To Örebro University

Recent shifts in media and digital spaces have created new conditions that frame our lives. For instance, how people engage with information, the visual, the written, the cultural; how they find, engage with, experience the written word and other cultural and intellectual tools. Issues related to time-space explicitly or implicitly frame ways in which identity and language broadly, and literacy specifically gets (re)searched. This study explicates challenges related to timespace – here, there, where, now, then, when and the virtual, mobility – across time-and-space (both geographical and virtual), and identity-positions through empirical examples from on-going ethnographically framed research at institutions in the Global North and South. Taking both a socially oriented perspective and a decolonial framework on language and identity, this contribution juxtaposes data from projects at the CCD research environment in Sweden (projects DoT, LISA-21) and Mumbai, India (project GTGS) where individuals have access to and engage with a number of language varieties including their written modalities. The analysis builds upon (i) video-recordings of mundane activities, (ii) data-prompted discussions and (iii) archives and policy related to institutions.

The analysis illustrates: (i) challenges of doing fieldwork currently; and (ii) contrasting accountings of literacy, learning and identity between individuals and institutions on the one hand, and the doing of these on the other. The doing of fieldwork highlights some important assumptions regarding timespace that have a bearing on ethnographies, including netnographies. The doing of languaging, learning and identity-work illustrates the chained ecology and hybridity of communication and use of technologies in vastly different geopolitical physical and virtual spaces. The latter can be understood in terms of intrinsic performatory hybrid dimensions of individuals-cum-technologies-in-concert-across-time-and-space. Flexibility and the hybridity of languaging in physical as well as digital spaces are both restricted as well as afforded by the glo-cal nature of linguistic landscapes.