Inter-organizational conflict in the participatory web: (Re) narrating interpreting and (re) imagining the community

Social, professional and political imaginaries are increasingly produced, contested and negotiated in and across online platforms. Adopting a socio-narrative perspective, this paper explores the ways in which collectivities of interpreters use communication technologies in the construction of, and competition over, their organizational identity, practice and space. It focuses on Babels, which organized activist interpreting in social forums, and AIIC, the international association of conference interpreters, and their use of babels​.org and aiic​.net. It analyzes the narrative ‘position’ of these collectivities through the prism of their Web 2.0 homepage design, and individual members’ enactment of, or departure from, these positions (narrative ‘locations’) in the context of an inter-website and interorganizational conflict. The study shows that the participatory web mediates and shapes how collectivities publicly project, enact and contest competing imaginaries of the profession, of the interpreting community, and of society at large.