Cover not available

Article published In: Manufacturing Knowledge
Edited by Alfonso Del Percio and Cécile B. Vigouroux
[Language, Culture and Society 5:2] 2023
► pp. 212–230

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload EPUB

Seeking access. Applied ethnopoetic analysis

Gate keeping or a gateway to poetry as knowing

 | University College London
Open Access logo
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with University College London.

Published online: 13 February 2024
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/lcs.00042.mca
Abstract
This paper discusses a poetic output of a research project at the intersection of linguistic ethnography (LE) and poetic inquiry (PI) which explores the barriers experienced by refugee and asylum seekers, seeking access to Higher Education. The research draws on Jan Blommaert’s applied ethnopoetics (AEP) work to reconstruct silenced voices ( (2006). Applied ethnopoetics. Narrative Inquiry, 16(1), 181–190. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). AEP as a ‘means of recognition’ of marginalised voices is explored. The paper goes on to explore the transformative possibilities for knowledge production offered by combining AEP with PI. This innovative approach and output are presented as act of resistance to normative expectations within academia which freeze conditions for voice ( (2008). Bernstein and poetics revisited: Voice, globalization and education. Discourse & Society, 19(4), 425–451. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). Questions are then offered to consider how we might advance the approach and its emancipatory potential further.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Context
  • 3.Applied ethnopoetic analysis
  • 4.Poetic inquiry
  • 5.Layering applied ethnopoetic analysis and poetic inquiry
  • 6.The project
  • 7.Discussion
  • 8.Concluding questions
  • References
References (62)
References
Atan, M.-U. (2020). Haere mo rere Pehe Manu: Caminando para volar en libertad. Santiago, Chile: Editorial De La Gorra.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baker, S. & Irwin, E. & Freeman, H. & Nance, S. & Coleman, J. (2018). Building cultural and linguistic bridges: Reflections on a program designed to support adult students from refugee backgrounds’ transitions into university. Journal of Academic Language & Learning, 12 (1), 64–80.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Badwan, K. (2021). Teaching language in a globalized world: Embracing and navigating vulnerability. In Language in a Globalised World (pp. 203–216). Cham.: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bauman, R. (1975). Verbal art as performance 1. American anthropologist, 77(2), 290–311. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Blackledge, A., Creese, A. & Hu, R. (2016). The structure of everyday narrative in a city market: An ethnopoetics approach. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 20(5), 654–676. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Blackledge, A. and Creese, A. (2023). Essay 4. Poetry. Essays in linguistic ethnography: Ethics, aesthetics, encounters (pp. 59–73). Bristol, Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Blommaert, J. (2001). Investigating narrative inequality: African asylum seekers’ stories in Belgium. Discourse and Society, 12(4), 413–449. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2006). Applied ethnopoetics. Narrative Inquiry, 16(1), 181–190. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2008). Bernstein and poetics revisited: Voice, globalization and education. Discourse & Society, 19(4), 425–451. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2009). Language, asylum, and the national order. Current Anthropology 501, 415–440. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2009). Ethnography and democracy: Hymes’s political theory of language. Text & Talk, 29(3), 257–276. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Blommaert, J. & Backus, A. (2013). Superdiverse repertoires and the individual. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies, 241. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Blommaert, J. (2018). Trump’s tweetopoetics. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies, paper 203.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Césaire, A. (1982). Poetry and knowledge. Sulfur; Ypsilanti, 51, 17–32.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Davis, C. (2021). Sampling poetry, pedagogy, and protest to build methodology: Critical poetic inquiry as culturally relevant method. Qualitative Inquiry, 27(1), 114–124. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Faulkner, S. L. (2019). Poetic inquiry: Craft, method and practice. New York: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ferri, G. (2022). The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house: Decolonising intercultural communication. Language and Intercultural Communication, 22 (3), 381–390. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ganassin, S. & Young, J. T. (2020). From surviving to thriving: ‘Success stories’ of highly skilled refugees in the UK. Language and Intercultural Communication, 20(2), 125–140. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Glesne, C. (1997). That rare feeling: Re-presenting research through poetic transcription. Qualitative Inquiry, 3(2), 202–221. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hornberger, N. (2009). Hymes’s linguistics and ethnography in education. Text & Talk 291, 347–358. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hymes, D. (2003). Now I know only so far: Essays in ethnopoetics. London: University of Nebraska Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Li, W. (2011). Moment analysis and translanguaging space: Discursive construction of identities by multilingual Chinese youth in Britain. Journal of Pragmatics, 43 (5), 1222–1235. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2018). Translanguaging as a practical theory of language. Applied Linguistics, 39(1), 9–30. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Li, W. & García, O. (2022). Not a first language but one repertoire: Translanguaging as a decolonizing project. RELC Journal, 53(2), 313–324. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lounasmaa, A. (2020). Refugees in neoliberal universities. In Crimmins, G. (ed.) Strategies for supporting inclusion and diversity in the academy: Higher education, aspiration and inequality (pp 85–98) Cham.: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2023). Emplacement in hostile spaces: Hopeless notes – commentary to Van Liempt. Fennia. International Journal of Geography 201(1), 112–117. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Maynard, K. (2009). Rhyme and reasons: The epistemology of ethnographic poetry. Etnofoor, 21(2), 115–129. [URL]
Maynard, K. & Cahnmann-Taylor, M. (2010). Anthropology at the edge of words: Where poetry and ethnography meet. Anthropology and Humanism, 351, 2–19. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
McAllister, Á. & Brown, N. (2023). Competition and collaboration in higher education: An (auto)ethnographic poetic inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 0(0). Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
McAllister, Á. (in press). Applied ethnopoetic analysis, poetic inquiry, and a practice of vulnerability: Uncovering and undoing the vulnerabilities of refugees and asylum seekers seeking access to Higher Education, Language and Intercultural Communication.
McAllister, Á., Zuoriki, W. A., Bektas, H. N., Katembwe, K., & Alibraheem, M. (2021). Seeking access. Refugees and asylum seekers seeking access to higher education: A poetic inquiry. London, Self-Published. [URL]
Makihara, M., & Rodriguez, J. L. (2022). Lived beliefs. Persuasion and self in Rapa Nui poetry. Language, Culture and Society, 4(1), 47 – 67. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Moore, R. (2009). From performance to print, and back: Ethnopoetics as social practice in Alice Florendo’s corrections to ‘raccoon and his grandmother’. Text & Talk, 291, 295–324. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
O’Regan, J. P. & Gray, J. (2018). The bureaucratic distortion of academic work: A transdisciplinary @analysis of the UK Research Excellence Framework in the age of neoliberalism. Language and Intercultural Communication, 18(5), 533–548, Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Del Percio, A., Baquedano-López, P., Pérez-Milans, M. & Vigouroux, C. (2021). Editorial. Language, Culture and Society, 3(1), 1–8. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Phipps, A. & Saunders, L. (2009). The sound of violets: The ethnographic potency of poetry? Ethnography and Education, 4 (3), 357–387. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Phipps, A. (2019). Decolonising multilingualism: Struggles to decreate. Series: Writing without borders. Bristol, Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters. ISBN 9781788924054Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2024). [URL]
Phipps, A. & Ladegaard, H. (2020). Notes towards a socially engaged LAIC. Language and Intercultural Communication, 20(2), 218–219. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Phipps, A. & Sitholé, T. (2022). Interrupting the cognitive empire: Keynote drama as cultural justice. Language and Intercultural Communication, 22(3), 391–411. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Qasmiyeh, Y. M. (2019). To embroider the voice with its own needle. Berghahn Books blog, January. [URL]
