Objectives

• • Bring together researchers from sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, literacy studies and linguistic ethnography who have been researching text production and uptake practices in a variety of different institutional contexts

• • Explore empirical and theoretical tools for developing dynamic approaches to text analysis

• • Explore and discuss the analytic affordances of ‘text trajectories’ and related notions – text histories, genre chains, genre suites, text chains – for researching linguistic phenomena

• • Determine ways in which research on text trajectories can contribute to, or have an impact on, institutional practices and policies.

Five speakers presented research undertaken in a range of different institutional settings: law and policing, medical surgery, academia and social work, journalism, workplace health and safety practices, and a self-build project. There was an emphasis across the papers not only on how we can research and theorise dynamic aspects of text production and uptake, but also on how this research can impact on policy and practice. While the speakers were employing a range of approaches in their research, they all shared a commitment to ethnographically informed close analysis and an interest in how such analysis could feed into issues of specific instititional and broader social concern. Each presentation was followed by discussion and additional small group discussions identified emerging points and questions. The seminar concluded with a respondent-led plenary.

Papers and discussion

Frances Rock (Cardiff University) focused on how textual travel in legal settings has the potential to influence lives in permanent and incisive ways. Using examples of data from her onging research in policing, she focused in detail on trajectories which are intrinsic to processes of cautioning, interviewing, police training, custody, and letters and calls to the police (Rock Reference Rock2007). In each case she considered the processes and effects of recontextualisation and entextualisation, for instance, in text mediation such as when police explain the meaning of the caution to suspects. She raised points about the processes of personalisation in cautioning, the chaining of texts in interviewing trajectories as police attempt to construct timelines for critical events, the use of hyperlegislative language to establish power and authority, and how text trajectories can contain traces of defunct practices which have to be somehow managed in police/suspect interactions. Citing intertextuality in relation to different levels of language (e.g. sentences, stories), Rock drew her presentation together with a quotation from Smith (Reference Smith and Smith2006: 66) ‘The magical character of replicable texts. . .is that they are read, seen, heard, watched and so on in particular local and observable settings while at the same time hooking up an individual's consciousness into relations that are translocal.’

Theresa Lillis (The Open University) explored text histories and trajectories in two distinct contexts: academia (writing for publication) and social work (case note recording). She highlighted the value of adopting a text history approach for shifting analytic attention away from single texts towards clusters of texts across time and space and for identifying key moments of production and uptake. Stressing the limits of situated local analysis of literacy events (Brandt & Clinton Reference Brandt and Clinton2002), Lillis considered how texts travel, which parts remained fixed and which changed, in the context of academics pursuing publication in Anglophone journals in a global context (Lillis & Curry Reference Lillis and Curry2010). She pointed out the important role of brokers and the epistemological implications of textual changes in the academic articles. In relation to data from case notes by social workers, Lillis illustrated the ways in which institutionally designed software systems prescribed specific text trajectories and emphasised the important influence of real and imagined future text trajectories on the ways in which texts such as case notes are produced and taken up. A key issue raised was that of professional voice, control and accountability on decisions about what and how to write. Professionalism here involved looking beyond the local and navigating enormous and sometimes irreconcilable tensions.

Jeff Bezemer (Institute of Education, London) presented a multimodal approach to researching text trajectories, where the analytic focus is on representation, mode, affordance, transformation and transduction, and the gains and losses of particular transformations across modes. Bezemer drew from his research on the negotiation of meaning-making in the operating theatre (Bezemer et al. Reference Bezemer, Cope, Kress and Kneebone2011). Concentrating on surgery training, he examined how nature is turned into culture in charting biomedical categories and how the human body becomes a text which is read through a particular epistemological lens (for example Western scientific versus alternative medical models). He highlighted the interpretative skills that trainee surgeons need to develop in shifting between the two-dimensional diagrams and images in text books, and the three-dimensional nature of actual activity in operating theatres, which is further complicated by digital equipment enabling imaging of internal procedures. Bezemer raised questions about how learning occurs across formal training, simulation and practical craft, and how such complex multimodal processes can be recorded and transcribed by the researcher. He demonstrated how he digitally records what people say in relation to what they do with surgical instruments, facilitating the mapping and analysis of transmodal meaning-making trajectories which are integral to teaching and learning in this context.

Tom Van Hout (Leiden University) examined how text trajectories coordinate workplace institutional activity in news production, in the process changing interpretations and outcomes. He argued that these trajectories are an important focus for research: while textualism dominates current language ideology (Blommaert Reference Blommaert2004) and labour is increasingly textualised, workplace writing has been understudied as an expert activity. Drawing from his research on journalists’ working practices (Van Hout & Macgilchrist Reference Van Hout and Macgilchrist2010), Van Hout reflected on the use of ethnographic methods to follow news stories across episodes of recontextualisation (drafting, editing, newsroom conferences) in order to investigate how texts are institutionally funneled to materialise as ‘news’. He highlighted the tension between pursuing a narrow and deep focus on key informants, interactive observations and computer-assisted micro-level analysis, and the need for repeated observations to establish the historical depth which is practically impossible to attain in real-time and virtual ethnography, where traditional ethnographic concepts of ‘place’ and ‘being there’ are complicated by ‘media-centric issues of flow and fluidity of information within a networked society’ (Murphy Reference Murphy and Nightingale2011: 396). Van Hout highlighted how being a good journalist is predicated on the ways in which texts are processed and transformed across different institutional contexts in the ‘fixing’ of news.

Catherine Kell (University of the Western Cape) proposed a theoretical shift within Literacy Studies away from the framework of events, practices and domains and towards the role of texts in meaning-making across space and time. In this context, she suggested that the focus should be on text trajectories, rather than literacy practices as the main unit of analysis, and that shifts in scale were of particular interest in theorising relations of text production and interpretation across different contexts. After reviewing how ‘scale’ has been conceptualised in sociolinguistics (e.g. Blommaert Reference Blommaert2007; Collins, Baynham & Slembrouck Reference Collins, Baynham and Slembrouck2009) and human geography (e.g. Massey Reference Massey2004; Marston, Jones & Woodward Reference Marston, Jones and Woodward2005), she presented a methodology for tracing text trajectories at the local level within participation frameworks in event-spaces. This incorporated distinctions of scale in theorising the relation between the local and the global, and addressed the role of texts in constructing social processes which have greater durability and irreversibility, or not. She presented contrasting examples of the highly ‘scripted’ trajectory of a health and safety incident report form in a New Zealand construction company and the ‘emergent’ trajectory of a woman's complaint about her house in a South African self-build project, to highlight the importance of fine-grained analysis of space and time differentiations, and of how these throw into perspective issues of power across trajectories (Kell Reference Kell, Stroud and Prinsloo2014).