WP356 Interaction & memory in empirical sociolinguistic approaches to the spectral

Sociolinguistics needs to take violence and its lasting, intense and/or unpredictable effects very seriously, but is a new and specialised hauntological sociolinguistics of the spectre needed to address them? This paper argues (i) that theories and empirical methodologies developed in the ethnographic study of situated interaction can already provide effective ways of engaging with ghosts, spectres and absent presences. (ii) Productive new links are emerging between sociolinguistics and memory studies, where violence and trauma have long been central themes, but memory studies itself may have more to gain from linguistic ethnography and studies of interaction than hauntology. (iii) The study of language, memory and haunting violence can form part of a broader collective effort to make sense of (in)securitisation, a powerful mode of governance that an increasingly difficult for sociolinguists to ignore.