Socializing for success: A critical sociolinguistic ethnography of high socio-economic status multilingual families in the UK brexit context.

Abstract

This thesis ethnographically examines two instances of high socio-economic status, multilingual, multinational families resident in the UK, in the aftermath of the 2016 Brexit referendum. For each, I explore the discursive creation and presentation of ‘our family’, enacted in ‘our home’, and the (language) socialization of the family’s children into this, through the lens of Bourdieu’s (1993) notion of habitus. I draw upon both verbal and visual fieldnotes, resulting from an eighteen-month ethnographic study that used participant observation as its principal method. The fieldnotes included not only records of interactions and observed speech, but also notes of paralinguistic communication and the participants’ engagement with material objects. My analysis is inspired by Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical approach. Through it, I reveal how the habitus of each family was characterised by (language) ideologies and practices that reflected the ideals of the neoliberal self (Urciuoli, 2008), and those of cosmopolitanism. I consider how the ways of being of the participant families, and family members, were discursively / semiotically constructed through their everyday rituals, language / semiotic practices, and interactions, moment to moment. I further explore the mechanisms by which the children were socialized, in and through language and the families’ broader semiotic repertoire, into ‘our family’, and how this notion was (co-)created, contested, and negotiated with, and by, them. Taking a critical stance, I explore the essential role of (language) socialization within the family in the socio-economic stratification of society. I reveal how the participants’ belief in the deterministic potential of the dispositions and orientations into which they were socializing their children, the forms of capital at their disposal, and the sense of agency afforded by their Bourdieusian habitus, created an enacted belief that through the ‘right’ choices and (language) socialization practices today, ‘our family’ can (will?) win tomorrow.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Adriana Patino: orcid.org/0000-0003-1950-3954

ORCID for Marion Demossier: orcid.org/0000-0001-6075-1461

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