March 19 th Team Meeting Transcription and Notes

The success of Steve’s film in the part

Marcus’s list of language as Talisman projects – Five projects: All girl film project, Matthew project putting speakers in trees: Matthew and Steve, Deborah’s event, Damian – Growth through stories: performance project, Marcus keen on a Heritage aspect material found in the park, Time machine/portal ideas

Steve making portals

Summing up the advisory board meeting

Kate: There was one bit which unfortunately I didn’t record cos the batteries ran out but it was really relevant for accomadation theory which was really interesting because Jackie started to almost use the language you know that bit about the bullying um the babylon we were talking about that and we were talking about how when Marcus starting working in Rawmarsh he didn’t understand anybody and he had a southern accent and about how his southern accent isnt actually is quite interesting seeing that played out in the field and the kind of accommodations young people make around Marcus but also it kind of encourages that meta-language and Jackie thought that both those ideas really worked because partly of who Marcus was which is that he’s got this quite kind of posh southern accent so and it was interesting going round with the Dundee people because their accent was different again and the young people were like double taking this kind of thick Dundee accents in Rawmarsh and something about other peoples accents.

Steve: I wonder if Marcus’s accent is just so unfamiliar that he’s not associated with being quite a posh southerner like the Scottish accents and the kids all knew that they were Scottish but I just wondered if you’ve never come across that posh southern accent whether you just think that its another regional accent and you don’t because it never seems to be a barrier to kids no kids call him posh or never seems to be a barrier people just get on with it so its quite interesting … unfamiliarity …I’ve just thought of a good name for the soundings project it could be ‘What are you talking about?’

Kate: One of the things that he felt she felt that Jackie that Marcus did is because he didn’t understand what the young people were saying he gave them more power but then they had to find he sort of diffused any intimidatingness of them and because there was a questioning of the dialect people then using language in different ways and so there’s something about having that accent disarmed both the young people and Marcus it kind of changed the power footing I thought that was quite interesting and then they talked about stories being of value …

Other points from the advisory meeting

Ruth and Marcus keen to meet each other

Chris Montgomery’s reaction

The cohesive and encouraging nature of the group

Discussion about family sayings and stories in

Kate: There was quite an interesting discussion about family sayings from the Ruth Finnegan book and Hoggart and that was quite interesting and also there was a discussion about stories

Richard: What came up with stories?

Kate: this is Chris actually about telling stories as something that was personal to you that you cant be judged on it and someone come from the university cant say that’s a rubbish story well I don’t think that you have got that right this idea of performing stories being something that anyone can access and that’s I suppose what marcus thinks about in terms of the films and then Deborah talked about this idea of storytelling within families and intergenerational work and stories of one part this is ruth stories of one part that connects us to the past and futures and its about his Ruth was talking about her work on quotations or sayings was that one of the things that units almost symbolises family continuity are shared quotations like ‘its not the end of the world’ or high level ones and low level ones she then started quoting latin and no one seemed to mind and then we talked about Sheffield voices and crungles and sayings as protective power and then the way that people construct their identities in the stories

Hugh: I think that was really interesting how that was linked to inter-generational work you know we were talking about family sayings and we were part the way that we were bringing it up was by looking at dialect words and stuff and then Dorothy was bringing in this idea of how it can work how it works in inter-generational work and that’s one of her priorities for things and that progressin was really really interesting.

Steve’s family sayings and sayings that you remember and they come by and they arent appropriate/not pc

David asking about language as protective and talking about his children and the names of games that they used

Kate: yeah well something that I picked up I interviewed somebody before I this project money I interviewed somebody who was head of family recovery in rotherham, I think that she had just retired. Called Cath Radcliffe and she talked about sayings as a protective power and she worked with families who were in sort of trauma she’d look at what the sayings were and she said that a lot of families do have sayings and they are protective and she was kind of using them and so this is a bit about child protection and then Julia was saying about people having a repertoire of sayings and when someone sort of dying and then has died it was a way of bringing someone back so her mother saying things like you look like a dying duck in a thunderstorm and she sort of brings her mother back through those sayings I think and ruths book which I have got upstairs if any one wants to borrow is really good because she calls it quotations which in a way is the wrong thing, it’s a misleading title because its actually the first bit of it is all about family sayings its about everyday language and it isnt about quotating in a posh way and she said you know quoting in a posh way puts people off if its sayings that’s a quotations and its handed down

