Böcker av Jan Blommaert

This edited volume consists of chapters celebrating the career of scholar Sjaak Kroon, who has produced ground-breaking work in the field of ethnography of education, immigrant minority language teaching and language politics. The chapters cover the use of immigrant minority languages in education and the development of policies at all levels and across the globe in this sometimes over-policed field. It particularly focuses on language policy analysis in which both the top-down institutional and the bottom-up ethnographic dimensions are blended, and in which globalization is the main macro-perspective. The chapters describe sensitive tools for investigating, unravelling and understanding the grey space connecting formal language policies to informal politics and practices of language on the ground.  

Ethnography must be seen as a full theoretical system, not just as a method. In this book, a range of authors are examined, whose work was either instrumental in creating this theoretical system, or might productively be used in developing it further. Authors discussed include Hymes, Scollon, Kress, Bourdieu, Bakhtin and Lefebvre.

Superdiversity has rendered places, groups and practices complex and the usual tools of analysis need rethinking. Using an innovative approach to linguistic landscaping, the author investigates his own neighbourhood from a complexity perspective and demonstrates how multilingual signs can be read as chronicles documenting the histories of a place.

An eminently readable analysis on the rhetoric of the 'tolerant majority' - those who view themselves as being open to a diverse society; a rhetoric that is prevalent throughout the news media and political world.