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ExLaLE (Exploring Language and Literature in Education) is an interdisciplinary seminar series dedicated to research in the intersection of the broad disciplinary fields of language, literature and education. ExLaLE aims to be a platform for junior scholars and is managed by doctoral students of the national research school CuEEd-LL.

Next seminar

Jessica Chandras – Aspiring to Resist: Translanguaging in Rural Indian Education as Resistance for Students from the Banjara Denotified Tribe

October 07, 13.00-14.30 CET
Zoom: https://gu-se.zoom.us/j/4290625047
FlyerPdf, 101.7 kB.

Jessica Chandras is an assistant professor of Anthropology at the University of North Florida. Her research focuses on identity construction and social stratification through language(s) in education. In her research, she uses qualitative, ethnographic and sociolinguistic research methods to bring to light narrative examples of how language shapes identity in diverse and multilingual communities.

Abstract

This presentation explores how Banjara educators from a Denotified Tribe in a rural region of the western Indian state of Maharashtra, employ creative forms of resistance through translanguaging to help students from their community negotiate contradicting demands in education. Banjara students, whose mother tongue is Banjari, face difficulties in school as they need to learn Marathi, the language of mainstream education, without any formal assistance while also navigating stigma linked to their low caste status. However, a growing cohort of Banjara educators with an extracurricular program for Banjara students, called Anandshala, help students to succeed within a system that simultaneously promises social mobility while reinforcing entrenched caste, class, and linguistic hierarchies. Through ethnographic data collected in 2023, this chapter analyzes how Anandshala educators resist hegemonic education norms by navigating multilingual pedagogies in their teaching and creatively adapting Marathi language-learning resources that were misaligned with their needs and the needs of their students. Strategically reconfiguring these resources allowed for Banjara educators to assert their professional autonomy and agency from a vulnerable social position (Scott 1985, 1990) while also opposing mainstream education authority figures whose negative assertions about Banjara communities reflect a system of routine oppression (Gupta 2010). Banjara educators therefore paradoxically resist and challenge the same Marathi medium education system that their students aspire to succeed in. This tension reveals broader contradictions in how students from socially and linguistically marginalized and minoritized communities craft their aspirations and pursue their educational goals in post-liberalization India. Banjara educators resiliently employ translanguaging to combat linguistic constraints, forging their own path to empower Banjara students in education.

Completed seminars

Luke Holmes – (Re)thinking irony and ethical discourse: Encountering difference in the internationalising university classroom

May 23, 14.00-15.30 CET

Zoom: https://gu-se.zoom.us/j/4290625047

Flyer (PDF) pdf, 194.5 kB, opens in new window.

Luke Holmes holds a Ph.D. in Bilingualism from Stockholm University and is currently a lecturer in English Language and TESOL at the University of the West of Scotland. His research interest is sociolinguistic in nature and currently focuses on how different conceptualisations of ethics and responsibility relate to and are developed through social and linguistic practices in institutional settings.

Abstract

This paper aims to rethink the character of ethical discourse through a discussion of its irony. It focuses on socially exclusionary discourse in a classroom discussion at a Swedish University, which was, ironically, voiced by a racially marked international participant with a traumatic past. Engaging debates of social justice, diversity, and inclusion, the paper questions the perceived limits of teacher, student, and researcher responsibility towards others, pointing towards the fundamental irony of ethical interaction. Drawing from a linguistic ethnographic study of a highly diverse postgraduate social sciences course, this paper explores teacher, peer, and researcher responses that both speak to and silence sociolinguistic difference and trauma (McNamara, 2020). It uses audio recordings, interviews, and fieldnotes to exemplify the perceived and real challenges that appear to prevent actors from taking responsibility in response to others’ troubling discourse. As a characteristic of contemporary sociality, as opposed to a rhetorical method (see Colebrook, 2004), irony is here reimagined in such a way that disrupts the metaphysics of presence that grounds our field’s quotidian understanding of ethics. The paper suggests that irony not only characterises the divide between institutional discourses on and experiences of diversity (Urciuoli, 2018); irony also creates the necessary space for considering the unknown trajectories on which the words and bodies of others are flowing. I conclude by suggesting that without an irony greater than Socrates’, researchers and teachers can neither move beyond the Eurocentric ethical traditions in which we work, nor come to terms with ethical interaction with (international) others.

