Diggit Magazine

Jan Blommaert, legacy, sociolinguistics,

Jan Blommaert on life

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The Editors
04/01/2021
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Last night (7 Januari 2021) Jan Blommaert passed away. Jan Blommaert was Professor of Language, Culture and Globalization, editor and founder of Diggit Magazine and Director of the Babylon Center at Tilburg University, The Netherlands. He was one of the leading sociolinguists of the world and wrote seminal works on Discourse (Discourse, a critical introduction), sociolinguistics (A sociolinguitiscs of globalization), ethnography (Ethnography a beginner's guide) and hundreds of academic papers on a very wide range of topics. In this file, we collect the work he has written for Diggit Magazine and work about his impact on the academic field by others. 

Alan Kurdi graffiti
© Wikimedia Commons

The ship, the child, and the refugee debate in Europe

Column
Jan Blommaert
12/06/2018
7 minutes to read

The current refugee debate in the EU has been deeply influenced by a small handful of iconic pictures documenting the predicament of refugees and highlighting the moral positions in the debate.

GDPR
© Pixabay

We're all data subjects now: the citizen in the European GDPR

Column
Jan Blommaert
21/05/2018
7 minutes to read

The new European GDPR generalizes the notion of the "data subject". But what exactly is the data subject? And how does it fit into a regulation which is fundamentally about the trading of Big Data?

Mai 68 50 years later. Revolution Revolt

Did anything happen in May 68?

Column
Jan Blommaert
23/04/2018
11 minutes to read

Was May 68 just a moment of countercultural protest? No, it was big, very big.

Corbyn at Glastonbury
© Wikimedia Commons

The Corbyn spy hoax and the cycle of fake news

Column
Jan Blommaert
23/02/2018
6 minutes to read

In February 2018, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was accused by the British tabloids of having been a Soviet spy. The media debate following these allegations offer us a glimpse the structure of a new media environment and the making of fake news.

Trumps Tweetopoetics

Column
Jan Blommaert
19/01/2018
6 minutes to read

Trump speaks in tweets. But his tweets are made for speaking too.

Traffic jam
© Jan Blommaert 2017

On butterfly effects and terror

Column
Jan Blommaert
22/11/2017
5 minutes to read

Thinking about a freak traffic accident and its huge butterfly effects made me reflect on the similarities with terror attacks. Can such things be prevented at all?

Macron on post-modernism

Column
Jan Blommaert
14/10/2017
4 minutes to read

Macron's distaste of post-modernism is actually a distaste for critical journalism attacking his very own Grand Narrative.

Thomas Hylland Eriksen
© CC BY-SA 3.0

Don't know what acceleration means? Then ''Overheating' is mandatory reading (Overheating - Thomas Hylland Eriksen)

Review
Jan Blommaert
01/06/2017
6 minutes to read

In his new book 'Overheating',  Thomas Hylland Eriksen offers a mountain of information and even more food for thought, and it does so in a text that can be read at lightning pace.

March for Science Brussels 2017
© Jan Blommaert 2017

The March For Science and why it's relevant

Column
Jan Blommaert
27/04/2017
4 minutes to read

The March For Science can be the beginning of a game-changing movement targeting some of the crucial evils of today's world.

25 years of right wing extremism in Belgium

Article
Jan Blommaert
24/11/2016
9 minutes to read

The Brexit, followed by election of Donald Trump in the US , have raised worldwide concerns about the rise of right wing extremism. The phenomenon is, however, 25 years old in Belgium. Lessons can be drawn from that longitudinal experience.

© Mehr Demokratie

Beyond ISDS

Article
Jan Blommaert
26/10/2016
3 minutes to read

The crisis of the ISDS system can lead to something better: a real international economic court of justice

© Friends of the Earth

How and why Wallonia and Brussels oppose the CETA Treaty

Article
Jan Blommaert
21/10/2016
10 minutes to read

Two small regional parliaments in Belgium have caused a crisis in the EU by raising objections against the CETA treaty. Why and how did they do that?

© ING - Flickr

ING's reorganization

Article
Jan Blommaert
03/10/2016
4 minutes to read

At the heart of TINA (There Is No Alternative), there is a lie revolving around the suggestion of absolute and uncontrollable actors shaping fields to which we can only respond. This lie deserves close inspection.

Explaining the Burkini debates

Article
Jan Blommaert
30/09/2016
4 minutes to read

Jan Blommaert (Tilburg University): 'The Burkini incident in Nice can only be "normal" from within a new politics of absolute identity."

© Patrik Göthe - Unsplash

Academic publishing and money

Article
Jan Blommaert
15/09/2016
4 minutes to read

We usually forget the real production price of academic work in Open Access discussions.

© Jan Blommaert 2016

What Pokémon Go teaches us about society

Blog
Jan Blommaert
02/09/2016

There are sociological and anthropological lessons to be learned from the biggest hype of the summer of 2016: Pokémon Go.

© Frederik Sadones - De Wereld Morgen

The 9/11 format and its consequences

Article
Jan Blommaert
29/03/2016
10 minutes to read

Reporting on terror attacks in Europe has, since 9/11, followed a format that emerged during the 9/11 events themselves. This format foregrounds emotion and "formats" public responses accordingly: "stop thinking, let's cry". 

Peiro
© Jan Blommaert 2007

From mobility to complexity in sociolinguistic theory and method

Academic paper
Jan Blommaert
22/01/2016
29 minutes to read

A theoretical and methodological paradigm sift is underway in sociolinguistics, in which insights in the mobility of sociolinguistic phenomena leads to a complexity perspective with far-reaching effects.

Agha, Silverstein, Rampton happy hour
© Jan Blommaert 2013

Chronotopic identities

Academic paper
Jan Blommaert
21/01/2016
15 minutes to read

Most of our identity work is "chronotopic" in nature: it is organized, regimented and ordered by specific timespace conditions. An awareness of this fact has implications for identity and culture theory.

The failure of surveillance

Article
Jan Blommaert
21/01/2016
3 minutes to read

The search for terrorists is supported by highly sophisticated and intensive surveillance of electronic communication media, but overlooks the basic fact that sometimes people switch off their devices and become invisible.

Teaching the language that makes one happy
© Jan Blommaert 2016

Teaching the language that makes one happy

Academic paper
Jan Blommaert
19/01/2016
5 minutes to read

Language teaching often assumes a generic "language" that needs to be acquired, while in actual fact, specific registers are learned and such registers enable "integration" into highly specific niches in social life.

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