management to participants on the floor. Against this background, the notion of what standardized, standard or standardization means becomes more difficult. If understanding depends on the hierarchical position of a participant, whose understanding do we take?

Finally, I wanted to draw a more complex picture of standardization as in social theory and sociology it has tended to be derogatory leading to homogenization, deskilling and ultimately to dehumanization. I started off from the assumption that standardization does not have to be negative and investigated possible benefits in actual use. For example, a significant number of college graduates work in call centers in London because competition for most jobs is fierce and graduates from other countries compete with graduates of over 50 domestic colleges/universities. It often requires some time in London before migrants find a satisfying job in their fields of expertise.  In the meantime, to make money and improve their English, they may work in a call center. Often this becomes an opportunity to improve one’s linguistic competence and launch oneself into an appropriate professional career.

Kristina Nielsen: Would you say that your book is a story of how call center agents… have agency?

Johanna Woydack: This is one of the facets of the book. I wanted to re-conceptualize the concept of resistance as it can be crude. Previous works on resistance, both Neo-Marxian and Foucauldian, although epistemologically very different, have succumbed to what Dennis Mumby has “called the duality of control and resistance”, wherein there is no room for agents, agency or subjectivity. Agency tends to be limited to upper echelons of power structures. Equally, if there is resistance, it is assumed to be guerilla-like, never collective, as it is read as subsumed within and reproduced by control mechanisms.

Agency, however, in call centers such as the London centers I explored is part and parcel of the skilled work entailed by those who operate the phones as well as by their leaders and management. Lower-level agency is often missed because of the negativity associated with calling as robotic and because it is a job that is mostly oral; the oral and technical skills of agents can be invisible and illegible even to managers.

I was also interested in producing a framework to study an organization in the new economy, including providing voices to different people such as middle management and lower-level employees.

On yet another level the book is about how standardization works or perhaps fails to work and how it is interpreted. The drive to standardization is not limited to call centers (including the desire to impose scripts top-down) but also appears in institutions like schools and hospitals, making the topic one of even greater general interest.

Lastly, I provided a larger story about being a graduate/immigrant in London, about London socialization and about how call centers play an integral part in the local and global economies. One’s call center past is something successful graduates or other individuals might hide due to social stigma but in safe settings agents report gaining important cultural and linguistic skills there.

Kristina Nielsen: Finally, call centers are a topic that most readers can relate to because they have inhabited the role of customer at one point or another. Is there one thing that you would want readers to learn about call centers, not as academics but as customers?

Johanna Woydack: Call center workers usually work hard, are educated, tech savvy and with time, become skilled in communicative competence, although this is sometimes hidden by constraints of the system. They try to help consumers but sometimes cannot because of conflicting logics and rules within rules that the system has created. They navigate their way through these constraints the best they can but often this is a challenge they cannot meet on their own. The industrial sociologist Marek Korczynski has theorized this conflict and dilemma as consumer-oriented bureaucracy.