Books by Jan Blommaert

The authors draw on their experiences in explaining the complexities of ethnographic fieldwork as a knowledge trajectory. They do so in an accessible way that makes these complexities easier to understand and to handle. The 2nd edition of this bestselling book updates the 1st edition and includes a new postscript on ethnography in an online world.

Ethnography must be seen as a full theoretical system, not just as a method. In this book, a range of authors are examined, whose work was either instrumental in creating this theoretical system, or might productively be used in developing it further. Authors discussed include Hymes, Scollon, Kress, Bourdieu, Bakhtin and Lefebvre.

Superdiversity has rendered places, groups and practices complex and the usual tools of analysis need rethinking. Using an innovative approach to linguistic landscaping, the author investigates his own neighbourhood from a complexity perspective and demonstrates how multilingual signs can be read as chronicles documenting the histories of a place.

An eminently readable analysis on the rhetoric of the 'tolerant majority' - those who view themselves as being open to a diverse society; a rhetoric that is prevalent throughout the news media and political world.