This chapter teases out key developments in discourse studies that have involved a radical rethinking of how stories and identities are being conceptualized and studied. First, we focus on how the role of the teller has been rethought by discussing the shift to interactional approaches to identities (cf. identities-in-interaction), including positioning analysis and small stories research. We then discuss how the personal story and story ownership have been reconceptualized with a focus on the uses and mobilization of stories in public arenas, especially politics. Third, we move to the reexamining of the role of space in the constitution of identities in stories, by focusing on work on mobile and migrant populations and on chronotopes as a concept increasingly employed for exploring the contextualization of stories. Finally, we discuss the implications of digital environments and media affordances, including the actual design and “curation” of stories, for how we tell stories and present ourselves online.

Linguistics as a modern science has invested its attention in describing structural rules and “trustworthy” parameters, which involve ideologies of objectivity, stability and invariance. These references conceived of language as an autonomous structured entity that created a kind of fixed ontology, relegating historical phenomena to a subaltern position. One can thus say that linguistics and history have been traditionally kept apart in the field of mainstream language studies. Considering the self-enclosure of linguistics, in this chapter, we begin by discussing how historicity and language are associated by different twentieth-century philosophers whose insights into historicity speak well to contemporary views of language as discourse. We then move into exploring how history is brought into textuality in present-day discourse studies by focusing on the macro–micro theoretical constructs of interdiscursivity and intertextuality. We conclude by drawing upon the relevance of such a theoretical apparatus to account for discourse circulation in fluid and superdiverse contexts. A specific question orients our line of reasoning and the pathway we construct: How can we, as discourse analysts, deal with the temporal–spatial horizon of history in view of the accelerated and ephemeral time-space references we experience nowadays? This question reflects our concern with the challenges that contemporary chronotopes pose to discourse analysis.

In this chapter, I offer examples of ethnographic approaches to discourse, focusing in particular on how linguistic anthropologists have engaged with and expanded upon the concepts and theoretical tools offered by Goffman and Bakhtin. This includes attention to how Goffman unpacks interactional participant roles, how his concept of footing has been critical to recent interest in stance, and also how speakers linguistically shift in and out of registers. Drawing on Bakhtin, discourse analysts have turned to explore the productive concepts of genre, intertextuality, voicing and chronotopes. Ethnographic discourse analysis connects levels of discourse and context and relies on specific methodological strategies to capture the dynamic ethnographic and sociopolitical contexts within which language is located and to which it contributes and responds.