My relationship with Sri Lanka started out of nowhere. For some strange reason, possibly fascinated by its vivid colours, I had its flag hanging on my bedroom wall when I was a 9-year-old child, and it is from there, I guess, that my father started to think, this kid is odd at best and strange at worst. Later on, while reading for my degree at Oxford University as part of my course on classic children’s literature, I came across Horace Walpole’s work ‘The Three Princes of Serendip’ without realising that the name ‘Serendip’ was a corruption of the Arabic term ‘Serendib’. Ignorant as it may sound, it was only while working on my PhD in linguistic ethnography that I became again confronted, this time from an ethnographic standpoint, with the notion of ‘Serendipiteit’ (Serendipity/Serendip/Serendib). All this triggered in me the thought: why is Sri Lanka keeping on coming back into my life, in one way or another? 

And here you have it then. Last summer, I set off on an academic exploratory venture to your country with the support of my dear host, the Dept of English at the University of Kelaniya. While strolling through the streets of Colombo, what could an ethnographer do but start to inquire about the urban, sociolinguistic, socio-political and ethno-religious landscape unfolding in front of his eyes at each step he took? From clear traces of British, Dutch and Portuguese colonial pasts being read on buildings’ walls and names, to clear traces of global dependence on IMF and India, to small yet constant reminders of the tough socio-economic situation that hit the Island nation in post- COVID times, serendipity,i.e., fruitful ethnographic unpredictability (Sacramento 2025), has again sparked to my mind the idea of setting up a research programme, that still aims at recruiting as many members as possible, that would try to map the synchronic and diachronic aspects of narratives at different scale levels (see Singh & Spotti 2021 for the notion of sociolinguistic scaling) across of the whole of the Island. 

To illustrate the above, I will draw on an ethnographic linguistic-landscaping inquiry I conducted with Professor Sjaak Kroon in 2021 (see Kroon & Spotti, 2024). Against common concerns about the loss of narrative ability in the digital era, we claim that the current phenomena of globalisation, digitalisation, superdiversity, and, sadly enough, neo-imperialism offer ethnographically fertile grounds for new forms of narrativity. In this contribution, I analyse three types of such new narratives. First, I present the offline narrative of Eritrea’s language policies as unfolded in the multimodal semiotic landscape of the country’s capital city, Asmara, which reflects acts of terror, struggle, and independence from colonial times to contemporary Internet usage. As a second example, we deal with the online narratives emerging around asylum seekers as a semiotic emblem of global movement. This is done through a Google search, which shows a fascinating yet, at the same time, discouraging, multifaceted narrative of diasporic (im)mobility. As a third, and very sad, example, we go into the well-known online-offline memetic narrative that surrounds the figure of Alan Kurdi, a drowned Syrian refugee child who received global political as well as artistic attention.

The offline and online narratives discussed above are broadly methodologically applicable elsewhere, and, while synchronically hunched, they become diachronically indexical of a nation’s tormented past as well as its involvement in current global phenomena, such as refugee movement, confinement, and border protection. These ELLA-driven nexus-based narratives reflect the identity work of the sign and image makers and have emancipatory potential. Imagine, therefore, the power of dwelling on these narratives in classrooms. A pedagogical practice that takes on board these narratives as its pivotal point holds the potential to open pathways to improving students’ knowledge of uncomfortable, often traumatic national pasts (Somasundaram 2007), while giving students the chance to construct a voice, that is, an emancipatory capacity to make sense of theworld around them.