Reimagining Rapport

Ethnography and ethnographic methods have increasingly become a feature of social inquiry. This new focus has prompted the adoption and regular use of "rapport" to evaluate the quality and robustness of research. Unlike its close kin, "communication," the uptake of the term rapport has occurred without much critical reflection. Within anthropology, rapport is merely thought about as a prerequisite for carrying out any type of fieldwork. Early sociological work saw rapport as a type of positive sociality. And, until now, sociolinguistics has mirrored these unexamined uptakes. Reimagining Rapport turns a critical eye to the use of the term "rapport" across disciplines. The collection analyzes the very idea of rapport, both exploring how it has been shaped by historical forces and actors within sociocultural anthropology, and questioning its usefulness. Rather than viewing the term as simply a type of positive social relationship that needs to be formed between researcher and consultant before research can begin, this book invites us to reimagine rapport theoretically, meta-methodologically, and methodologically. Leading sociolinguists challenge readers to 1) think about how rapport has been constructed within a number these disciplines; 2) see rapport as an emergent co-constructed social relationship that is built during situated multimodal encounters; and 3) see the interpretation of such social relationships as requiring a reflexive approach. Contributors collectively argue that rapport should be replaced by concepts such as "role alignment" and "belonging," which are more useful in qualitative sociolinguistic inquiry and which can be used to push the field forward. Chapters trace the concept of rapport's genesis and use in anthropology by examining it in relation to power and materiality, seeing it in terms of role alignment, and by critiquing it theoretically in terms of the ideologies it draws on and manifests. A valuable resource for scholars and students of sociolinguistics and linguistics anthropology-Reimagining Rapport is the first collection to provide an in-depth investigation of the popular term that has taken the social sciences by storm.