Curating emerging linguistic soundscapes in transnational space (MOSAIC Seminar)

MOSAIC Group for Research on Multilingualism Seminar Series 2023-24

Speaker: Dr Kinga Koźmińska, Lecturer, Birkbeck, University of London

Drawing on her recently published book, Soundings and the Politics of Sociolinguistic Listening for Transnational Space Dr Koźmińska explores how the focus on the practices of sounding and listening helps better understand the role of language in contemporary vernacular-cosmopolitan transformations.

The talk will examine how the act of bringing different logics and rhythms of seemingly similarly positioned transnational actors with links to Poland, but residing in the UK in relation with one another, informs how semiotics of the voice may work today. It will also examine how sensorimotor capacities are entangled in bodily experiences and how they are embedded in their sociocultural and technological contexts. The talk adds to the debates on how the use of communicative resources operating in multiple and co-present frames influences the changing ideals of linguistic legitimacy.

Dr Koźmińska begins by foregrounding the need to connect research on scale in migration contexts with studies of embodied soundwork and of stance in semiotics. She argues that such a focus helps unpack how language both perpetuates and, through emerging alternatives, challenges systems of exclusion and inclusion. 

Her talk will then discuss the situated production of perspectives on norms and practices, highlighting contradictory tendencies and processes through which the change in location changes both the transnational actor’s perspective and units of comparison and discuss what dimensions and contexts are relevant to whom, and how these fit into the ways in which larger stories are enacted and explained. This in turns helps reveal how we occupy and push the limits of normative structures in the context of changing research possibilities, positionalities, economies, ecologies of media, and aesthetics.

Dr Koźmińska proposes to see sociolinguistic listening as curatorship, potentially enabling healing of multiple publics brought in dialogue in the times of increased politicization of movement. 

Biography

Kinga Koźmińska (DPhil Oxford) is a lecturer and researcher in sociolinguistics in the School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication at Birkbeck, University of London. Drawing on situated audio and audio-visual recordings, she studies linguistic soundscapes, scale-making and material-semiotic practices among transnational individuals and groups. 

This a free seminar and open to the public, staff and students. 

Please note, the seminar will not be recorded and is in person only