Hugh: I was just looking at Hoggart’s Everyday language book and he kind of returns to all the stuff that he was saying about sayings back in Uses of Literacy and there kind of was a bit in the blurb where it says there kind of similar to the modern day idea of resilience … and there’s a big section

that he has about poverty and putting up with things and you know that all these sayings are about keeping your end up and being resilient and stuff and there a whole section well the majority of the book is about that it seems so.

Kate: But also Ruth was quite interested well she said interesting was she said when I did research on quotations was how strongly people felt against the use of quotations which is kind of interesting because they felt that they were discriminatory and a form of showing off and often just done to them especially proverbs like a bad workman always blames his tools when you’ve just burnt the dinner and this idea of parents saying I hated proverbs when I was a child and they were always used to put me down and then using them you know against there own children and its kind of interesting thing that my mother said always said cleanliness is next to godliness and now I hear myself saying the same thing so I suppose one of the things is to kind of look at that intergenerational.

Steve: But is a kind of modernisation of that be the kind of clan sort of thing of tv quotes so its like the mighty boosh quotes cos like you get like these sort of little cultures of kids who like the mighty boosh who will speak in mighty boosh language and like the day today quotes that I kind of used to use all the time that my kids use but their kind of direct from the day today so I sort of say rosie may or black bag the faithful border bin liner and viz quotes and they become recontextualised as like family quotes but they have actually been appropriated from popular culture …

Kate: and I think what was nice was that Dorothy really liked that because she talked about depending on what stage you are in your lives you wont value certain things but when you get older you do and then actually Deborah just emailed me to say one of the things that’s quite significant about Rotherham and particularly Rawmarsh was just that its had a real problem with valuing itself and partly because of Jamie Oliver coming along and saying no rubbish and abuse but also there’s the history of the mines but that’s not that’s over so there isnt that kind of language of value and yet actually that would be really helpful and a lot of people would have thought that that would be really helpful is that was stressed this idea of the value of the Talismanic value of language and language kind of being valued so again I think there was a conversation at the end which wasn’t recorded about how to do that and that would be a really good outcome so whether it was through Sheffield Voices or in a kind of tangible way they talked about sustainable outcomes

Sound legacy archive, resources for schools, having open ended archive has to be used in order to avoid exclusion because it is on-going.

Sheffield Voices

Online archives as an outcome

Sheffield Voices as an archive of texts and representation being different to a sound legacy

Using Facebook to create an engaging legacy, user developed

Starting by looking at the reading

David – Rampton article about discourse communities, interesting stuff about the internet age, the potential of the web and user generation, speech communities

Richard on Jung

Looking at the history of the Talisman

Richard: I put the stuff up on Jung because everytime I talked to Marcus he starts talking about Jung and I kind of thought that might be interesting and there is an essay where Jung is talking about archetypes archetypal imagery and he connects the archetypal image of the wise old man with the giving of talismans its sort of interesting because the idea is that the wise old man is a sort of I mean the archetypes are part of yourself there kind of contained in the unconcious and they sort of manifest in individual in Jung’s thought in individual manifestations like dreams and in collective ones like folklore and myth and the wise old man manifests when the self is in trouble basically its kind of stuck or is in some situation which it cant cope with alone and the wise old man remembering that the wise old man is part of the self as well arrives and does something which enables you to get over the kind of stuckness and actually reading Jung I was just thinking that this is all about resilience this is about the kind of moment when you have to sort of stick at something you have to get over that kind of and when I first started thinking about it and when Marcus was first going on about it I was kind of thinking does he think that he is the wise old man but actually that’s not the point the point is the archetype’s are part of you and if somebody else is involved that’s because it’s a projection out of you find that part of yourself in the other person and you kind of so it all began to make sense to me a little bit that the kind of sort of one of the responses in Jung’s thought to stuckness and being kind of unable you know being in a difficult position is that somehow you have to provide yourself with this Talismanic object that will produce some kind of affect and the Talisman’s he mentions are all from folklore and there kind of things like theres a girl who is seperated from her family so the kind of the wise figure gives her a ball of wool which magically rolls towards the family so she can find them sort of and there are a number of these sorts of things so he I don’t know its just part of this body of stuff about what talisman’s are and how they function and I kind of quite liked it because its got this sort of psychological basis which the other stuff didn’t that was purely sort of metaphorical in a way and because it is connected with the way that marcus seems to think about things so that’s a kind of context.

