Description
Book SynopsisThis highly original book brings compelling narratives of migration and social diversity vividly to life. At once a play script and an outcome of ethnographic research, it is a rich resource for the interpretation and representation of life in the multilingual city. The book takes an inside view of a hidden space in the city: an advice and advocacy service in a Chinese community centre. Here, advisors translate and translanguage, making sense of the bureaucratic world for clients who need help to access rights and resources related to housing, employment, education, welfare benefits, insurance, taxation, health and much more.
Trade ReviewIn this brilliant and fascinating piece of ‘ethnographic theatre’, Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese illustrate, in a kaleidoscope of characters and scenes, the complexity of the social, linguistic and, more generally, human problems that migrants and people who try to help them face every day. In the process, they make us rethink what it means to do qualitative research. * Anna De Fina, Georgetown University, USA *
This ground-breaking volume transforms outcomes of an ethnographic study into a drama about Chinese migrants’ lives in the UK. It is minimalist, just people talking and telling their stories. Yet, the seemingly mundane conversations bring out rich imageries and emotions. It is a new genre in the making.
* Zhu Hua, University of Birmingham, UK *
Interpretations is an ethnographic drama, an inspiring and thought-provoking arts-based intervention to ethnographic writing. The text brings to life the multiple layers of interpretation that happen in the everyday as people try to make sense of the world, producing interpretations of interpretations, using multiple languages and semiotic resources. Reimagining ethnography as drama challenges conceived ideas about ‘how academics should write’ and opens up new horizons for scholarship in the social sciences.
* Ana Deumert, University of Cape Town, South Africa *
After reading this play, I grew a fondness of the characters and being a foreigner in the United Kingdom myself, I developed a clearer understanding of how the social system works [...] the play is very effective at showing that the problems of language we normally associate with migrants, namely, that they do not speak English, are really about navigating the amount of paperwork and following fixed procedures and assessments that work to sustain the Hostile Environment policies.
-- Rommy Anabalon Schaaf, IOE, UCL, UK * Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2022 *
Table of ContentsText Conventions
Notes
Characters
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3
Scene 4
Scene 5
Scene 6
Scene 7
Scene 8
Scene 9
Scene 10
Scene 11
Scene 12
Scene 13
Scene 14
Scene 15
Scene 16
Scene 17
Scene 18
Scene 19
Scene 20
Scene 21
Scene 22
Scene 23
Scene 24
Scene 25
Scene 26
Scene 27
Scene 28
Scene 29
