Sounding and listening

Part of my work involves studying the sonic dimension of discourse with qualitative and quantitative methods. For my PhD project at Oxford (2012-2016), I collected situated accounts of migration and investigated the  production of perspectives on norms and practices among a group of Polish-speaking young adults living and working in South-East England. In my thesis, I juxtaposed different orientations and rhythms that sat momentarily with one another to form emerging Polish-sounding stories in the UK. By foregrounding the sounded dimension of discourse, I wanted to move away from regimes of visibility towards analysing how contemporary changes in sensory modalities influence adherence to linguistic norms and sociolinguistic innovation, and how this may impact group formation processes and performances of collective memory.

This project has resulted in a series of articles and serves as a basis for my book, Soundings and the Politics of Sociolinguistic Listening for Transnational Space, recently published by Bloomsbury Academic. In the book,  I investigate how the practices of sounding and listening help understand how sensorimotor capacities are entangled in bodily experiences and how they are embedded in their sociocultural and technological contexts. I focus on embodied enactments and their entanglement in network cultures and specific rearrangements of materials. Tracing connections between situated research actions, communication, knowledge production, historical emergence of recording techniques and specific politics of modernity, I propose to redefine the practice of sociolinguistic listening as curatorship and openness. 

This part of my work is quite technical as I closely examined the dynamics of linguistic production, materiality of speech and their embedding in research practices. Using phonetic analysis and discourse analysis, I closely examined the ways in which my participants were assembling self and collective images through their interactional moves. I was particularly interested in emerging sounded differences which were used to differentiate between emerging images of time-space-personhood. Here, I examined my participants' use of phonetic detail such as aspiration of stops and falling-rising intonation. To study segmental variation I conducted phonetic analysis in Praat, mixed-modelling in R as well as discourse analysis. To study intonational variation, I used close listening technique, Praat, and methods from interactional prosody studies. This enabled me to conduct a detailed analysis of my participants’ situated stance-taking in different depictions of time-space-personhood and contribute to discussions on scale-making and processes of authentication in transnational space. In the thesis, I argued that the new hybridised, speaking styles were influenced by speaker’s ideological orientation and network-linked practices.