Jane: I was gonna go slightly kind of wildly of on one if you don’t mind I was just thinking about I think it was who was saying something about the fact that there was a difference between sayings in the family which are collectively agreed ones and ones that are parently imposed ones you know the bad workman always blames his tool sort of thing and I was kind of thinking about the fact that I partly see this as a parent and kind of one of our developing sort of things that we sort of tend to say is you know how do you get better at something you practice you know cos you get a child who is completely refusing to do something and you kind of go you gotta practice your not just gonna get better at something you get better at things though practising and in a way that’s all about trying to give the child resilience and to understand the process by which you help yourself but its also your aware at the same time profoundly unhelpful in some ways as well because its that whole problem of your kind of trying to give them that kind of knowledge and they can kind of resent it so I don’t know but then the fact the older person you actually find yourself repeating back and you suddenly

see the perspective from a different thing and I don’t know I just kind of it just kind of made me think we that thing of it being the older person and yet some part of yourself

Steve: is that passed down from your parents did they do that to you?

Jane: I think that one seems to be more something that’s me but there are ones that my parents would say to me

Steve: Because one of the ones that I would always use with my kids is the old character is Kurt Vonnegut and so it goes which I only remember is Kurt Vonnegut because I used it so much since reading Kurt Vonnegut as a 15 year old Ive just got actually but he’s like the older wise character that I lay that on to I suppose but that’s not instructional that’s just its about acceptance

Jane: Well it is

Steve: but its not like so if something happens I’ll say and so it goes but it feels more Talismanic and practice makes perfect is kind of more instructional

More examples – its not fair/life isnt fair: acceptance not as directly instructive

Hegemony – there is nothing that you can do about it so put up with it, change your attitude

Richard: well that’s it I think whats quite rich about the theory is that it it kind of doesn’t it sees the real older person as important but actually the kind of the trick of it is whether that gets internalised or whether your daughter then makes that her own internal voice or not you know it’s the kind of which I think is sort of interesting

Steve: but it’s the talismanic nature of the meaning of the words or the mantric nature of default position of you know ‘so it goes’ sort of thing is kind of very much about the meaning of the words that you come to its almost like a haiku in language rather than a visual haiku that you get to this point and something happens and you just think ‘and so it goes’ and its very very meaningful where as there are other things that are default position that are talismanic in that I’m not going to think about that therefore that can stop me engaging with that situation so you don’t well people are just like that so the litters there well that’s just what its like isn’t the same its not as talismanic its not helpful or its not you realise it’s a negative it’s the same I suppose but it doesn’t feel like the wise old man that’s telling me that people always drop litter it feels like another part of my political persona

Hugh: Well that’s interesting because the ones that seem to be to do with resilience just from the everyday language stuff that I was looking at Hoggart describes them as a poultice you know something that’s there so theres this problem ‘and so it goes’ you know this goes on you pull it out and there you go you mend the situation quite quickly whereas the other ones that you are talking about you know ‘its alright for some’ I suppose or people always drop litter or that’s theres something else going on there but I like that idea of the poultice is kind of an old medicine from the era when its kind of the ideas of magic and healing are similar it was a term that I picked up that just its not the same as talisman but in the same lexical field lexical set

