Jan Blommaert (1961–2021)

Jan Blommaert’s passing was a niched translocal social media phenomenon. Young scholars and established academics around the world mourned and praised his academic impact. Many of them also wrote testimonies about his personality and the impact he had on their lives and academic careers (see Diggit Magazine for a collection). Reading those messages, one could not help but wonder how he could have met, inspired and collaborated with all those people in all those places in the same timeframe. When he in March 2020 broke the news that he was ill, he was immediately overwhelmed by the many messages he received on his Facebook, Academia page, Twitter, and email. In Belgium, the country where he was born, lived and was deeply committed in society, hundreds of ex-students, civil society workers, activists, journalists, politicians, and unionists would thank him for his many contributions to society in Facebook posts on his wall. He was not only personally overwhelmed by it all or thankful, he saw it as proof that ‘his publication strategy worked’. A strategy he coined ‘knowledge activism’ and focused on open publishing and giving back knowledge to other academics and society in general.

The academic and academic knowledge was something that he considered as intrinsically connected to society. Blommaert was, just like most of his maîtres à penser – Dell Hymes, Johannes Fabian, Michel Foucault, Erving Goffman to name just a few – an academic driven not only by an academic but also by a social and political mission. His work was ‘ethnographic throughout, but ethnography in a particular sense: not that “ethnography” found in most textbook descriptions of it (a “method”, in other words), but a general programmatic perspective on social reality and how real subjects, in real conditions of everyday life, possessed by real interests, make sense of it’ (Blommaert, 2018a: ix). Just like Dell Hymes, he subscribed to a humanist politics that grounded his ethnographic approach. Ethnography was not just a scientific occupation but also a political-democratic project in the Enlightenment and Marxist tradition.

Ethnography, he liked to stress, had ‘a counter-hegemonic’ potential (Blommaert and Dong, 2010). The book ‘Debating Diversity. Analysing the discourse of tolerance’ (Blommaert and Verschueren, 1998) which he co-authored with Jef Verschueren was an early testimony to that commitment. In this groundbreaking work that put both authors on the academic map, Blommaert and Verschueren illustrated how meticulous academic research is not only academically relevant, but can also be societally and politically important, albeit potentially controversial. In this book the authors restituted the voice of migrants who were de facto voiceless in the Belgian ‘integration debate’. They showed that the discourse of tolerance of the majority shared the main assumptions of the extreme right. Both cultivated an ideology of homogeneism and abnormalized diversity.

The Dutch version of Debating Diversity – Het Belgische Migrantendebat (Blommaert and Verschueren, 1992) – preceded the English version by 6 years. It was not only self-published because no publisher wanted it, it was also politically explosive. This counter-hegemonic voice came with a price tag. It was not just theoretical knowledge that Blommaert shared with his readership when he wrote in Discourse. A critical introduction (Blommaert, 2005: 167) that ‘At the end of the day hegemony may be what it is because there is a real price to be paid for being anti-hegemonic. The price may be that one is not understood, not heard, not recognized as a subject, but it may also be that one is ostracized, exiled, killed or jailed, made unemployable, or declared insane’. Blommaert had first-hand experience about what it meant to take position against hegemony. He was of course not jailed or killed, but the rector did try to silence him and Verschueren, and journalists, politicians and even academic colleagues tried to denigrate them. This was not a one-time occurrence. Later when Verschueren and he published a new book on antiracism (Antiracisme Blommaert and Verschueren, 1994), authors from the same publishing house pushed their publisher to withdrew it from the stores. Throughout his life he has received ‘tons of shit’ to quote him.

All the counter-actions were in vain, Blommaert kept writing and talking with the same rigor and maybe even with more dedication. Throughout his career and his writings we see the importance of his principled humanism. The same drive to restitute the voices of the voiceless was central to what he himself saw as his best book Grassroots Literacy. Writing, Identity and Voice in Central Africa (Blommaert, 2008). In this book he analyzed the life-writing of ‘Julien’ and the Congolese painter Tshibumba as grassroots voices on history. Blommaert didn’t analyze their writings as ‘local’ texts, but from a perspective of ‘mobility’ and ‘inequality’ in the context of globalization. Both texts were written for an audience abroad, but so he argued, they didn’t travel well because they displayed constraints of sub-elite writing. Their voices deeply contrasted, he wrote in the preface, with his own voice. Blommaert was fully aware that he had access to elite resources. His command of academic English meant that he was fully integrated in an elite environment on the highest scale of globalization. He worked in excellent universities in core cities and countries of the world system and had access to good libraries and top-journals while the subjects of his research – Julian and Tshibumba – lacked those resources to have a voice.

