Heterotopia on the Downtown C: A Mobile Landscape Study

Keywords: sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, subways, heterotopia, multilingualism
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 59

Abstract

In diverse urban areas, transit can serve as a space of equality, when the imperative to speak the hegemonic language is relaxed for the duration of a commuter or other journey. On subways, private operators, advertisers, and city government coordinate these mobile landscapes occupied by thousands daily. The frequently changing, multilingual assemblage of text and image within vehicles and at stations emphasizes their in-between, palimpsest nature, as different interests try to assert their preferred discursive realities. As previous research in linguistic landscapes and mobility studies has shown, such spaces can become heterotopias by virtue of their liminality, serving as semiotic representations of junctures between differing language worlds (and/or differing attitudes to the same one).

This paper takes as its point of departure a recent campaign by the New York State Council on Children and Families on the NYC subway. Their ads encouraged parent–child interaction to foster language development, and are monolingual in several minority immigrant languages: Haitian Creole, Russian, Hindi, etc. Using a discourse analysis approach, I examine the sociolinguistic assumptions that underlie the ads’ messaging and presence in the subway cars. Discussion of the campaign is supplemented by tracing the complex flows of material, political, and cultural capital, from creation to consumption, that are involved in the production of this mobile landscape. Beyond focusing solely on the distribution of information in different languages, my goal here is to unpack motivations for how these spaces are constructed, and what worlds they signify to their occupants on a broader level.