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.
CaMP Anthropology 