To Örebro University

Issues related to time and space explicitly or implicitly frame ways in which identity and language broadly, and literacy specifically get (re)searched. This study explicates challenges related to space – here, there and the virtual, mobility – across time and space (both geographical and virtually), and identity-positions through empirical examples from on-going ethnographically framed research 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 ethnographic projects at the CCD research group at Örebro University, Sweden (www.oru.se/humes/ccd). The analysis builds upon (i) video-recordings of mundane activities, (ii) data-prompted discussions and (iii) archives and policy related to institutions in Sweden and Mumbai, India where individuals have access to and engage with a number of language varieties including their written modalities. Fieldwork in the projects raise important issues related to globalization and the very doing of research

Recent shifts in media and digital spaces have created new conditions for the human condition. 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. Everyday life across spaces, including the disparity of experiences between individuals and groups calls for systematically revisiting some central areas in the educational and social sciences. Flexibility and the hybridity of languaging in physical as well as digital spaces are afforded by the glo-cal nature of linguistic landscapes. Here processes of identity are shaped by the transnational, multilingual and glo-cal nature of participation both inside and outside institutional settings. These linguistic landscapes enable the creation of physical as well as symbolic relationships, enabling glo-cal states and experiences.

I attend to the following issues: (i) illustrate some important challenges of doing fieldwork in present times; (ii) raise issues related to individual actors talk and institutional accounting of language, learning and identity on the one hand, and the performance of languaging, learning and identity-positioning on the other; (iii) illustrate the chained ecology and hybridity of communication and use of technologies in vastly different geopolitical physical and virtual spaces (ie. make visible the active work that participants and institutions “do” with symbols and artifacts through detailed descriptions of naturally occurring communication and interactions across time and space); and (iv) illustrate the ways in which multimodal analysis allows for revisiting dimensions of language socialization and identity-positions which get accounted for not as the sole property of individuals or as distinct bounded entities, but rather in terms of intrinsic performatory hybrid dimensions of individuals-cum-technologies-in-concert-across-time-and-space.