To Örebro University

The emergence of the knowledge society, increased global-local migration flows, the explosion of social media and disparate regional power and resource shifts, including conflicts in the new millennium have shaped not only the sociocultural fabric of human existence on our planet, but also the parameters of the research enterprise itself. Broadly taking sociocultural and neo-(post)colonial points of departure, the work presented in this article addresses gaps in the research where a screwed monolingual, monomodality bias continues to dominate much of the thinking in the Language and Educational sciences, particularly in the Global North. This thinking is clearly at odds given the dimensions of human existence in the new millennium.

The empirically driven multidisciplinary study reported in this article takes a socially oriented perspective on human activity. It is broadly framed in the intersections of (new) Literacy Studies, Communication Studies, Deaf Studies and Critical Cultural Studies traditions. Regardless of the concepts that are used to describe and discuss different dimensions of human communication and identity that are evoked by or conferred upon language varieties and/or modalities used by individuals or groups, the analytical perspectives deployed here recognize the need to (re)conceptualise human linguistic-cultural behaviour, identity and space beyond divisions and boundaries. Taking neo-(post)colonial and sociocultural perspectives as points of departure, intersections and transitions are here recognized as spaces in their own right – as knowledge systems – that constitute rich sites for understanding how dimensions of communication or positions related to human identity are privileged and/or made redundant in everyday mundane interactions.

Meaning-making processes in everyday life are here accorded primacy when compared to formal structural properties of linguistic variation, modalities and identity positions. The point of departure here 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- modality based systems.

Ideas and themes that emerge from micro-empirical analysis of (i) hearing mono- and bi-variety communication, (ii) bi/multimodal communication in “visually oriented” environments, and (iii) oral-written, multimodal face-to-face and virtual communication are highlighted. “Thick accounts” and “transcripts” of mundane communication from different ethnographically pushed projects based at the CCD (Communication, Culture and Diversity – Deaf Studies) research group at Örebro University in Sweden are presented and discussed. The multi-fronted analysis of data from different language sets (in different projects) from traditionally segregated academic fields (for instance research results in fields such as Swedish/mother tongue, bilingualism, reading and writing, multimodality, deaf communication, online communication and education, etc) allows for juxtaposing the explorations against one another. Analyses are concerned with the ways and techniques that children and adults employ in order to accomplish “the social” inside and outside different institutional settings. What are the distributed and situated ways-with-words of human beings who routinely use more than one language variety and/or different modalities in different settings? The role of the written word as a technology in relationship to languaging broadly and how written, oral, signed communication are handled in daily life inside and outside learning institutional settings is explored. Furthermore, this article explores how these framings allow for understanding newer and older concepts such as superdiversity, code-switching, pluri/multilingualism, deaf bilingualism in Scandinavian and Swedish geopolitical spaces.

The findings presented highlight the fluidity displayed in naturally occurring languaging, including its multimodality (in both face-to-face and virtual settings). Furthermore I raise didactic implications from the analysis that takes a social practice perspective and goes beyond structurally framed concepts such as codes, switching, oral language, written language, signed language, bilingualism, etc. This attention to human activity and ways-with-words makes visible the chained and linked fluidity of languaging. 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 perspectives that currently dominate the fields of bilingualism and literacy in educational settings in the Global North.

Transcripts aspiring to represent naturally occurring interaction mediate analytic insights into fleeting human communicative performances that routinely implicate verbal and nonverbal dimensions in concerted action. Video technologies have introduced unprecedented opportunities to study interactional complexity in minute detail. This article aims to exemplify how the level of detail attended to in transcriptional representations can expand or restrict video data-derived results and throw different analytic light on the constitutive features of interactional phenomena and their generic workings. Towards this aim, various transcription formats are explored to represent classroom interaction from language focused lessons at a school setting in Sweden. The juxtaposition and analysis seek to highlight that making body orientations across time and space as well as written language unavailable for analysis renders invisible integral sense-making actions that bear consequentiality for participants. For the sake of emic and consequential analysis, appeal is made for an endeavour to attend to the interdependence of multimodal social practices that routinely compose naturally occurring interaction.