Keywords: Ethics, responsibility, irony, trauma, classroom ethnography, internationalisation.

References

Colebrook, C. (2004). Irony. Routledge.

McNamara, T. (2020). The Anti-Shibboleth: The Traumatic Character of the Shibboleth as Silence. Applied Linguistics, 41(3), 334–351.

Urciuoli, B. (2018). The Irony of Diversity Numbers. Signs and Society, 6(1), 88–110.

April 25, 14.00-15.30 CET

Zoom: https://gu-se.zoom.us/j/2313356747
Flyer (PDF) pdf, 886.4 kB, opens in new window.

Dr Emma Nilsson Tysklind holds a PhD in Curriculum Studies (Didaktik) from the Uppsala University, where she now works as a lecturer at the Department of Education. She teaches Swedish and other various courses at all levels of the Teacher Training Programmes.

 

At the seminar, Emma Nilsson Tysklind will present her doctoral thesis entitled Dissent and Harmonies: On Literature Education, Democracy and Agonism. The thesis centres on the relationship between literature education and democracy, and explores this relationship both theoretically and empirically in two upper secondary classrooms. Central to the thesis is Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic political theory, as well as Masschelein and Simons’ educational theory on school as ‘free time’. From different angles, the literature classroom is explored as a political space in itself, rather than as a place that fosters for future democratic participation.

 

Further reading

Nilsson Tysklind, E. (2024). Dissent and Harmonies: On Literature Education, Democracy and Agonism [Uppsala University]. https://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-539569

Tysklind, E. N., Areskoug, L., & Hultin, E. (2024). Agonism in a Classroom Discussion on Strindberg’s Miss Julie. Democracy and Education, 32(1), Article 1. https://democracyeducationjournal.org/home/vol32/iss1/1/

Tysklind, E. N., Areskoug, L., & Hultin, E. (2024). Political emotions in a literature classroom. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2024.2382262

Tysklind, E. N., & Tryggvason, Á. (2025). Politicised or Political: On Agonism and School as ‘Free Time’. Studies in Philosophy and Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-024-09977-w

February 28, 13:00–15:00 UTC+01:00

Dr. Sepandarmaz Mashreghi holds a PhD in social sciences and humanities with a specialisation in sports sciences from Malmö University and works as a lecturer at department of sports sciences in the same university. She instructs in gender, migration and research methodologies in relation to sports and exercise studies. Her research areas include migration, art-based research, decolonial thought and Indigenous methodologies.

 

This seminar will revolve around Sepand’s dissertation project in which she explored how Afghan youth in Sweden navigate, experience, challenge and recreate spaces of physical activity and sports; and how the youth generate knowledge and meanings within these spaces. Grounded in decolonial thought and drawing from Indigenous, Black and Brown feminist theories, she used participatory art-based approach to generate material and conduct this research. In this seminar, she will also elaborate on the role of creative language and writing in doing decolonial work within the academy.

 

For those who wish to read more:

Mashreghi, S. (2023). Gesturing Towards Decolonial Openings: Sports and Poetry. In: McGowan, L., Symons, K. (eds) Intersections of Sport and Society in Creative Writing. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-5585-5_10

Mashreghi, S. (2022). Decolonial stories of forced migrants in physical activity and sport, we the Afghan kids, in N. De Martini Ugolotti & J. Caudwell (Eds) Leisure and forced migration: Lives lived in asylum systems (pp. 157-175). Routledge

November 22, 14:00–15:30 UTC+01:00

Dr. Ellinor Skaremyr holds a Phd in educational work with a focus on language didactics in preschool. Her research encompasses linguistic and cultural diversity, religion and worldviews, and educational equity, to name a few. Ellinor works as a senior lecturer at the Department of Educational Work at the University of Borås, where she mainly teaches multilingualism and interculturality at the university's teacher education programs.

 

Social sustainability and equal education will be the focus of the seminar. Ellinors presentation will handle different parts of her research, from her thesis to more recent studies on religion in relation to early childhood education (policy, practice and teacher training), multilingualism and multiculturalism in picture books, among others.