This awareness of his privileged position in combination with his humanism and his belief that science is a public good made him an avid supporter of open source publishing. Most of his papers and even books appeared (first) on his blogs, the Tilburg Papers for Culture Studies and later also on platforms as Academia and Researchgate. He was also one the supporters and founders of Diggit Magazine on which he was by far the most productive author. Next to his academic writing, he wrote more than 10 Dutch books and hundreds of Dutch analyses on alternative media. He saw himself as an educator, somebody who had the duty to give his insights back to society. This belief that science can contribute to a better society was present in all his work. This open source publication strategy was the essence of his ‘knowledge activism’, and it explains at least partially the global uptake of his work.

Another ingredient of this global uptake is the programmatic, innovative and data-driven character of his work. The programmatic dimension starts again with Dell Hymes. Hymes provided him with ‘a framework that enables the incorporation of a vast field of social-scientific angles, tools and instruments’ (Blommaert, 2010: 694). It makes Blommaert’s ethnography paradigmatic. He clearly situated it in the Hymesian tradition as an approach to reality that contains ontologies, methodologies and epistemologies that were situated in the larger tradition of anthropology (see Blommaert and Dong, 2010 for a detailed description). It was from this tradition that he engaged with many different academic subfields: critical discourse studies, conversation analysis, sociology, linguistic landscaping, literacy studies, narrative analysis, social media studies, and of course sociolinguistics. His contribution to all those fields was ethnographic in nature. He always started from the idea that language is the architecture of society. Language, according to him, is always socially loaded. It has a history of use, and is used in society. It is not only the stuff that makes us social, it also is socially and politically consequential for humans.

Language is context. The importance of context and thus society in his work cannot be overstated. Grassroots literacy, together with Discourse, a critical introduction and A Sociolinguistics of Globalization (Blommaert, 2010) constituted a trilogy. All three books were empirical in the sense that they were data-driven. Starting point was always real people, with their investments in life. Even in Discourse, he didn’t just ‘criticized power’, he advocated a discourse analysis that analyzed the power effects that focused on ‘what power does to people, groups, and societies, and of how this impact comes about’ (Blommaert, 2005: 1–2). Power to him was not only something that was established through language, but also sedimented in language. ‘Language itself’, he argued, ‘is an object of inequality and hegemony; revealing the power effects of language cannot overlook this dimension of how language and speech themselves have been “molested”’ (Blommaert, 2005: 67). This, to him, meant that the analysis of discourse should start well before people speak or produce text. Context was not to be narrowed to the local situatedness of discourse. Context, according to him, was now ‘the world’ (Blommaert, 2008: xiii, 2010).

This trilogy was deeply ethnographic and used globalization as context. All three books focused on the fact that in the latest phase of globalization, mobility was a fundamental issue that demanded science to reimagine and reorganize itself and develop new tools to grasp this new context. He had first-hand experience about globalization as context. Every place in the world where he worked, became a field for data collection. He started his academic career as a PhD with fieldwork in Tanzania. When he worked at the Belgian Universities in Ghent and Antwerp he engaged not only with the hot ‘integration debate’, but was also asked by governmental institutions to analyze the ‘narratives of Asylum seekers’. Something that he later used to analyze the power effects of those institutions on the lives of asylum seekers. When he was appointed at the Institute of Education in London, he engaged in analyzing the role of language education and inequality. Even his own neighborhood in Antwerp Berchem became a site for fieldwork (Blommaert, 2013). And always, the local was interpreted in a global, layered, polycentric context. And always, he focused on the power effects in and through language and how they create inequality and injustice.

Blommaert was outspokenly empirical in building theory. He was convinced that scientists ‘need the messines and chaos of actual confrontation with empirical cases and data in order to arrive at systematic theories’ (Blommaert, 2018b: X). Fieldwork never meant mere description to him. Data was analyzed in function of building an empirically grounded theory that would sketch the consequences, the power effects of globalization and later also digitalization for the study of language in society. The deepest effects of power everywhere, he argued, were inequality, as power differentiates and selects, includes and excludes. This focus on the world as context, also meant that digitalization would gradually take a more central place throughout the last 20 years. He always regretted not spending more attention to the role of digital media in his Discourse book. He remedied that by steering the department of Culture Studies at Tilburg University in the direction of Digital Culture Studies. In one of his last papers, he argued compellingly that ‘Digital infrastructures have become part of what is conventionally described as “social structure” – the deep, generic and often invisible drivers behind actual social conduct – and such infrastructures now demand much more attention in research on messages and meaning’ (Blommaert, 2020).

All of his work was empirical and deeply paradigmatic. He looked at science and research as the product of humans. Meaning that social sciences are also grounded in shared assumptions that can be seen in certain trends in research, or disciplines and schools. He advocated that we as researchers not only question the assumptions in society and their power effects, but also our own assumptions as researchers. Most of his books, from his linguistic landscaping to his voyages into discourse analysis, sociolinguistics and literary studies shared this eagerness to question the paradigms. He empirically analyzed the shared assumptions in a field or a scientific discipline and tried to contribute to that academic discipline by critically engaging with its assumptions. Ethnography has counter-hegemonic qualities, so use them to the fullest so that we can make the world a more just and equal place. That I think, is the most important lesson Blommaert thought us.