The post-World War II era has seen the explicit establishment of a range of policies vis-à-vis equity and inclusion across the geopolitical spaces that constitute the global North and the global South. These have had wide ranging repercussions on the nature and quality of human life across the planet. International, national and local level policies (in democratic geopolitical spaces at least), currently constitute a foundation for equity work. Such policies and changes notwithstanding, the continuing escalation of the outcomes of disparity, the failure of institutions in their provision of equitable education, health care, and other services (even in global North settings in Scandinavia), and recent alarm reports, together call attention to the role that research plays and what research has focused and continues to focus upon vis-à-vis issues of equity and marginalization. This volume attempts to unpackage dimensions related to the type of research endeavors that have been themselves marginalized in the epistemological enterprise.

Furthermore, while it is easy to identify and be critical of the lack of coordination of institutional efforts that contribute to the marginalization of large numbers of individuals in the 21st century, I will—together with the scholars whose work is presented in this volume—make the case, that a significant step in the epistemological enterprise lies in going beyond issues of marginalization and normalization as categories deployed for the identification of children, young people or adults. The research that is show-cased in this book attempts to highlight how curtailing the categories of marginalization (and normalization) themselves are. By center-staging processes, participation patterns and membership in social practices across sites and across identity domains, the research presented in this book builds the case for an alternative way of conceptualizing the performance of marginalization (and normalization) empirically.

This book has emerged out of a series of dialogues between scholars who have visited the CCD research environment on different occasions and who have contributed to one another’s (and CCD members’) thinking in the areas of Communication, Culture and Diversity across the last two decades. More specifically, two activities on the theme of Marginalization Processes organized in 2011 and 2013, with support from the Swedish Research Council and the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Marginalization Processes across Different Settings xv Örebro University, Sweden, comprised the contexts for a series of conversations that have resulted in the creation of this book. A third activity on the expanded theme of Revisiting Identity, Marginalization and Bilingualism organized in 2014, also with support from the Swedish Research Council and the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Örebro University, Sweden, contributed to these dialogues. Scholars from the global North and global South—including the North in the South and the South in the North—have enrichened these dialogues from their specific domains of expertise and vantage points.

I wish to take this opportunity to express my sincere gratitude to the coordinators, the leaders and the administrators of the CCD research group during the organization of these events as well as the hosting of the international and national scholars attached to the environment across the years 2011-2015. The CCD research group has evolved into an international network-based environment that has, since 2016, moved to Jönköping University in Sweden (www.ju.se/ccd).

I would also like to thank the editorial support team at Cambridge Scholars Publishing, and, in particular, Anthony Wright and Victoria Carruthers who have provided timely and efficient guidance in navigating desk-top editorial work. Finally, I would like to extend a warm thanks to Guy Karnung—for his generosity and willingness to participate in so many aspects related to this book.

Socialisation is a significant factor that shapes nursing students' learning in clinical settings. Little is known about the ways in which students learn practical skills during their clinical practice and how they are socialised into these skills. This knowledge is important for creating an optimal environment for ensuring a high standard of care and patient safety. This study aims to address this knowledge gap. An ethnographic approach was used. Data were collected by participant observations during nursing students' clinical practice in an emergency department at a university hospital in Sweden, and during informal conversations with students and their preceptors. In the analysis, four themes emerged: A reflective approach based on a theoretical framing; Multitasking situations; Shifts in an active role as a nursing student; and Styles of supervision. Students' socialisation into practical skills was shaped by several factors where preceptors played a key role. Teaching and learning styles and interactions between the preceptor and the student shaped the learning situations. A dominant discrepancy regarding whether and how reflections took place between preceptors and students was identified. This highlights the need for creating continuity between the ways that experiences are organised across the settings of learning (university-based and clinically based learning) to enhance nursing students' learning and socialisation into practical skills.

This article explores linguistic-cultural ideologies and educational policies as they emerge and are negotiated in everyday life in a bilingual school setting located in the geopolitical spaces of Sweden. Taking sociocultural theory and discourse analysis as points of departure, we focus on empirical examples of classroom interaction and locally established formal policing. Linguistic-cultural ideologies and educational policies that frame life at the school are investigated by employing nexus analytical methods, focusing on social (inter)actions through which a number of locally and nationally relevant discourses circulate. Our findings indicate that refocusing ideology and policy research from the lens of a practiced perspective allows the situated and distributed nature of everyday life to inform issues related to bilingualism as well as their relations to wider societal discourses. Furthermore, our analysis highlights the crucial role of educators in (re)locating bilingual education in its societal contexts as well as making these connections visible in classrooms.

