Making marginality work: Working at/from the peripher - Seminar with Meredith Marra 

For a number of years the Language in the Workplace team and associates have been exploring the discursive processes involved in boundary crossing, i.e. the ways in which employees use language to successfully cross (or fail to cross) linguistic, social and national borders in their daily routines at work. The default assumption of the Community of Practice model which influences much of our work envisions newcomers on an inbound trajectory from legitimate peripheral membership (to use Wenger’s terminology) to core membership of the community. At the core, members are able to signal that they are “one of us”. Focussing on these transitions we have considered the way that boundaries are acknowledged, maintained, patrolled and defended in interaction, recognising that membership in a community is a joint achievement that can be thwarted by uncooperative in-group members. But our analysis has also suggested that some people simply do not want to become central members of a group. Rather they choose to draw on the subtle power associated with operating at the margins. Using data collected in a range of different workplaces I challenge claims regarding the need to integrate, and I trouble the power typically claimed for ‘belonging’.

Speaker's biography
Meredith Marra is Head of the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. She is Director of the Wellington Language in the Workplace Project and has researched aspects of workplace discourse with her colleagues for 20 years.  Her primary research interest is the language of business meetings, but she has also published in the areas of power, (im)politeness, humour and aspects of identity (especially gender and ethnic identity) in the Journal of Pragmatics, Language in Society and Text & Talk. Meredith is co-author of Leadership, Discourse, and Ethnicity (OUP, 2011), and co-editor of Constructing Identities at Work (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Linguist at Work (VUP 2017) and Negotiating Boundaries at Work (EUP, 2017).

13 April, 10.30 – 12.00, Dalgas Have 15, room 2V.071