Articulating Privilege

This fixed-term project – titled in full as Articulating Privilege: A New Geographical Methodology for Sociolinguistics – is funded through the Swiss National Science Foundation’s Spark scheme supporting “unconventional ideas” (CRSK-1_190183).

The project is run by me with the support of a student research assistant Noëlle Haudenschild and two other MA students Jasmin Liechti and Serena Wölfel (see below). For an important part of the project, I have also been collaborating with a professional photographer, Daniel Rihs (see photo left).

In short, the main objective of the Articulating Privilege project is to implement an experimental research method in sociolinguistics, a field which studies the use of language in everyday social/institutional contexts. The method is called a “discourse-centered commodity chain analysis”.

In sociolinguistics there is renewed interest in studying the connection between language, social class and structural inequality. Some scholars have focused on language used in/about elite settings as a way to understand how privilege is represented. Sociolinguists and other language scholars have also been considering the role language plays in shaping how people understand larger issues like food culture and material consumption, with implications for waste production and sustainability. The experimental method at the heart of this project offers a chance to examine these pressing social issues and cutting-edge scientific developments. The project borrows from geography (and economics) commodity chain analysis which entails “mapping” all the activities involved in the design, production, marketing and consumption of a single product or commodity. The project redesigns this method in a way that highlights linguistic and communicative practices (i.e. “discourse”) at each stage. To this end, a particular but slightly unorthodox object of analysis is used – the business-class airline meal – which is selected as a quintessential manifestation of contemporary privilege.

With its underlying concern for (a) the increasing divide between “haves” and “have-nots” and (b) the social-ecological consequences of material consumption, the project has strong societal relevance. Primarily, however, the project seeks to make a novel methodological and theoretical contribution to current debates in sociolinguists and allied language scholarship.

Related publications

Thurlow, C., Pellanda, A. & Wohlgemuth, L. (2022). The discursive chronotopes of waste: Temporal laminations and linguistic hauntings. Language in Society, 51(5), 819-837.

Thurlow, C. & Haudenschild, N. (2022). Dishing up distinction: Language materiality and multimodal coherence in elite foodways. Frontiers in Communication.

Thurlow, C. (2019). Expanding our sociolinguistic horizons? Geographical thinking and the articulatory potential of commodity chain analysis. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 24(3), 350–368.

Thurlow, C. (2020). Touching taste: On the classist intersections of materiality, textuality and tactility. Multimodal Communication, 9(2).

Thurlow, C. (2022). Rubbish? Envisioning a sociolinguistics of waste. Journal of Sociolinguistics.

Liechti, J. (2021). Stylising the elite eater: The discursive construction of distinction in the promotion of airlines’ “premium” food service. (MA thesis, University of Bern, supervised by Crispin Thurlow)

Wölfel, S. (2021). Prosuming distinction: Elitist stancetaking in travel blog reviews about “premium” airline meals. (MA thesis, University of Bern, supervised by Crispin Thurlow)