I will, in this presentation, discuss both conceptualizations of inclusion-as-action, and issues regarding the didactics-of-representation. In my presentation I will argue for the need to shift the focus (i) from the marginalized Other to the non-marked Norm, and (ii) from the center to the boundaries that are (re)created in everyday actions and that give rise to the Other. I will illustrate how human identity and diversity, including an “imaginary community” (Andersson 1991), plays a decisive role for society’s planning of and support in the work that is done for integration, inclusion and equality. I will specifically discuss identity and the conceptualizations or metaphors related to the dominating dichotomized positions – “inclusion/mainstreaming” and “exclusion/segregation” – we have inherited, live with and that (re)create possibilities or frameworks for children, young people and adults in different institutional settings (Wertsch 2002). Taking an overarching critical humanistic, socially oriented framework that includes a sociocultural perspective and a decolonial position on human communication and identity, I will draw upon studies from different ethnographic projects at the CCD research group at Örebro University, Sweden (www.oru.se/humes/ccd). Taking the field of deafness research, including work in the areas of gender and ethnicity as illustrations, I will introduce a third position or “alternative voices” (Husnain et al 2013) in conversations about human collectives and communities-of-practices. This third position, highlights spaces for the didactics-of-representation and inverted-inclusion, allowing for new conceptualizations, including institutional strategies with regards to one-society-for-all, one-school-for-all, a-culture-for-all or in other words, one-for-all.

References:

Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined Communities. Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso.

Hasnain, I., Bagga-Gupta, S. & Mohan, S. (Eds.) Alternative Voices: (Re)searching Language, Culture and Identity... Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Wertsch, J. (2002). Voices of Collective Remembering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Paper at the invited symposium 'Illusions and Delusions of the Centre within the Framework of Globalization'

My interest in this paper is twofold: first, make visible the work that individuals and institutions “do” in the global North and global South. Second, illustrate how analyses across time and geopolitical spaces allows for revisiting the ways in which language categories get talked-and-written-into-being and how identity positions and culture become framed in and through social practices and textual accountings. Taking both a socially oriented perspective and a decolonial framework on languaging and identity positions, 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 a number of language varieties.

The findings highlight the incongruence between individuals and institutional accountings in the global North (as opposed to individuals talk and institutional accountings in the global South) as well as the performance of languaging, identity and culture in the global North. In other words, this study challenges dominating understandings of language, identity and culture generally and the organization of “special” support for “immigrant” individuals in the global North more specifically. Issues are also raised regarding the “technification” of language and diversity. Evidence presented questions the simplistic positions and problematic “webs-of-understandings” (Bagga-Gupta 2012) that frame mono-bi-multilingualism and mono-bi-multiculturalism in the global North. Providing emic understandings of how accountings constitute a core dimension of “collective remembering” (Wertsch 2002) of “imagined communities” (Anderson 1991), the paper illustrates “alternative voices” (Hasnain el al 2013) in the Language and Educational Sciences (Bagga-Gupta 2013, 2014). This endeavor calls for a major shift in analytical perspectives, an “earthrise” viewing from decolonial positions, instead of the dominant “sunrise and moonrise” viewings that build upon northern hegemonies that currently frame discourses of globalization.

References:

Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined Communities. Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso.

Bagga-Gupta, S. (2012). Challenging understandings of Bilingualism in the Language Sciences from the lens of research that focuses Social Practices. In Eva Hjörne, Geerdina van der Aalsvoort & Guida de Abreu (Eds.) Learning, social interaction and diversity – exploring school practices. pp 85-102. Rotterdam: Sense.

Bagga-Gupta, S. (2013). The Boundary-Turn. Relocating language, identity and culture through the epistemological lenses of time, space and social interactions. In Imtiaz Hasnain, Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta & Shailendra Mohan (Eds.) Alternative Voices: (Re)searching Language, Culture and Identity... pp 28-49 Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Bagga-Gupta, S. (in press 2014). Performing and accounting language and identity: Agency AS actors-in-(inter)action-with-tools. In P. Deters, Xuesong Gao, E. Miller and G. Vitanova-Haralampiev (Eds.) Interdisciplinary approaches to theorizing and analyzing agency and second language learning. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Hasnain, I., Bagga-Gupta, S. & Mohan, S. (Eds.) Alternative Voices: (Re)searching Language, Culture and Identity... Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Wertsch, J. (2002). Voices of Collective Remembering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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.