ETHNOGRAPHY AND GLOTTOPOLITICS AT THE MARGINS: (ANTI)LANGUAGES AND (ANTI)METHODS
This symposium promotes theoretical-methodological and experiential reflections at the confluence of various disciplines in order to refine tools for understanding realities marked by marginality, illegalisms and bordering processes. Doing so through dialogue between anthropology and ethnography, political philosophy, critical sociolinguistics, critical discourse analysis, glottopolitics and communication sciences allows us to articulate disciplinary approaches to understand complex phenomena (O’Byrne and Holmes 2008; Pacheco-Vega and Parizeau 2018; Cardin and Renoldi 2020, Renoldi 2015, Renoldi and Bertotto 2026, Bentivegna et al. 2017, Bürki and García 2025, Morgenthaler in press). We start from shared experiences during several fieldwork stays on the border between Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay in 2023-2026. During this period, we became accustomed to crossing dry, river and fluid borders not only between countries and cities, but between disciplines, languages and imaginaries, in an effort to understand a reality subject to political processes related to the deployment of violence and illegalisms at different scales.
In continuity with symposium 11.3 “Between Borders: Perspectives in Dialogue on Illegalisms, Inequalities and Other Complex Phenomena in Border Areas” from the 58th ICA 2025 in Novi Sad, Serbia, which was devoted to current studies on Latin American borders, we now turn to questions of methods and inter- and transdisciplinary theoretical challenges (Lima de Freitas, Morin and Nicolescu 1994) based on empirical studies. We will address the following cross-cutting issues:
● forms of marginal communication as contestatory anti-languages in contexts of illegality or precariousness (Halliday 1976), from an ethnographic standpoint
● the construction of meaning in marginal or peripheral spaces, such as the interweaving of silencing, keeping quiet and speaking (Millán 2025); the indexicality of complicity and secrecy, or quotation-marking (“comillación”) (Jerez 2013)
● understanding inequalities and differences from ethnography and from the glottopolitical perspective on hegemonies, conflicts and resistances (Arnoux 2014, Olave et al. 2024; Becker et al. 2025)
● the construction of sensitive approaches that go beyond manual-based methodologies (Renoldi et al. 2021), through which the politics of speech and the local meanings of marginal experiences are problematized and reconstructed
● from ethnographic-glottopolitical approaches (Zavala 2020), analyzing vital practices in spaces marked by necropolitics shaped by neoliberal advances, the crisis of the nation-state and the decline of democracies (Mbembe 2016, Agamben 1998)
● rethinking the use of traditional research techniques and instruments (e.g., field notes, team discussions, interviews) and their technologization (cloud services and collaborative software, AI) for addressing topics and problems situated at the margins
● proposing strategies to address inequities between researchers from the Global North and South, as well as between academia and research subjects in situations of precariousness (e.g., through strategies of horizontality, “communication-communion” and “multi-voiced authorship” according to Corona Berkin 2019)
We invite scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and at various stages of their academic careers to submit proposals articulated around one or more of the issues suggested above.
