Kellie Gonçalves

Helen Kelly-Holmes

This collection brings together global perspectives which critically examine the ways in which language as a resource is used and managed in myriad ways in various blue-collar workplace settings in today’s globalized economy. In focusing on blue-collar work environments, the book sheds further light on the informal processes through which top down language policies take place in different multilingual settings and the resultant asymmetrical power relations which emerge among employees and employers in such settings. Taking into account the latest debates on poststructuralist theories of language, the volume also extends its conceptualization of language to demonstrate the ways in which it extends to a wider range of multilingual and multimodal resources and communicative practices, all of which combine in unique and different ways toward constructing meaning in the workplace. The volume’s unique focus on such workplaces also showcases domains of work which have generally until now been less visible within existing research on language in the workplace and the subsequent methodological challenges that arise from studying them. Integrating a range of theoretical and methodological approaches, along with empirical data from a diverse range of blue-collar workplaces, this book will be of particular interest to students and researchers in critical sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, sociology, and linguistic anthropology.

Language, Global Mobilities, Blue-Collar Workers and Blue-collar Workplaces

This book provides an in-depth analysis of language and tourist mobility within an adventure tourism context. It uses a critical and ethnographic approach, contributing to poststructuralist perspectives of social life that are currently undergoing considerable changes on social, political, cultural and linguistic levels. Drawing upon an array of data sources collected over five years on two continents, it examines and compares the way language and communication (e.g. speech, written texts, visual resources) are used within the production of place-making practices in two of the world’s top adventure tourism destinations: Interlaken, Switzerland and Queenstown, New Zealand. It centres on issues such as cross-cultural discourses, transcultural texts, and semiotic landscapes.

Kellie Gonçalves

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