Voices of a City Market

With coffee and croissants and chairs in a circle, this book invites us to explore the mundane world of ethnographic research amid the voices, bodies, meat cleavers, everyday racism, conviviality, and cuts of meat in a market. It takes us on a poetic expedition in search of the quintessence of experience and its impossibility, giving us instead the rhythm and rhyme of encounters with eels, intestines, milk, blood, tea and fish. Beguiling.

* Alastair Pennycook, University of Technology Sydney, Australia *

The ethnographic eye and poetic sensibility Blackledge and Creese bring to their work shines through brilliantly in these scenes and characters from the everyday business of a bustling urban multicultural and multilingual food market, bringing our human diversity and common humanity to the fore. This is not a quick read, but it is a deeply rewarding one.

* Nancy H. Hornberger, University of Pennsylvania, USA *

...the authors make an interesting point about the use of the body as means of communication in the exchanges between traders and customers, and between traders themselves...These practices, the authors show us, have a particular rhythm, they occur under certain circumstances, and even though they are not entirely the same, we notice they go through a process of ritualisation as they are produced and circulated in specific times and places.

-- Rommy Anabalon Schaaf, IOE, UCL, UK * Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2022 *

This piece of work researching on voices of the market has informed the current ethnographic research from at least two perspectives. Firstly it exhausts all the modern research techniques available, researching out for details of social life to reveal the complexity and superdiversity of the city market. The way the data are collected and presented has also shed some light on both ethnographic research method and ethnographic writing. It can be hailed as the cornerstone of twenty-first century ethnography.

-- Aihui Wu, Jiangsu University, China and Birkbeck, University of London, UK * BAAL News, Issue 117, Summer 2020 *

An original combination of research rigour, creative writing, and artistic materials produces a highly expressive text that places the reader at the very centre of the market and of the multifaceted processes of translation taking place within it. 

-- Simona Stano, University of Turin, Italy and New York University, USA * Social Semiotics, 2020 *

Voices of a City Market provides a nuanced and experimental account of multilingualism and superdiversity in urban Britain. The book’s original form of evocative vignettes draws readers in and highlights the wide diversity of voices at play in the market. The result is an account that demonstrates the promise of superdiversity
as a theoretical approach to the increasingly complex constellations of difference both within and across migrant communities.

-- Adam Sargent, School of the Art Institute of Chicago * Language in Society 50 (2021) *

We found the book to be a beautiful demonstration of detailed, nuanced description and representation of ethnographic data unlike most of the academic writing in the academy. The plethora of characters encountered
by the reader in the book represent many cultures, which makes it a great demonstration of mindful representational writing [...] above all, we would highly recommend this book for what it is – a delightful rendition of an account of everyday mundane life and takeaways from it.

-- Anuja Sarda and Ameya Sawadkar, University of Georgia, USA * International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 20