Article published In:
Meaning Making in the PeripheryEdited by Luiz Paulo Moita-Lopes and Mike Baynham
[AILA Review 30] 2017
► pp. 50–71
Edited by Luiz Paulo Moita-Lopes and Mike Baynham
[AILA Review 30] 2017
► pp. 50–71
Negotiating sustainability across scales
Community organising in the Outer Hebrides
This paper represents voices of community organizers on Barra, a small island in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland. Although, arguably Barra is geographically and socio-politically located in the peripheries of Scotland, Britain and Europe, the island has been a center of North Atlantic maritime trade networks for centuries. In the current phase of Europeanization and devolution of powers within the United Kingdom, the community finds itself in the position of having to attend to multiple scales: the European Union, the United Kingdom, Scotland and the island itself with its various interest groups. We draw on ethnographic interviews with community organizers that were elicited for the research project Sustainability on the Edge to illustrate some political challenges and possibilities of such scalar realities. We show that community organizers construct a voice that emphasises a historical quality of what it means to live on Barra while inflecting this quality with worldly knowledge that enables access to resources from outside the island. Our findings remind us that centers and peripheries are neither fixed categories that could simply be mapped on geographical visualisations nor notions independent of discursive practice.
Keywords: scales, multilevel governance, islands, voice, community organizing, devolution
Article outline
- Introduction
- Scales, indexicality and voice
- Scale uncertainty in times of devolution
- Recognising scales
- Upscaling communication
- The complexity of informal organization
- Conclusion
- Notes
-
References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].
References (40)
Agha, A. (2005). Voice, footing, enregisterment. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 15(1), 38–59. 
(2007). Recombinant selves in mass mediated space-time. Language & Communication, 27(3), 320–335.
Attardo, S., & Raskin, V. (1991). Script theory revis(it)ed: Joke similarity and joke representation model. Humor, 4(3/4), 293–347.
Bachtler, J., & Turok, I. (Eds.). (1997). The coherence of EU regional policy: Contrasting perspectives on the structural funds. London: Regional Studies Association.
Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). Forms of time and the chronotope in the novel: Notes toward a historical poetics. In M. Holquist (Ed.), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, 1895–1975) (pp. 84–258). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Bartlett, T. (2012). Hybrid voices and collaborative change: Situating positive discourse analysis. London: Routledge.
Bartlett, T., Montesano Montessori, N., & Lloyd, H. (in press). Contesting key terms and concepts in the civil sphere. In P. Garret & J. Cots (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of language awareness. London: Routledge..
Beck, U. (1994). The reinvention of politics: Towards a theory of reflexive modernization. In U. Beck, A. Giddens, & S. Lash (Eds.), Reflexive modernization: Politics, tradition and aesthetics in the modern social order (pp. 1–55). Cambridge: Polity.
Bernstein, B. (1971). Class, codes and control. London: Routledge.
Blommaert, J. (2007). Sociolinguistic scales. Intercultural Pragmatics, 4(1): 1–19.
(2010). The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
(2015). Chronotopes, scales, and complexity in the study of language in society. Annual Review of Anthropology, 441, 105–116.
(2016). From mobility to complexity in sociolinguistic theory and method. In N. Coupland (Ed.), Sociolinguistics: Theoretical debates (pp. 242–261). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Blommaert, J., Collins, J., & Slembrouck, S. (2005). Spaces of multilingualism. Language and Communication, 28(3), 197–219.
Blommaert, J., & Rampton, B. (2011). Language and superdiversity. Diversities, 13(2), 1–22.
Blommaert, J., Westinen, E., & Leppänen, S. (2015). Further notes on sociolinguistic scales. Intercultural Pragmatics, 12(1), 119–127.
Branigan, K., & Foster, P. (2002). Barra and the Bishop’s isles: Living on the margin. Stroud: Tempus.
Braudel, F. (1973[1949]). The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the age of Philip II, 21 Vols. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Brenner, N. (2001). The limits to scale? Methodological reflections on scalar structuration. Progress in Human Geography, 25(4), 591–614.
Brown, T. (2015). Sustainability as empty signifier: Its rise, fall, and radical potential. Antipode, 48(1), 115–133.
Canagarajah, S., & De Costa, P. I. (2016). Scale analysis, and its uses and prospects in educational linguistics. Linguistics & Education, 34(1), 1–10.
Castells, M., & Portes, A. (1989). World underneath: The origins, dynamics, and effects of the informal economy. In A. Portes (Ed.), The informal economy: Studies in advanced and less developed countries (pp. 11–37). Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.
Collins, J., Slembrouck, S., & Baynham, M. (Eds). (2009). Globalization and language in contact: Scale, migration, and communicative practices. London: Continuum.
Dart, R. (2004). The legitimacy of social enterprise. Nonprofit Management and Leadership, 14(4), 411–421.
Ferguson, C. A. (1959). Diglossia. Word, 151, 325–340.
Gumperz, J. J. (1982). Discourse strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Laclau, E. (1996). Emancipation(s). London: Verso.
Munasinghe, M. (2009). Sustainable development in practice: Sustainomics methodology and applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nye, J. S. (2004). Soft power: The means to success in world politics. New York, NY: Public Affairs Press.
Okvat, H. A., & Zautra, A. J. (2011). Community gardening: A parsimonious path to individual, community, and environmental resilience. American Journal of Community Psychology, 47(3/4), 374–387.
Perrino, S. (2015). Chronotopes: Time and space in oral narrative. In A. de Fina & A. Georgakopoulou (Eds.), The handbook of narrative analysis (pp. 140–159). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell..
Richards, E. (2013). The highland clearances, 2nd edn. Edinburgh: Birlinn Press.
Silverstein, M. (1976). Shifters, linguistic categories, and cultural description. In K. H. Basso & H. A. Selby (Eds.), Meaning in anthropology (pp. 11–25). Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press.
(2003). Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language and Communication, 23 (3/4): 193–229.
(2005). Axes of evals: Token versus type interdiscursivity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 15(1), 6–22.
Singh, J. N., Kantara, A., & Cserző, D. (Eds.). (2016). Downscaling culture: Revisiting intercultural communication. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
Singh, J. N., & Dattatreyan, E. G. (2016). Cultural interventions: Repositioning hip hop education in India. Linguistics & Education, 36(1), 55–64.
Stiùbhart, D. U. (2005). Rìoghachd nan Eilean: Mìle Bliadhna de dh’Eachdraidh nan Gàidheal 550–1550. Dunblane: Clò Hallaig.
Vertovec, S. (2007). Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic & Racial Studies, 30(6), 1024–1054.
Wallerstein, I. (1997). The time of space and the space of time: The future of social science. <[URL]> (29 May, 2017).
Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
Bartlett, Tom
2021. Time, the deer, is in the wood: Chronotopic identities, trajectories of texts and community self-management. Applied Linguistics Review 12:3 ► pp. 463 ff. 
Makoni, Busi
2020. Constructing multilingua franca scales. Journal of Multilingual Theories and Practices 1:2 ► pp. 218 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 31 december 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.