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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Marta Wilczek-WatsonORCiD
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Othering tends to be approached as a discursive device demarcating perceived boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’. In this talk, I discuss how in certain contexts – here, during food-related interactions in intercultural families – accentuating Otherness can function as a tension-defusing strategy. The data presented are drawn from audio-recorded interviews with five UK-based Polish-British families and their celebratory meals, which they video-recorded. Through a qualitative (multimodal) discourse analysis, I explore how the families’ food talk projects ‘stance’ (Du Bois 2007) – i.e., how it indexes the speakers’ subject positions towards their sociocultural repertoires while moulding their identities. The analysis demonstrates how the family members recurrently ‘other’ their interlocutors’ foodscapes – represent them as different, atypical, and/or inferior. While this practice could be read as distancing from other speakers, abundant contextualisation cues (e.g., caricature-like hyperboles, playful voicing, and collaborative floor strategies) suggest non-stigmatising character of these utterances. I argue that, in this context, highlighting difference can paradoxically reflect the speakers’ intimacy and solidify their bonds; this potential of othering is understudied in face-to-face interactions. In relation to the 2023-24 ALCSS theme (‘Applied Linguistics, Communication, and Social Inclusion’), the talk contributes to the discussion of discursive strategies for cultivating sharedness among individuals from different sociocultural backgrounds.
Author(s): Wilczek-Watson M
Publication type: Conference Proceedings (inc. Abstract)
Publication status: Published
Conference Name: Applied Linguistics & Communication (ALC) Seminar Series
Year of Conference: 2023
Online publication date: 31/10/2023
Acceptance date: 23/10/2023
Publisher: Newcastle University, Education, Communication and Language Sciences
