Emergence in a transient social configuration: 'A linguistic ethnographic study of how strangers establish practices for working together within international development'

Project description

This project investigates the emergence of various social phenomena in a transient social configuration. The transient social configuration manifests as an 8-day ‘project visit’. The project addresses the question of how the six project participants come to socially organize their shared activities over the course of the eight days. The research is designed as a linguistic ethnographic case study and anchored in the sociological realist view of an analytically stratifiable social world. The study combines ethnographic field work with linguistic analyses of interactional data, as well as interviews before, during, and after the project visit. To analyze the data, an inductive approach was adopted, which resulted in different objects of analysis on different scales of context.

The first part of the thesis reveals how establishing a shared body of knowledge is crucial for the participants to be able to carry out the institutional tasks. It can be concluded that an unequal distribution of knowledge can impinge on how joint activities come to be socially organized.

 The second part of this thesis is a transcontextual analysis of the process of writing a development project. The analyses reveal the emergence of text production practices and project language as a register. These are argued to emerge in situated encounters through a reflexive relationship between participants’ sense-making and their operationalization of the broader institutional order during the writing process.

The the project offers a theoretical and empirical understanding of the concept of transient social configurations by illuminating the various factors which can shape these social settings. Finally, the study offers a rich linguistic ethnographic anchoring to studies of development encounters which have thus far paid marginal attention to the communicative practices that underpin development work.

Download the entire PhD project as a PDF here. 

Project participants

The PhD project is conducted by  Katherine Kappa.

Project period

The project was published in 2019.