“Making people happen”: materiality and movement in meaning-making trajectories

Abstract

Trans-contextual analysis focuses on the distribution of meanings over space and time and the variable resources which come into play to configure this distribution. This article traces two lines of inquiry: first, it outlines a unit of trans-contextual analysis which involves the tracing of recontextualizing and resemiotising moves within meaning-making trajectories. This proposed unit of analysis takes mobility as its premise and provisionality as its condition, and it asks what do we learn about meaning-making and about society from the examination of this distribution and these resources? I compare two different sequences of events, one from a visit to a remote village in Tanzania; the other from an ethnography in a house-building project in South Africa. I detail the recontextualizing and resemiotising moves and the resources that come into play in each. The second line of inquiry focuses on the “joins” that link meaning-making across contexts, enabling its projection beyond the local. The article seeks to understand the role of objects together with language in contributing to meaning-making across space and time, and to problematize the different ontologies and theoretical accounts that have been offered for interpreting the relation between language and objects. I argue that the unit of trans-contextual analysis and a return to objects together can contribute more precise lines of inquiry to the development of a sociolinguistics of mobility and complexity.

Keywords:

• trans-contextual analysis
• meaning-making trajectories
• recontextualization
• resemiotisation
• agency of objects
• mobility

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Catherine Kell is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, and a specialist in Literacy Studies. She studies literacy as everyday social practice using a linguistic ethnography and her research and development work has been based in informal settlements, development projects, schools and out-of-school learning spaces, social movements, workplaces and higher education institutions in South Africa, New Zealand, and Tanzania.

Notes

1. Bakhtin's notion of chronotopes takes a different and valid approach to diachronic analysis but it has not been applied to naturally occurring activity in general, rather being applied to literary texts, although notable exceptions to this are from Lemke (2000) and Prior (2009) who have both drawn on this concept in productive and innovative ways.

2. Even earlier though, Bernstein (1990) had raised the importance of the concept of recontextualization and especially how power and control enter into communication as it moves from context to context, or domain to domain.

3. “Seeing flies” is apparently a reference to the way the letters of the alphabet look on the page. The idiom means we cannot read and write.

4. The architects were working under a different set of pressures, in effect, a different trajectory, which was about increasing density, so that more people could be accommodated on sites closer to the city.