 

For those who wish to read more:

The limits of multilingualism: Language didactics on (un)equal grounds in the age of migration

Flyer: ExLaLe – Andreas Nouttaniemi png, 303.3 kB, opens in new window.

 

His PhD project was about a group of young people who are trying to take their place as legitimate speakers of Swedish in a small inland community in northern Sweden.

 

27 September, 14:00–16:00

Link to Zoom meeting External link, opens in new window.

Becoming a person who reads in Swedish? Fiction reading practices of highly educated multilingual adults.

22nd of March 14.00-16.00

Flyer - ExLaLe- Wilinger jpg, 352.2 kB, opens in new window.

 

Dr. Henriikka Wilinger holds a PhD in Swedish with a didactical orientation and works as associate senior lecturer at CAKL, Centre of Academic Learning, at Malmö University. She instructs in Swedish as a second language and in higher education studies, and her research areas include multilingualism, sociology of language, and literature didactics.

 

The seminar will revolve around Henriikka's dissertation project External link, opens in new window., which explores how and why adult migrants with academic backgrounds read literature. Two connected studies investigate second language learners' fiction reading practices in an advanced Swedish course at two universities, as well as in free time, several years after such a course. The method is qualitative, and the data consists of syllabuses, observations of an oral exam, as well as interviews with teachers, students, and multilingual individuals living in Sweden permanently. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the thesis, the data is analyzed with a broad variety of theoretical tools, based on three cornerstones: literary education, second language learning and sociolinguistics.

Flyer ExLaLe Jonas Iversen jpg, 363.8 kB, opens in new window.


Presenting this topic is Dr. Jonas Yassin Iversen, who holds a PhD in education from Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences. He is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the same institution. His research interests include minoritised language education, multilingual education, and multilingualism in teacher education. The seminar will discuss the following:

 

Research from heritage language (HL) education in Scandinavia has found that this form of education constitutes a transnational space where teachers and students negotiate complex relations between competing imaginations of the homeland, diverse diaspora communities across the globe and their current locality (Daugaard, 2020; Straszer et al., 2020). Thus, HL education entails a wide range of competing centres the teacher can reference (e.g. Blommaert, 2010). The teacher can choose to teach the HL with reference to a particular ‘imagined homeland’ or towards an ‘imagined locality’, meaning the teacher’s perception of the students’ current locations, or anywhere on this continuum. In a diasporic context, teachers and students may also experience a sense of peripherality in relation to the imagined centre. This might lead some students to orient towards other centres than their teacher. In this presentation, I discuss how two Sámi HL teachers in Norway and one Finnish HL teacher in Sweden navigated this complexity through their HL teaching.

 

23 feb 14:00-15:30
Join us via Zoom: https://stockholmuniversity.zoom.us/j/68795001700

Welcome everyone to the first ExLaLe Seminar, part of the ExLaLe Seminar Series organized by the CuEEd-LL PhD students!

We hope you can join the ExLaLe seminar next Friday, January 26th, 14:00-16:00 CET, for a discussion with Semeneh Ayalew Asfaw on Schooling vs. Education: the making of rebellious subjects in postwar Ethiopia

 

Join the online seminar here:

https://stockholmuniversity.zoom.us/j/62849906150?pwd=QUJ5cCtNVnJyZWo1WGFXVUx2T1Ivdz09 External link, opens in new window.

 

Abstract

His talk will focus on how university students in Addis Ababa, and Addis Ababans generally, in the postwar period reshaped the "hegemonic" discourses they received from state-affiliated institutions (the university, the theater and the like) to form a rebellious cultural and political subjectivity that paved the way for the Ethiopian Revolution of 1974. This historical understanding of the Ethiopian Revolution encourages us to view education, self making, and cultural formation as processes involving a complex interplay between subject formation from above (for example, the imperial state and its institutions) and from below (students, urban dwellers and the general citizenry). It also encourages us to view discourses and practices associated with modernity as being contested and as being informed not just by the ideas and interests of a ruling clique but also by the ideas and interests of the ruled, often with transformative and unexpected consequences.

 

Chair: Tesfaye Ayele, PhD student in the CuEEd-LL research graduate school

For any questions, contact: exlale.seminars@outlook.com.

Find more information on the seminar here.
See a flyer about the seminar here. pdf, 304.4 kB, opens in new window.