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This ethnographic drama script is adapted from observations conducted in a large city centre library in the UK. The action focuses on the staff room in the library, where the fictionalised characters of four customer experience assistants, threatened with redundancy, take their lunch and tea breaks. The ethnographic drama is a creative curation of field notes, transcripts, audio recordings, video recordings, conversations and observations. It tells a story of political tension in everyday life at a time of austerity.
Carefully distilled from ethnographic data, a multivoiced scenario unfolds that vividly captures the liminal moment of the dismantling of a public sociocultural institution under the conditions of neoliberal policies. A riveting reading experience and a milestone in the quest for new ways of presenting research findings.
Blurring the personal and the political on the page as in life, this creative curation of ethnographic data captures people in the middle of life-changing events. From debating stroganoff recipes to political party leadership candidates, this drama of the everyday traces the human cost of the largest award-winning library in Europe disintegrating into “a body without a soul.” It’s impossible not to be moved.
A familiar scene. A weary academic enters, stage left. Walks to table in centre stage, picks up book and begins to read. WEARY ACADEMIC: [engrossed] I’ve never read an ethnographic research output like this...one that immerses the reader in everyday conversations through which we come to know both the characters and their understanding of the social and political changes around them...Exit right still reading book, pursued by a renewed sense of excitement.
The dialogues in this book are...simple, easy and fun to read. We can understand the characters through their conversations, from the frustration of having to leave their jobs at the library to the uncertainty of the future and how these reflections get intertwined with conversations about food or TV shows.
— Rommy Anabalon Schaaf, IOE, UCL, UK
Adrian Blackledge is Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of Stirling, UK. He has published widely on both multilingualism and sociolinguistics. He was Birmingham Poet Laureate from 2014-2016.
Angela Creese is Professor of Linguistic Ethnography at the University of Stirling, UK. She has published widely on multilingualism and ethnographic methods. Together with Adrian Blackledge she is the author of Voices of a City Market: An Ethnography (Multilingual Matters, 2019), Interpretations – An Ethnographic Drama (Multilingual Matters, 2021) and Volleyball – An Ethnographic Drama (Multilingual Matters, 2021).
Preface
Acknowledgments
Setting and Characters
Act I
Act II
Act III
Act IV