Language in context seminar

Speaker: Jasper Zhao Zhen Wu (National University of Singapore)

Title: Spatial becoming and governmental stylisation: Dis/connecting territories in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area

Abstract: In 2019, the People’s Republic of China published the Outline Development Plan for its new economic region. Often referred to as the Greater Bay Area (GBA), this region on the coast of the South China Sea encompasses nine prefectures in the Guangdong Province and the two Special Administrative Regions – Hong Kong and Macao, occupying a key strategic position in the nation’s global economic network emerging under the Belt and Road Initiative. The governments of Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Macao are tasked to coordinate in enhancing holistic cooperation within the GBA. Shaped by different historical processes – Guangdong in the modernisation of China, Hong Kong in British colonial rule, and Macao in Portuguese colonial rule, the three territories developed distinct spatio-cultural practices, which constitute the core identity of each territory. However, these practices also created relative advantages between the territories, allowing them to take up different strategic positions in the GBA. Guangdong’s leading prefectures as cultural and tech-innovation hubs, Hong Kong an international financial hub, and Macao a world-class tourism centre. Spatio-cultural differences between the territories invoke simultaneously their individuality and their collaborative potential. Focusing on the Chinese – simplified and traditional – official GBA websites devised by the three governments, the paper examines the tensions in styling territorial difference as governments simultaneously individuate and connect the distinct spatial conceptions of the GBA between the three. Analysing such dual relation stylised through linguistic forms, multimodal discourse, and ideological framing, the paper shows the socio-political tensions in territorial inclusion/exclusion and segmentation/integration of the GBA as a socio-historically complex region. It argues that the discursive differentiation of space does not necessarily produce a singular/collective binary opposition but simultaneously dis/connecting territorialities (Deleuze 2014 [1994]; Pennycook 2012), and reflects upon the theoretical and socio-analytical implications in taking this post-structuralist standpoint. Keywords: governmental stylisation, dis/connecting territories, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Areas.

Speaker: Lauren Hall-Lew (joint work with Claire Cowie, Zuzana Elliott, Anita Klingler, Nina Markl, and Stephen McNulty)

Title: COVID-19 Lockdown: Freedom & Choice

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic brought about a profound change to the organisation of space and time in our daily lives. In this talk, we analyse narrative shifts in the representation of place in the times before versus the times after the first UK lockdown. Data come from the Lothian Diary Project, which collected self-recorded audio/video diaries made by residents of Edinburgh and the Lothian counties in 2020 and 2021. Across these diaries, speakers compare and contrast life before and during lockdown by employing shifts in tense and shifts in deixis to ‘zoom in’ and ‘pan out’ of time and space (Pritzker and Perrino, 2021), enacting chronotopic shifts (Bakhtin 1981; Britt 2018; Blommaert & De Fina 2017). We focus here on those narratives that describe changes in freedom and choice. While many participants describe lockdown as constraining both, we also find an interesting range of narratives describing increases in personal freedom. These discursive differences, which appear to pattern demographically, reveal the differential impact of the COVID-19 lockdowns across the community. In fact, we argue that the COVID-19 lockdown actually reconfigured the meaning of community, and raise the question as to if those changes have had any lasting impact.