Time: 6:30 pm

Date: Monday, 6 May 2013

Venue: Room AG434, English Department, HK Polytechnic University

LANGUAGE & SUPERDIVERSITY

Ben Rampton

Professor of Applied & Sociolinguistics 

Director of the Centre for Language Discourse and Communication

King's College London

This presentation starts with a brief discussion of ‘superdiversity’, a concept that registers the huge problems that contemporary population movement presents for traditional forms of empirical sociology. ‘Superdiversity’ runs with a call for close attention to everyday communication, and it opens the door to a crucial contribution from sociolinguistics.   The presentation reviews the concepts and methods required to engage with this challenge, and articulates four key questions that need to be addressed in a sociolinguistics of superdiversity.

The presentation is based on Blommaert & Rampton 2011, and on the work of the International Consortium on Language and Superdiversity (InCoLaS – http://www.mmg.mpg.de/subsites/sociolinguistic-diversities/about/)

Blommaert, J. & B. Rampton 2011 Language & superdiversity.  Diversities 13/2:1-21

Ben Rampton is Professor of Applied & Sociolinguistics and Director of the Centre for Language Discourse and Communication at King's College London.  He does interactional sociolinguistics, and his interests cover urban multilingualism, ethnicity, class, youth and education.  He is the author of Crossing: Language & Ethnicity among Adolescents (Longman 1995/St Jerome 2005) and Language in Late Modernity: Interaction in an Urban School (CUP 2006), and a co-author of Researching Language: Issues of Power and Method (Routledge 1992).  He co-edited 'The Language, Ethnicity & Race Reader (Routledge 2003) and edits Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacy (www.kcl.ac.uk/ldc).  He was founding convener of the UK Linguistic Ethnography Forum (www.uklef.net), and is currently the Director of the King’s ESRC Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Centre (www.kcl.ac.uk/kissdtc).

Refreshments Served. All are Welcome with Limited Seats Available.

Visit HAAL at http://www.haal.hk/

Following the seminar, you are invited to a self-paying dinner with the speaker. Thank you.