Steve: Their kind of enclosed so their not kind of socratic so you might say to somebody are you a cup half full person which is a oh I need to reflect on myself and im being really negative and it’s a similar kind of mantra saying but its not so much talismanic because its not closed not got to that

point where its kind of a poultice or that’s finished it’s a question rather than a so and so it goes is just like you ask my daughter to do anything now she just goes ‘Effort’ so that’s a kind of really talismanic its like no really cut down thats minimalism for you you’ve come to the point where it can only go a be a single word ‘effort’

Folklore and Julia Bishop

Interested in the influence of them in the literature review

Plane crash story and the park, going for walks

Shared stories in the park is interesting

East Deane Mafia,

The park as a holding frame for the stories

Jung using an everyday story

Jung thinks that the stories are everyday manifestation of these things

In the story a Talisman is passed across from a an older person to a younger but its an image that happens within you.

Maturity in the story

Hugh – Jung on magic, Hypnosis

Freud on the uncanny difficult to read

Freud quoting dictionary definitions

Richard: I’m trying sort of to piece together out of these sort of things asort of account of what we think Talismans are and there’s a sort of I don’t know I kind of quite like this because it puts them in a psychological framework

David – asking the young people explicitly what they think talismans are

Jung/Young

Asking them what language as talisman means

Steve: When I first heard about the project I didn’t really understand what language as talisman meant at all and now I seem to really clearly understand what it means so something has happened in the interim well I got my own definition of what it means

David: Well I think that’s the point isnt it that if we all were asked that same question we wouldn’t all say use the same words right so there’d be nuances hopefully theres some shared point in it but there might not be I think that asking the people who are young

Steve: I think its protection is the thing that you know I think I said whats a talisman to somebody and they said oh its all about protection and I think that’s what formed language as protection that’s what on all sort of different levels made sense to me.

Asking young people what their responses would be, how much would come from popular culture, world of warcraft etc. that we havent considered

Rampton and the internet age

Fast show, might boosh, world of warcraft

Might boosh seated in magic and fairytale, shamens

Asking what the children thought about ‘language as Talisman’

So that we reach a point where we understand what we are trying to look at

is it language as protection, language as exclusion or language to feel part of a group

Avoiding language as talisman leading questions

Hugh: that Idea about language as inclusion is theres lots of one of the things that when I went to the park with Kate things kind of clicked and obviously Im sat in the university of Sheffield reading these articles and we are talking about a park but when you go to the park and for me it was just you just forget that as a child this is a space that is open to you to do all your socialising in when a lot of other spaces arent open to you and that it was in a way not regulated but then you have got people like the youth workers who you said were intervening which was quite interesting they are not there to police it but they are there and that was really interesting to think about and what we noticed that as the children were going along and they are talking but they are constantly doing things at the same time the bike stunts playing football and even just like jumping on things as they are walking along these days when you are an adult you sit and you talk or you go to the pub

Kate: Actually that’s really helpful that brings me to my little bit which was one of the things that I think is really interesting about Ruth’s work and why I’m really keen for her to be in is this idea of the multidimensional nature of expression in a (Frith?) sort of way and she talks about in her creativity thing written language melts into other spacial representations too but I think that one of the things that when I go into the park I constantly see like the bike stunts we immediately saw them in terms of accommodation theory didn’t we? we kind of saw how as they were sped across the thing they were doing accommodation theory in a really kind of clear way

Hugh: Because if you don’t accommodate you’ll crash and that was really yeah cos there’s boundaries physical boundaries because if you go at the wrong time then you’ll hit someone else but

also if you I suppose if you go and you make someone else feel uncomfortable then there starts to be tension so its all about timing and performing and you know you gain the respect you know you do good tricks and people enjoy that but it’s the norm everyone is constantly moving and constantly doing it was fantastic to watch they were really really good

Kate: and I suppose what she wanted to do was to take away the kind of opposition between language and music and kind of sort of also the kind of the way in which createivity is materialised across these different forms and I think that if you go to the park that becomes really clear doesn’t it there’s language but its held in these different gestural and oral and

David: The bike story there is a great example of community protection security all those that’s the essence of all that talismanic stuff isnt it

Hugh: yeah yeah as a group

David: That’s it a real clear physical example of if you don’t cohere then you know bad stuff happens

Steve: within that group of young people theres a kind of mythology of stories we asked them how whats the worst accident and banging their head and having a fit going off down bumps and compound fractures so theres a mythology there of injuries which is a precautionary Talismanic tales of why you wait for your turn and why so that a kind of and I think those stories are true but they are extended by they are extended into mythology arent they or made worse and they are always described the stunt that you were trying to achieve before the accident Double backflip! …

Jane: Tow things coming out of that really one of which is thinking about the fact that we can talk I mean just thinking about everything that people have just said I mean there is one thing about where the idea of language as talisman is kind of protective and reassuring and about resislience but there is also actually I don’t know how well this fits but there is also that element of language and those moments of recognition Im just thinking about the bike stunts but its also very much which perhaps comes out of the Ruth Finnegan article which is that it is also about creativity and that in a sense having those boundaries you know the double backflip almost is about the places also where you manage to kind of exceed and in a sense the point about having the boundaries and the limits is that it gives you a kind of a playfulness I mean, even the story about the you know and so it goes and now you daughter just kind of says effort you tell that story cos its kind of a funny story and I don’t know what the kind of dynamic is when she tells it but its also about the kind of playfulness and the jokiness of language some how

‘Effort’ being clever because it is cut down

Jane: but its clever and there is that use of language that isnt just kind of Talismanic in the sense of being kind of resilient and serious but also about language as a you know and perhaps we should read something on this as language as a sort of shared game

Wittgenstein

Ron Carter – creativity as not something as special or genius but something we all do all the time, inherent in language

In a community or family we have a shared repertoire of things that then allows one to create jokes that are actually extremely kind of specific to that sort of family

Effort funny in a family context

Family in jokes as being the shared community joke

‘Potato on Lampost’ joke referring to a point in time

Bernstein and elaborated and restricted code – the delicacy of the restricted code

Not exactly the restricted code but embedded language

Jung/young pun – very small group that that is relevant to

Liminal Criminal

Steve: but I do feel that there is a negative you can’t ignore the how language excludes and I think because we my kids went to a 98% Muslim school and language was used as a terrible tool for the white kids in that school of exclusion and I think that that’s I don’t know whether the accents in the park are fantastic when you are going around recording people but it is pretty understandable accent the Rotherham accent whereas you get to some areas and the accents are almost unpenetrable their so rich that you can’t understand a work of what people are saying in terms of standard meaning so that’s quite an interesting so if you had specific words, the skate park thing again that creates its own little exclusive language that excludes people that arent skaters from it deliberately which is talismanic in its own way.

Richard: it is but it kind of raises the question of when do we I mean why talk about talismans and not talk about identity identity is a much more ordinary commonly used words in sociolinguistics and at that point we are starting to kind of move into group formation and kind of whereas the having chosen to use the word talisman suggests an interest in something other than or something that is slightly different from that Im not arguing all I am saying is that kind of need to place talisman in relation to other words that are commonly used to talk about

Kate: and Im also kind of thinking about in an instrumental way the literature review that Hugh’s building up and one of my interests is sort of looking at like we said we’d do kind the adjacent things so accommodation theory has been really useful for me this whole month I’ve just looked at everything through that lens and meta-language has been really useful and it came up in both the advisory groups but also looking at folk-tales and folk-law and then createivity and I suppose I am quite interested in the and this is something that Hugh and I were doing this kind of mapping thematic areas arent we and vaguely through invivo … because having these adjacent, you know I like the idea of the fields rubbing up and then producing other things.

Richard: well its interesting because Jung does sort of get folklore to rub up against sort of and the things that is interesting about the folkloric material is that it is very sort of there are certain values that seem very impotant to them like being cunning or being wiley and being able and being practically able to handle situations and its noticeable that when the talisman appears that its got a very practical kind of value its something that will sort out this problem that you are in you know and I kind of I suppose what I am getting at is you are talking about serious talisman but they are not actually they are not serious in a kind of weighty sense in that kind of story there sort of about we are in a fix what do we do in this fix kind of and I think that that might involve being funny or being ribald or being you know that kind of

Validation of other skills, a weak creature being clever, showing the value of other skills

Functional using archetypal characters to do stuff

Kate: I suppose what I think is interesting as well is that in terms of functionality if you think of the park as a holding form it kind of I quite like having that concentrating the mind on the nature of language and that kind of sociolinguistic context but then the stories and mythologies within the park and the odd spaces we were looking at in the park

Bad spaces

Steve: When you were gonna be beaten up when you were a kid you do kind of think there might just be something I can say that’s gonna get me out of this and you kind of there’s a get out like ‘Oh your sister’ and I think that that’s the kind of the very literal talismanic talisman as protection that I think if you are going to talk to the young people about it it might kind of what can you say in these situations that will get you out of them quite a literal im just thinking of what you were saying about going and asking them I mean if we as kind of Ive been thinking about this for months we cant come up with a reasonably coherent kind of thing to say I think we need to ask them something that’s from their own experience that kind of leads them into this is that what we are trying to find out? is it language as protection is it language as more than identification more than a community

Thinking about talismans as something that manipulates external forces

In the magical tradition the influences of the planets

Richard: A talismanic expression that I don’t know why it keeps coming into my head is ‘have you swallowed a dictionary’ because its that kind of thing of it instantly deflates somebody and it wards of their power you know what I mean over you in a kind of its totally stereotyped its like a kind of a little object that you pull out that you just go and it kind of and in a way it’s the exactly right thing to say to the person who is going to beat you up is a similar sort of thing it’s a kind of

Eating a book of quotations as an art form

A quick response rather than a reassuring mantra

Anxiety – ‘what’s the worse that can happen’ as a coping tool, a personal talisman rather than community

Ethnographic approach – the reality of the young people in Rawmarsh

Gathering soundings about interpretive schema by being in the field

Young people who are willing to participate

Having a set of research questions and then asking the young people to come up with some questions themselves

Taking concepts into the field, reflective approach, having some academic constructs but being open to ideas

By looking at Talisman as an interesting category you are not looking at identity

Thinking about the category of talismanic power as an interpretive framework

The Etic and the Emic

Sam’s role

Kate: because what strikes me I suppose is I kind of think its interesting to think about language categorising and I think that a lot of people here have made me think about that in a way that’s quite interesting but Id quite like to know how so the whole idea of meta-language I think is really interesting is beacuase it is about other people’s categories of language and accommodation theory is about how people make sense of language in the space so those theories seem to be quite good because they both kind of everyday but also they are located in quite a lot of writing because I am now quite interested in developing that.

Steve:I like Talisman because it feels like a concentration like a boiling down to this thing so that everything from that boiling down is reduced to this kind of potent thing and I think that that is really strong as in a kind of idea for everyone to come together around theres a small idea but lots of people can come together on a small project but there is lots of people involved and it’s a really tight but then I think we have to be careful that doesn’t become narrative because that’s in a whole different project so although language and narrative and community language and narratives and people identify themselves through narrative and stories when I didn’t I don’t see that as being talismanic I don’t see that as being this point that’s almost mythical you know the talisman is a refinement of all those stories into this kind of this thing that’s really potent.

Agreeing with steve’s definition

Steve: its almost a mystical sort of potent kind of concentration that we are never not going to be able we are not trying to really describe what that is if we describe it we’ve lost it its actually so I think to broaden it out about how people like stories are important to people I think that that can fit in but its when those stories become refined to the point of effort is probably the too minimal but I mean there is a thing of of like all the stories that come together to make your practice makes perfect is a story about not practicing enough and trying to do something and being a bit rubbish at it but its at that point where it becomes this saying the way it becomes a talisman and that you carry round with you and you put in your bag of talismans to protect you.

‘Effort’ as protective

If we expand to far to look at narrative and identity

How does storytelling fit in with Talisman

There are occasions where a story is boiled down

Fat Tony – evoking the whole narrative of everyone knowing who fat tony is

Make sure you’re phone is charged up

Hugh: So it’s the kind of phrases or the language use and what it invokes rather than the whole narrative of collecting stories and collecting narrative looking at smaller things the kind of like you were saying a kind of talisman or a nugget or something that you have

Richard: well that’s it isnt it part the point of it when we started was that there is a kind of material quality to it and its not necessarily literalintive its not as if its written on an object its sort of like a thing that can be pulled out and those kind of reminders of stories are a bit thinglike you kind of whip them out

Kate: That’s it that’s and its like with the pottery fields and the playgrounds there was almost like I mean it was really great to look on the internet and find the plane crash site but they’ve become kind of objects stories as objects and I’m quite interested in stories turning into objects and as well as objects turning into stories but there a sort of duality there and I think that has happened at times actually and there is something kind of objectified about the park because it’s a material space that would be quite an interesting thing to do an ethnography around actually

Agreement from Richard

Speaking to the young people and they may not be interested in Talisman but may have another way of looking at it

Jane’s choice

Acquisition of meta-pragmatic abilities in pre-school children

Meta-language everywhere – Student arguing with her ex over how they argue

Language isn’t just about communicating but about policing the boundaries and appropriateness

Steve talking about the bike stunts and people telling the stories and people topping the previous story, people telling stories about when they got injured

Talisman as things that manipulate power and power being exercised linguistically

The talisman may very well be meta-linguistic as that is the very medium that it has to deal with

Have you swallowed a dictionary as a meta-linguistics talismanic phrase

Meta-language as a fairly equal theoretical tool

Ron Carter

Linguistics has an instituitionalised meta-language

Standard is not inherently better

Widespread meta-language where we know that some forms are better than others

All use this all the time

Undergraduates arguing that all forms of language are equal but if they spell ‘incorrectly’ they will be marked down.

Jennifer Jenkins

English as a Lingua Franca

Looking at the way that non-natives in a european context engage with language

Has its own regularities – Journal saying don’t worry about writing in Standard English

Non-natives may want to pay a native to proof read their work

David working in Singapore

Jane: And I thought what was really interesting from that article from Michael Rosen in the Guardian which Hugh sent round which was really good which what Michael Rosen is saying is entirely uncontroversial someone said that he had talked to a linguist I mean its within linguistics its absolutely uncontroversial it had a phenomenal amount of comments and all of the comments were saying that’s all very well but you cant go around teaching that to children because you wont let them get jobs at the end of it and which is in a way is fine but nobody kind of you know getting angry about the fact that we live in this kind of linguistically kind of stratified society that means that some children get certain kinds of privileges as a kind of birth right and everyone kind of jumps straight to the instrumental of we’ve got to the poor children to of Rotherham how to speak correctly and no body sort of takes a moment out to get angry about the system

Kate: Well I think that this is where this project has quite a big role because it’s the two schools who are involved and Dorothy is quite excited about that on the basis that their Ofsted said that their children didn’t speak properly and what the schools are now really they’re really excited about this project because they actually want to be able to speak back to Ofsted and say alright ok but we are going to show you how we are going to make sense using meta-language so I think that what’s happened is actually quite and in fact I’m very rarely conscious of being socially useful …

Ofsted story from Steve about being positive

Kate: … but I think that one thing that we could do if we could do one thing as a result of this projects Thorogate and Highgreave have some sense of ownership of language which is quite nuanced in relationship to what we can offer them and I still think actually it hasn’t gone through

you know what I mean that understanding meta-language, accommodation theory isnt in the distance and that’s quite strange like you say Mike Rosen it’s a kind of a surprisingly difficult thing for people to take on board

