In order to go beyond the more quantitative mode of LL research referred to above, an increasing number of LL researchers have stressed the embedding of language, social and political histories in the construction of public spaces. The scope of LL research is expanding by including ‘semiotic landscapes’ (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2009, 2010) and multimodal ways of approaching languages in public spaces. These new concerns of LL research draw on Scollon and Scollon’s (2003) concept of ‘geosemiotics,’ i.e. ‘the study of social meaning of the material placement of signs and discourses and our actions in the material world’ (p. 2). Jaworski and Thurlow (2011, p. 363) point out that ‘spaces are culturally and communicatively constituted, and the meanings of spaces are established by the way they are represented (e.g. written and talked about) and by the nature of social inter/actions that take place within them.’ Thus, this new strand of LL research advocates for data collection not only centred on photography supported by observations and field notes but also by including interviews in order to ‘avoid the misleading one-sidedness of textual interpretation resulting from researchers’s own reading of his or her data’ (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2010, p. 15).
Although they do not frame their study as LL research, Pennycook and Otsuji (2014) advocate for studying ‘spatial repertoires,’ i.e. ‘how individuals, objects, and language form the communicative activity within spaces’ (cited in Higgins, 2017, p. 107). They bring to the fore the notion of ‘smellscapes’ (Low, 2009; Pennycook & Otsuji, 2015), i.e. the spatial relations between smells, identities, places and languages. Furthermore, spatial repertoires also include what Scalvagiari et al. (2013) have termed ‘soundscapes’, the acoustic environment formed not only through spoken language but also through other sounds (e.g. music played, noises etc.) provoked by interactions and movements of people, animals and objects in the landscape. Ethnographic LL research goes beyond detailed and accurate inventories of urban multilingualism to include broader semiotic, critical ethnographic concerns and methodologies (cf. Blommaert & Maly, 2014). Signs emplaced in spaces inform us not only about the past and present, but they also index to transformations of those places due to societal mobility and
migration. Thus, changing the LL of a place represents power struggles in which authorities (e.g. the government, municipalities etc.) or dominant groups and ordinary people try to make visible their ideologies, policies and desires. All of these are often contested, opposed or embraced and advocated for as signs of evolution, development and diversity as well as for symbolic reasons, making LL a site of both ideological tension and compromise. This new wave goes beyond the language vitality perspective refered to above in order to understand the meaning of signs and their emplacement by looking at (their) semiotic landscapes, i.e. as ‘any (public) space with visible inscription made through deliberate human intervention and meaning making’ (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2010, p. 2) by listening to ‘discourses in transit’ (Sebba, 2010). It also considers mobile texts, both by migrants themselves, media, societal or official institutions, that index and are associated with people who navigate the places or spaces of the signs emplacement.
As Pennycook et al. (2013) put it, we need to do ‘ethnographies of signs” by deep immersion, or in other words, we need a ‘biography of objects and signs’ (Thurlow, p.c. 2017). To expand LL research beyond the focus on language attitudes and language policies, Milani (2013, p. 202) advocates for a sociolinguistic inquiry also concerned with gender and sexuality, another important facet ‘in which public spaces are structured, understood, negotiated and contested as are other forms of social categorization such as ethnic and national identity’.
Authors referred above, recommend an ethnographic linguistic landscaping approach which ‘does not leave the task of interpretation solely to the researcher who, on the basis of singular instances makes assumptions about a trajectory of learning and factors presumably significant in the structuration of an individual’s linguistic repertoire’ (Budach & de Saint-Georges, 2017, p. 70). And they argue for an approach that integrates multiple variables (e.g. gender, age, sexuality etc.) instead of the over-prioritization of language over other modes of representation (such as images, music, dance etc.), senses and semiotic practices that may help reach a nuanced understanding of social complexity in dense migration settings. In investigating migrants’ trajectories, this understanding can facilitate researchers’ engagement with research participants and with the semiotic/linguistic signs associated with them and their trajectories across national, linguistic and cultural borders. For all these, multisited research is needed to demonstrate the simultaneity and ‘multiple embeddedness’ of migrants’ lives.
4.4 Multisited ethnography
Geertz (1973, p. 5) points out that ‘eclecticism is self-defeating not because there is only one direction in which it is useful to move, but because there are so many: it is necessary to choose’. Drawing on Max Weber, he stresses that ‘man’ is attached to the webs of significance and he takes culture as those webs and so its analysis is interpretative ‘in search of meaning’ but ’not in search of law’ (Geertz, 1973, p. 5). This means that knowledge is not conceived as a given truth, instead it depends on our interpretations, for example when doing ethnography, which are always biased by the researchers’ experiences. It is thus constructed by an entanglement of researchers and research participants’ relations and juxtaposed lives in juxtaposed sites. Geertz (1973, p. 6) defines ethnography as the process of ‘establishing rapport, selecting informants, transcribing texts, taking genealogies, mapping fields, keeping a diary, and so on’. However, according to him, it is not these procedures that define science, rather it is the intellectual way of elaborating these procedures, i.e. what he describes as ‘thick description.’
In a world of transnationalism, migration and movement, we need thick descriptions not only of places in their own right but also of how places are connected and who connects them. According to Marcus (1995, p. 102), ‘multi-sited ethnography’ studies are informed by comparative dimensions of sites over the ‘fractured, discontinuous plane of movement and discovery among sites as one maps an object of study and needs to posit logics of relationship, and association among … sites’. This approach is paramount mainly when ‘the object of study is ultimately mobile and multiply situated’ (Marcus, 1995, p. 102). This mobile object is in fact the subject of study, as for instance are migrants, transnational people and their lives scattered in multiple sites. Thus, in order to gain a nuanced reading and understanding, researchers need to have multiple observations of juxtaposed moments, trajectories and emplacement in time and space of those subjects and sites of their navigation that ‘conventionally have appeared to be (or conceptually have been kept) worlds apart’ (Marcus, 1995, p. 102).
Falzon (2009, p. 1) points out that ‘conventionally, ethnography has involved the idea – if not necessarily the practice – of a relatively long term (typically several months upwards) stay in a field site of choice’. He calls for reflections on this idea of sites as (linear) containers of social relations which can be compared one to another. As Wimmer and Glick Schiller (2002) put it, there is a tendency to draw on ‘methodological nationalism’, i.e. by taking ‘nation-state as the natural container for analysis’ (cited in Dick & Arnold, 2017, p. 401). Marcus (1995, p. 102) disparages operating on a ‘linear spatial plane, whether the context is a region, a broader culture area, or the world system … comparisons are generated for homogeneously conceived