Rampton, B. (2009). Dell Hymes’ visions of enquiry. Text & Talk, 29(3), 359–369. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rampton, B., Cooke, M. & Holmes, S. (2022). 4 Linguistic Citizenship and the Questions of Transformation and Marginality. In Struggles for multilingualism and linguistic citizenship (pp. 59–80). Bristol, Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rawlins, L. S. (2018). Poetic existential: A lyrical autoethnography of self, others, and world. Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal, 3(1), 155–177. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sarangi, S. (2009). Editorial: Hymes, text and talk. Text & Talk, 29(3), 239–240. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Serpa, R. C. (2022). Providing an authentic voice? Understanding migrant homelessness through critical poetic inquiry. Social Sciences, 11(1), 6. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sherzer, J. (2002). Speech play and verbal art. Austin: University of Texas Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Trundle, C., & Wardell, S. (2020). The meaning of pain: Exploring the intersections of ethnography. Journal of Anthropology, 22(1), 238–253.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Van der Aa, J. (2013). The narrative architecture of voice. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 441, 177–188. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Van Rooyen, H., d’Abdon, R. (2020). Transforming data into poems: Poetic inquiry practices for social and human sciences. Education as Change, 24(1), 1–17. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Van der Aa, J. & Blommaert, J. (2011). Ethnographic monitoring: Hymes’s unfinished business in educational research. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 421, 319–334. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vigouroux, C. (2017). Rethinking (un)skilled migrants: Whose skills, what skills, for what, and for whom? In Canagarajah, S. (Ed.). The Routledge Handbook of Migration and Language (1st ed.). London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vincent, A. (2018). Is there a definition? Ruminating on poetic inquiry, strawberries, and the continued growth of the field. Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal, 3(2), 48–76. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Weinar, A., Klekowski von Koppenfels, A. (2020). Highly skilled migration: Concept and definitions. In Highly-skilled migration: Between settlement and mobility. IMISCOE Research Series. Cham.: Springer Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Yohannes, H. T. (2023). Refugees as questioning subjects: A critical reflection of PhD fieldwork involving refugees. Access: Critical explorations of equity in higher education, pre-print.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Yohannes, H. T., Phipps, A. (2024). What does it mean to move? Joy and resistance through cultural work in South–South migration. In Crawley, H., Teye, J. K. (eds) The Palgrave handbook of South–South migration and inequality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zalipour, A. (2011). From Poetic Imagination to Imaging: Contemporary notions of poetic imagination in poetry. Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 31, 481–494.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zhu, H. & Li, W. (2020). Comment on Part 3: Collaborative outcomes. In Moore, E., Bradley, J. and Simpson, J. (eds). Translanguaging as transformation: The collaborative construction of new linguistic realities. Bristol, Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters (pp. 177–183). Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zhu, H. (2020). Making a stance: Social action for language and intercultural communication research, Language and Intercultural Communication, 20(2), 206–212. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zhu, H., Jones, R. H. & Jaworska, S. (2022). Acts of distinction at times of crisis: An epistemological challenge to intercultural communication research, Language and Intercultural Communication, 22(3), 312–323, Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zhu, H., Conlon, C., Smith, C., Diamantidaki, F. & McAllister, Á. (2022). Language teaching and learning beyond vocabulary and grammar: Our success stories, available at [URL]
Zhu, H. (2024). Folk theories of hierarchies of things and space in between. In Dovchin, S., Gong, Q., Dobinson, T. & McAlinden, M., (Eds) Linguistic diversity and discrimination autoethnographies from women in academia (pp. 31–45). New York: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

Hua, Zhu
2025. Translanguaging and Interculturality. In The Handbook of Translanguaging, ► pp. 491 ff. DOI logo
McAllister, Áine & Giuliana Ferri
2025. There is no other: Dúchas, Levinas and interconnectedness as poetic restoration. London Review of Education 23:1 DOI logo
Vigouroux, Cécile B. & Alfonso Del Percio
2024. Reading or writing is not the question: politicizing the politics of scholarly production and reception [Language, Culture and Society]. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2024:289-290 ► pp. 105 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 25 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue