Get to know Ben Rampton

Learn about his academic journey, struggles, personal life and interests.

 

Ben Rampton is a professor of Applied and Socio-linguistics at King’s. His work centres around ethnographic and interactional discourse analysis, with particular interest in anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies. His publications focus on language in relation to urban multilingualism, youth, popular culture, ethnicity, and numerous other aspects.

 

Some of you may have heard about him and his work during your GCSE or A-level English language journey. I cannot help but admit I was slightly smug to know he was a staff member in my university and I may or may not have shared this with both linguistics and non-linguistics students. The following interview I conducted with Ben is intended to centre around his academic journey but also provide a chance for students to get to know him and his personal life a little bit better.

 

 

What made you interested in linguistics? 

 

Well, I mean, there are different types of linguistics and I’m not very interested in the formal side of linguistics. I’ve actually never been especially interested in the patterns of language or the mathematics of it, or the crossword puzzle of linguistics, which a lot of people really like.

I’m interested in language because I always think of William Blake’s words – “To see a world in a grain of sand; to hold eternity in an hour.” If you know how to look, you really can see an awful lot of the social world, history, ideology and interpersonal relations within language. That’s what fascinates me about language – it’s being able to pinpoint and unpick all these things going on in the social world. 

 

Were you always fascinated by language?

My interest in language began fairly early. I did modern languages for A-level but again I was more interested in the literature than the actual linguistic structures. Then I got particularly interested in linguistic study when I was a school teacher, teaching English as a second language in a reception unit attached to a school. We were getting kids aged 7-15 mainly from Bangladesh, and we were teaching them English. But there came a point when suddenly no more new kids were arriving and so the person who ran our centre thought “Oh god we’re all going to lose our jobs”. So, she said that we need to find new students. She went around all the local schools, and if anybody had parents from the Indian subcontinent and had difficulty with literacy, she said “Right, we’ll have you in our centre”. These were kids who actually spoke extremely good English, they were just having difficulty with reading which has nothing to do with second language stuff but I had to teach those same kids and they didn’t like being in that centre. This is why I thought to myself, how is it possible, what’s the justification for this. At that time there were lots of talk about “deceptive fluency” – kind of third stage deceptively fluent English, which provided a justification for these kids being yanked into the centre where I taught. I thought I had to do a bit of study so that I could argue against this educational ideology and that’s how I really got into linguistics more fully. I mean, I did a teacher training where we did some linguistics but I didn’t appreciate its importance in the way I did until I encountered this real-life situation.

Which university did you go to and what did you study?

 

I went to the University of York, where I studied English and related literature. This was in the 1970s and it had a big impact on me because there was a lot of emphasis on the experience of literature and what it could show you about the meaning of life. I loved it. But I think it was when I did my teacher training that I came across social science as a way of thinking, and yes, social science did ask some of the big questions, but it also had more of a method and I liked that. It wasn’t so much about taste but more about analytic procedures. I think that the two come together [literature and social science] very nicely in the kind of research that I like to do, which is ethnography. Both the analytic attention to the small details and the big picture are important but also the experience counts as well.

 

 

Where are you originally from and what was your journey into becoming a lecturer at King’s College London?

 

I’m from London and as I said earlier, I became a teacher of English as a second language. I taught abroad for a bit and then I worked in this local authority of school unit. I had that tricky class I mentioned, which was the first step I made towards working at a university and my first step towards research. I mean, there were a number of things that happened along the way to the journey to King’s such as routine things about an academic career but there is one unusual aspect of coming to King’s. That is, that I came along with thirteen or fourteen other people.

I was working at what was then called “Thames Valley University”, now called West London University. There was a group of us, we were doing really, really, really well. We were top of the Times lead table for Linguistics along with Cambridge. But Thames Valley University got into trouble because it was dumbing down its degree and that got into the local press and people stopped coming to the university and so the funding dropped. So, the accountants were considering what they can do to cut down their costs and they looked at this group, the group of us, and said “these guys, somebody’s gonna cherry pick them so you better get rid of them now” in order to cut down some costs. So essentially, we were put up for auction and they got this very experienced guy who went around the universities inside the M25 and said, “whoever takes the largest number of people can have them.” So, we didn’t know where we were going for sure until the day we started at King’s (he laughs). Then suddenly fourteen people arrived at the department of Education, Communication and Society which was a big shock for them but it was nice for us. That happened in 1999 and a big group of linguists suddenly arrived at King’s – it was me, Constant Leung, Nick Andon, and many other people who have retired now. But yes, that was an unusual aspect of my academic journey.

 

 

What do you consider to be the most memorable moment in your career so far?

