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. 

jan Blommaert, hart boven hard, socialism
© Karina Brys

Jan Blommaert's struggle

Column
Jenny-Louise Van Der Aa
10/01/2021
2 minutes to read

Jan Blommaert has recently passed away. Jenny Van der Aa reflects on his political and democratic engagement as one of his former close collaborators at Tilburg and Ghent University.

jan blommaert, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, in memorium, tribute

Farewell, Jan Blommaert

Article
Tom Van Hout
09/01/2021
2 minutes to read

Tom Van Hout says farewell to Jan Blommaert. He praises not only the academic, but also the man who normalized vulnerability

jan blommaert, sociolinguistics, in memorium, tribute
© Jan Jans

In memory of Jan Blommaert 

Article
Sjaak Kroon
08/01/2021
5 minutes to read

It is with deep sadness that we received the news that January 7th, 2021, Jan Blommaert passed away at the age of 59.

jan blommaert, in memoriam, sociolinguistics

Jan Blommaert, the trail blazer

Article
Anna De Fina
06/01/2021
7 minutes to read

Anna De Fina met Jan Blommaert in the early 2000’s during a workshop on Narrative and Identity. That workshop was one of the pivotal experiences of her academic career and, to a certain extent of her life.

Jan Blommaert, Christian Chun, discourse, sociolinguistics

My tribute to Jan Blommaert

Article
Christian Chun
24/11/2020
3 minutes to read

Christian Chun describes the impact of Jan Blommaert on his work: 'It is people like Jan Blommaert who has shown me in so many ways through his work, his teaching, his demeanor, his personality, and his humanity that indeed we can make academia a better world worth fighting for. '

SpaceX Falcon launch
© NASA TV 2020

The SpaceX mission and why it worries me

Column
Jan Blommaert
01/06/2020
4 minutes to read

Elon Musk's SpaceX operates in a field of power previously reserved for state institutions under public control. Is this a good or a bad thing? 

face mask, corona, covid, culture, corona culture
© Kate Trifo | Unsplash

The COVID19 lockdown rules: How we learn and adjust

Column
Jan Blommaert
14/05/2020
7 minutes to read

The COVID19 lockdown crisis involves many of us rapidly learning and adjusting to entirely new rules, many of which used to be 'weird' until recently.

Pelosi-Trump, October 2019 meeting
© Wikimedia Commons

Pelosi and Trump: Choreographies of conflict

Column
Jan Blommaert
12/02/2020
10 minutes to read

Pelosi and Trump don't get along too well. A number of emblematic pictures document this conflict, and in each of them concrete body movements are sensed to tell the story.

Elisabeth Warren
© flickr 2019

Elisabeth Warren, clickbait and truth

Column
Jan Blommaert
15/01/2020
6 minutes to read

Elisabeth Warren's statement on her male contenders being "electoral losers" enables us to examine the ways in which clickbait actually works.

Twitter politics
© Piqsels.com

Twitter politics: the next stage

Column
Jan Blommaert
07/01/2020
6 minutes to read

Two recent incidents on Twitter in the wake of the US attack on Iran's general Soleimani show us how Twitter continues to define politics as we know it.

© Jeremy Corbyn

Did Brexaustion kill Corbyn's media strategy?

Column
Jan Blommaert
15/12/2019
12 minutes to read

Analyses of Corbyn's social media campaign overlook something: the fact that politics is played out in a weaponized hybrid media field.

The House of Commons
© (c) Parliamentary Copyright, Open Parliament Licence

Order!! John Bercow going viral

Column
Jan Blommaert
25/09/2019
5 minutes to read

John Bercow's shouting of "Order" in the Commons has become global cultural material. What happened?

AOC, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, maiden speech, CSPAN

How AOC turned C-SPAN into a media hit

Column
Jan Blommaert
21/08/2019
6 minutes to read

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez congressional hearing interventions have turned C-SPAN's traditionally unspectacular broadcasts into a highly successful hybrid media format.

Virat Kohli
© Wikimedia Commons

Interested in globalization? Watch cricket

Column
Jan Blommaert
17/06/2019
7 minutes to read

The Cricket World Cup 2019 is a global media event of enormous size, while cricket itself is practiced only in a relatively small area in the world. How come?

Emma Watson on Framing

Column
Jan Blommaert
16/05/2019
6 minutes to read

Emma Watson's Instagram reaction to the Alabama abortion bill accurately exposes the work of framing in public debates, and shows an educational use of social media. 

What linguistic landscapes hide

Column
Jan Blommaert
26/02/2019
6 minutes to read

Offline linguistic landscapes hide a lot that only becomes overt when one traces these landscapes to their online extensions. It is by this move that we begin to get a grasp of the real complexity of "local" phenomena in a superdiverse world.

Facebook Birthday, Facebook old, Wechat, Weibo

Facebook is old: the Ford-T of social media just turned 15

Column
Jan Blommaert
04/02/2019
6 minutes to read

The very thing that has made Facebook great also makes it obsolete. Designed in the very early years of the 21st century and swept up in a wave of tremendous technological developments, Facebook now looks, and feels, almost medieval.

migration, global compact on migration, un
© Wikimedia

The Global Compact on Migration and its discontents

Column
Jan Blommaert
20/11/2018
7 minutes to read

The Global Compact for Migration has "evidence-based public discourse" as one of its objectives. Remarkably, this requirement has led to huge controversy. Are we moving towards a fact-free open society?

Jair Bolsonaro
© Wikimedia Commons

Big Man politics 2.0

Column
Jan Blommaert
29/10/2018
5 minutes to read

Big Man politics used to be an exotic and marginal phenomenon, but algoritmic populists such as Bolsonaro, Trump, Orbán and others made it one of the dominant formats of 21st century power.

Professor Jan Blommaert from Tilburg University

Professor Jan Blommaert on Foucault and the internet

Video
The Editors
18/10/2018

According to professor Jan Blommaert from Tilburg University, for Michel Foucault "the internet would have been an absolute marvel". It's not unreasonable to think that we are all living in a digital panopticon. Here's why. 

Marcuse's grave, cultural marxism, hoax, conspiracy theory new right
© Wikimedia Commons

Why has Cultural Marxism become the enemy?

Column
Jan Blommaert
03/10/2018
13 minutes to read

Cultural Marxism is blamed for "globalism" and its discontents. Perhaps exploring globalization can be an alternative for this deeply flawed conspiracy theory.

Martin Luther King
© Wikimedia Commons

Challenging the politics of knowledge, continued

Column
Jan Blommaert
28/06/2018
9 minutes to read

Jan Blommaert: 'In the discussion on the politics of knowledge, the political-economic dimension is absent. Academics can do more and better things in attempts to redress existing racial and gender inequalities.'