Hugh: Well actually going back to another news article that we were talking about you know when we were talking about the school that banned slang and you know there’s the obviously linguistic horrific thing that all language use is none is better than the other and they are saying stop using slang well what was interesting with Sam Kirkham in the department did one of the phd students he did a paper about his ethnographic work in a school looking at sociophonetics so actually the sounds that people use and he was talking about it in terms of ethnic identity so using certain ways of speaking as a type of ethnicity and he is saying that it’s a practice but actually I asked him he said cos Jane you said that you had problems with school children going in and talking about dialect but then actually the students actually level of reflexivity that they had knowledge about the way that people spoke was something that was not perhaps quite established there so I asked him I said what do the students think about language and language use and he said that in fact the main thing was that they said you spoke common if spoke Sheffield you know like a Sheffield speaker and obviously there is the concept of posh as well which is you know Rampton looks at but then the other thing was that street language was slang and so actually the two, the schools using banning slang is not banning something that’s on a sliding scale that we are all complaining about not that I’m vindicating this school but it just made me think about it is that actually they are talking to the students in their in the language that they understand about their own language use and saying don’t use this language use which you have signposted yourselves as slang and I just found that kind of interesting actually I think that wading in and saying you know what do you mean by slang is it dialect is it this is it that well actually no perhaps it’s a self-selected category that the students already have and I don’t know I don’t know whether that has solved anything for me but it really kind of started to make the way I was thinking academic study and working with schools and I suppose just from Sam’s work how his ethnographic approach is a lot more beneficial to his academic work …

Ideas to take from this meeting

Taking the idea to the people of the park, difficult to ask the young people without being leading

Top ten lists of Talismanic language, language as functional, protective

How does Marcus’s suggestion effect and work with our work

Steve’s suggestions for how the project will work, film as generative

Interesting to go out and collect samples of Talismanic language, give them some steers and examples and then

Ethical procedure

Don’t collect sayings but why they think that they are talismanic

Young people filling in the ethics forms

Project ownership for the young people

Ethics as good way of enhancing the project for young people

Problems with archiving

Collecting Talismanic language from across the park and the ethics

Young person’s reaction to being involved in the project

What to do next

Copenhagen conference

The approach to the next meetings

Soundings event

Meeting in the park

Approaches to questioning people

Danger of death question – Have you almost been beaten up?

Jane: I mean it would be quite interesting cos that suggestion that maybe we should all send our sort of top ten things of what we think a talisman kind of is that its protection that its magic

David: You could do that but I thought that if you picked sayings and then look at what they led to

Jane: I wonder whether maybe both should kind of run in parallel a little bit

Kate: But I am also interested in what people talk about these truncated stories that are kind of crystallisation of a lot of different things so I’ve started to think about and this is a bit of jargon but it comes from freud and I never really understood it until now which it is this idea of things being over-cathected they talk about things being piled up with too many meanings and I was thinking that one of the things that does tend to happen is a kind of concentration around certain things and I have watched that you know in terms of partly kind of Marcus talks about hotspots as well when like there’s a den bit which Marcus always says is completely full of stuff and we found these things saying grim reapers … but actually there are these hotspots in the park where things kind of get piled up so the layers are more dense and when we went round I know Steve found this a bit annoying because we insisted on dousing for these hotspots

Steve disagreeing with dousing

Over-cathected spaces/language crystalised – concentration, density and distillation

Language and people having a richness

VC talking about the pennies as an over-catected story

Reconnecting the university to the city through a talismanic language use – misrepresentation

Compacted crystalline story – people of Sheffield and pennies

Restricted codes within the park – things that we don’t understand

Small Stories

Dataller – over weighting his stories with Greek and Latin Mythology – elaborated code

Eaglestone’s subject is legitimated through his literariness

Crystal Story – means a lot to the people who know about it

Jane: I suppose what we mean actually is not even really crystally stories but crystal is quite good is kind of talismanic stories almost you know, stories that have a talismanic function and function almost as objects and you told tell the whole blinking story you just say you know people of the city pennies and everyone goes oh yeah everyone can kind of fill in the rest of the story

Steve: But that’s short hand for people in the know so it’s a short hand rather than a talisman …

Jane: And then it has that Talismanic function of enabling things to take place.

An excuse for retelling the story when someone doesn’t know, exclusion of those who doesn’t know

Inauguration through stories

Ray Hearne article about Eaglestone’s biography

Mapping Eaglestone’s story over the geographical locations in Rawmarsh and Parkgate

The Carnegie library

Toast

A Yorkshire Lad autobiographical extract about the library

Any other business

Unfamiliar repertoires

Insider and outsider boundaries