To Örebro University

This empirically driven multidisciplinary study takes a socioculturally oriented postcolonial perrtidisciplinary, ethnographic data, ostcolonialism, languaging, performativity, chaining, meaning-makingspective on social life and language. The point of departure is that human beings communicate with one another and they create meaning together, irrespective of whether this communication occurs in one, two or more linguistic varieties, dialects, registers or written-, pictorial-, oral-, signing- modalities. Analysis of multi-site and multi-scale ethnographic data are presented from different language sets that are often studied in traditionally segregated academic fields (for instance, fields such as Swedish/mother tongue, bilingualism, reading and writing, multimodality, deaf communication, gender etc) enable juxtaposing the explorations against one another. The role of the written word as a technology in relationship to languaging broadly and how written, oral, signed words are handled in daily life across time and space are explored.

An overarching aim is to contribute to the academic domain of (what is glossed as) bi/multilingual research from bi/multilingual perspectives. 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 ways in which written, oral, signed words are handled across everyday life spaces is explored through a range of representations like “thick accounts”, “transcripts at the meso and micro scales”, “video-grabs” and “maps”. Focusing the ways in which individuals in different communities language – convened in public spaces or in more stable organizations like work places or schools – makes visible the performative active work that participants (and institutions) “do” with symbols and tools. Language is empirically accounted for not as the sole property of an individual, community of practitioners or geopolitical state, but rather in terms of an intrinsic performatory dimension of interlinked language varieties and modalities on the one hand and humans in concert with tools on the other in face-to-face and textually mediated sites. Focusing social practices – what gets communicated and the ways in which the same occurs – allows for problematizing the dominating monolingual-monomodality position in addition to the “monological” essentialistic colonial perspectives on language.