The Discursive Construction of Identity and Space Among Mobile People (Advances in Sociolinguistics) - Hardcover

Roberta Piazza

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1350053503 ISBN 13: 9781350053502

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020

Synopsis

This book offers a close look at discourse of and around three socially marginalised groups: Irish travellers, squatters and homeless people, in order to understand more about these groups and how individuals within them position themselves vis-à-vis mainstream society. It investigates the groups' diverse and provisional relationship with space that challenges mainstream society's spatial logic.

Given that the relationship between mobility, space and identity has been explored in the main in migrant contexts, the volume proposes a reconsideration of this relationship outside and beyond people's movement from one place to another. Investigating the space-identity nexus among the three groups, the study highlights how mobility - and diversity - is not solely a cross-country phenomenon but a no less crucial and dramatic reality within an individual nation.

Based on close linguistic analysis of interviews collected over many years, the book investigates how the participants construct their social and personal identities, when talking about themselves and the sites they inhabit in interaction with the researcher, drawing on the concepts of 'heterotopia' and non-sexual desire. The book also considers other data, such as written reports and letters on the topic of marginal and mobile space, produced by ordinary people and by a small group of homeless individuals.

About this title

About the Author

Roberta Piazza is Lecturer in Linguistics and English Language at the University of Sussex, UK.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1350053503
• ISBN 13: 9781350053502
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256