Graduate student Sarah M. Hillewaert, under the guidance of Dr. Judith T. Irvine, will undertake research on youth linguistic and semiotic practices in a social environment affected by migration, urbanization, and tourism. The researcher will investigate whether and how language offers young people a means to cope with rapidly changing social contexts and with the contradictory demands of "tradition" and "modernity." The research will be carried on the island of Lamu, which is Kenya's oldest Swahili settlement. The researcher will examine how youth negotiate their relation to Kenya's mainland urban youth language, Sheng, while living in an environment that gives value to a pure form of Swahili.
The researcher will test two key hypotheses: 1) Tourism, urbanization, and migration instil feelings of alienation and displacement among youth, who mobilize broadened linguistic repertoires in an attempt to redefine their positions in society; 2) Changing linguistic and semiotic practices offer a means to grapple with social flux. She will analyze Kenyans' interpretations of language use, and how these mediate the formation of social groups, identities, or relations. This will permit insight into the creativity of youth to reinvent personhood and agency in reference to tradition and new sets of social and economic relationships. Four research methods will be utilized to investigate these propositions: long term participant observation; semi-structured interviews; detailed linguistic analysis of daily interactions; and spatial analysis - using mapping and visual documentation to record the placement and movement of people.
This research will contribute to anthropological theory by allowing new understandings of how location, identity, and language are re-imagined and re-invented in relation to each other and to a rapidly changing social context. The research also will contribute to the education of a social scientist.
