Ironising with intelligence

Abstract

This article is part of a project that seeks in part to explore how students understand and use the concept of intelligence. It is based on an ethnographically contextualized study of linguistic events and was conducted in an inner-city upper secondary school in Sweden. The article shows that the concept of intelligence is not spontaneously used by students but is given meaning by them when they are asked, and that this meaning is given in relation to future expectations, hopes, ambitions and the grades and performances in school that are seen as a means to attain them. When doing this the students also appear to describe their education, the demands it places on them and their performances with a sense of irony. Indeed, on closer analysis, irony seems to be an important communicative strategy for these students more generally.

Keywords:

• linguistic ethnography
• intelligence
• discourse
• meaning
• irony

Notes

1. The Swedish Research Council financed this project.

2. Voloshinov (1986), in a classic language philosophical study, uses the term ‘refraction’ to describe the continuous variations of term meanings in actual communication. This variation – the fact that we constantly use the same terms to express slightly different things – gives the language social stability, which otherwise would not have been possible. Via small unconscious misinterpretations, we give each other the benefit of the doubt. This strong, situated character of language use is also emphasized in linguistic ethnography. In the same way, different ‘repertoires of speech’ can very well be found in the same local communicative practice, due to differences in personal history or, differentially put, to differences in communicative resources available.

3. This study is more product of an ethnographical framework than, for example, Gumperz classical study from 1982. For a discussion around important ethnographical methodological topics such as time, reflexivity, and theory in relation to data production in ethnography, see Jeffrey and Troman 2004.

4. This is reminiscent of points made by Beach and Dovemark (2011). As they pointed out, students seem to rarely use the concept of intelligence and when they do it seems to be melted together with remarks on contextual performances within the school as a performative arena. This was also the case in the present investigation.

5. See also Draelants and Darchy-Koechlin (2011). The elite students in that study not only confirm stereotypes but also use stereotypes as resources for continuous self-referential work.

6. However, we do not claim that there are no other ways to handle this concept on the site, or that the students do not deal with this concept in other ways when they are in other situations. Such variations are both possible and even likely. The category of intelligence is an intellectual artefact that transmits and shapes possible courses of communication and action, but at the same time it is contested and reshaped and is under continuous reconstruction. We have called this a ‘double bind of social meaning-making’. It derives from situated language use, never being either fully fixated or totally stable.