 

I can remember the ghastly moments, which I certainly have, but let’s not talk about them here (he laughs). I think if you were doing the kind of job that I do – that is, to do with research – probably the most memorable things happen during fieldwork. Because you interact with people with alertness and space to think about what’s happening, which you don’t get in ordinary life. Once you’ve started that, then you start to try and turn those encounters with people in the fields into memories themselves. You try and build the memorability through the process of transcription and analysis so that there’s a way in which you’re producing memories as a researcher. Indeed, sometimes you can work them up and they really do become and turn into vignettes and people can look at them and realise quite a lot is happening. You know, we’re not poets and we can’t, like Blake, produce words that show the world in a grain of sand, but in the process of transcription and analysis, small bits of encounters mean a lot in the academic intellectual frameworks that you’re looking at. So, I think I’d say that if you’re an ethnographic or interactional researcher, you’re producing memories. You dwell on these encounters, and of course the recording machines make a huge difference as well.

 

 

Do you have a favourite accent/language?

 

Oh yes, I do. My favourite accent is a kind of general Scottish accent and that is because my mother was Scottish. But the paradox is that I could never hear my mother’s accent. I think that is not unknown or uncommon. For example, many people know that their parents speak with a different accent and other people comment on it but they can’t hear it themselves. So, when it actually came to hearing the Scottishness of my mother’s voice, I only heard it through other people doing imitations. One way or another, I go there quite a bit and I’d say that’s my favourite accent.

 

 

What is your favourite class/module to teach?

 

My favourite module is always the one that’s most recent and that I’m developing myself. One of the nice things about this job is that you do get the chance to take things that you’re really interested in and turn them into occasions that allow you to share them with other people, which is really exciting. So you propose something and then you work with a colleague, which is often great, but then you start wondering how you will approach it. You build it up. You build up the readings, the activities and so forth. Once you actually do it, whether it’s first year undergraduates or PhD students, you get the excitement of the feedback for something that you’ve recently developed and created. So I couldn’t give you a single one. I would say that all of the courses that I’m developing are my favourites.

 

 

If you weren’t a lecturer at university, what do you think your occupation would be?

 

I think I would probably still be working in education. I have to say I do like this job because it is quite varied. You can do the research, do the teaching, but also certain types of administration and organisation can be quite creative. I mean I have to say I’m quite old now and I think it’s tougher now than it used to be. There’s less freedom as an academic than there used to be. I think there’s quite a lot of insecurities surrounding this job now. For example a lot of people are badly paid, or teaching and doing research on short term contracts and there’s a lot of regulation, a lot of micromanagement. So I think that university teaching is much tougher and much more constrained than it used to be. I might have been very positive about the job in what I’ve been saying to you but that’s me looking back at how things have been. Now it’s more difficult, the amount of scrutiny, surveillance that goes on is making it much more difficult for academics and indeed much more difficult for students too – I think the amount of monitoring that goes on, and the pressures and the costs of course. When I was studying as a student, it was free and all of these things mean that there have been changes and it’s more pressured than it used to be.

 

 

What do you like to do during your free time?

 

Well I’ve always liked being active – walking, exercise, and I also used to enjoy playing football, cricket and rugby more so than watching them. More recently I’ve been doing music-making, trying my hand at singing, and that has been quite fun. That’s what I’ve been doing recently and I really do enjoy it.

 

 

Do you have any pets and if not, would you ever get one?

 

Yes, yes. We adopted a cat recently. Well, you know, it comes along with feeding it, brushing it, fetching pills and various kinds of ointments but it’s nice and it does change the way you look at a room for example. If you’ve got a cat in a room then it’s no longer just a space. They animate the space. Rooms don’t feel empty anymore which is nice and rather interesting. If you have an animal then literally your sense of space is “re-perspectivised”- you start to imagine what it’s like to see from their perspective, for example what a foot looks like from the ground and so forth. So yes, it’s nice to have even though it’s not a terribly responsive, loving animal but anyway (he laughs).

 

 

Name 3 things you can’t live without.

 

• .Early mornings
• Something to write with – whether it’s a pencil or keyboard or anything else. I couldn’t live without that.
• And I suppose nowadays I have to say YouTube because that’s where I learn to do my singing for example. I listen to YouTube and think to myself “Oh that’s a nice song”. So yes, I use it to develop my own interests and skills.

 

 

Do you have any advice for graduating students who are about to step foot into the real-life world?

 

I’ve got kids myself who have now finished university, but the first thing to say is that the world has changed and the advice that somebody like me gives has a certain value but it’s hard for me to understand the kind of pressures that you guys face. However, my first piece of advice would be this: Good things don’t happen in a hurry. 

Secondly, I think that, whatever you do, you should throw yourself into it but also step back and reflect. What I mean is, suspend your disbelief for a while but then also don’t believe it completely. Do step back and in a couple of years, take a look at what you’re doing. Don’t lose yourself in what you’re doing even though it’s important to throw yourself in for a period. 

And then finally I suppose the third thing is: don’t make the mistake of thinking that expertise and understanding go with the institutional role and job description. You know, there are an awful lot of hierarchies that you encounter. But knowledge, understanding, or expertise isn’t necessarily in places where they say it is. Those would be the three pieces of advice I would give.