Language learners and learning language in the era of reinforced boundaries : challenging webs-of-understandings related to bilingualism ethnographically

• This empirically driven multidisciplinary study takes a socioculturally oriented decolonial perspective on language, identity and learning. It is framed in the intersections of Communication Studies, Literacy Studies and Educational Sciences traditions on the one hand, and the identity research domains of Deaf Studies and Gender Studies on the other. An overarching aim is to present explorations of bi/multilingualism from bi/multilingual multimodal perspectives. Focusing the ways in which individuals’ language, in public spaces, schools or work spaces, makes visible the performative work that participants (and institutions) “do” with semiotic resources. Language is empirically accounted for not as the sole property of an individual, community or geopolitical state, but rather as an intrinsic performatory dimension of both interlinked language varieties and modalities and humans in concert with tools in face-to-face, textually and digitally mediated spaces. Focusing social practices – what gets communicated and the ways in which the same occurs – allows for problematizing dominant hegemonic epistemologies related to language, identity and learning. Alternative decolonial vantage positions together with multisite, multi-scale data (like diaries, field-notes, video-data, narrative biographies, language curricula and archive data across time) from ethnographic projects at the Communication, Culture and Diversity, CCD research group at Örebro University, Sweden have enabled center staging “isms” that currently collate towards reinforcing oppressive boundaries and producing newer web-of-understandings in the Language and Educational Sciences. Together with an oral language bias in academic reporting these webs-of-understandings reinforce dominant monolingual-monomodality positions in addition to monological essentialistic colonial perspectives on language, identity and learning. The analysis highlights that ways of conceptualizing, reporting and “talking about bi/multilingualism” are not in sync with mundane languaging or ways-of-being-with-words, or peoples engagement in everyday “bi/multilingual communication” inside and outside institutional settings. The findings have major relevance for reframing both educational as well as societal agendas in the global North, but also South.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Annan samhällsvetenskap -- Internationell migration och etniska relationer (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Other Social Sciences -- International Migration and Ethnic Relations (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Studier av enskilda språk (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- Specific Languages (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Annan samhällsvetenskap -- Tvärvetenskapliga studier inom samhällsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Other Social Sciences -- Social Sciences Interdisciplinary (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Language learning

learners

education

Oppression

decolonial studies

webs-of-understandings

Gender Studies

Genusvetenskap

Publikations- och innehållstyp

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