Contextualizing Linguistic Diversity in Institutional Settings

I am pleased to announce that we are preparing a workshop with two colleagues in Tromsø. In 2013, I presented a paper in Tromsø at the Tromsø International Conference on Language Diversity. There we had very illuminating discussions with Prof. Hilde Sollid who invited me next year to a panel on language ideologies in the classroom at the 20th Sociolinguistics Symposium. As a continuation of our cooperation, I will spend a week in Tromsø this October. The visit includes lectures, a data seminar and the two-day workshop 'Contextualizing Linguistic Diversity in Institutional Settings' that we have just announced and organize together with Hilde and her colleague, Florian Hiss.

Please consider our call for papers that follows after the image!

As I saw Tromsø during my first visit in 2013

Contextualizing Linguistic Diversity in Institutional Settings

8–9 October 2015, University of Tromsø – The Arctic University of Norway

    

For this two-day research workshop we wish to gather a variety of perspectives on the – individual, institutional, or political – management of linguistic diversity in different institutional settings.

‘Linguistic diversity’ is a concept around which many research projects are organized in linguistic, anthropological, cultural, educational and other studies. The aim of our workshop is to initiate discussion between scholars researching ‘linguistic diversity’ in various institutional surroundings and to reflect on its conditions, consequences and challenges in ongoing research projects.

‘Institutional settings’ may, on the one hand, refer to particular institutions, such as a school or kindergarten, a company or a public authority. On the other hand, in discourse and language use, various kinds of institutional settings affect interactions between participants. Participants enact institutional roles, and institutional settings define social hierarchies and other frames. Linguistic diversity (on the individual level, in society, or as part of the institutional frames) is managed and contextualized in various ways, in interaction, through language ideologies, active language management, or multimodal frames in linguistic landscapes.

Beyond individual presentations, the workshop will provide space for discussions surrounding research practices, ideologies of ‘linguistic diversity’ in the field and in research, and the role of the researcher vis-à-vis institutional structures and vice versa.

We have invited three external guests from different strands of research:

Jürgen Jaspers (Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium)

Dorte Lønsmann (Copenhagen Business School, Denmark)

Jo Angouri (University of Warwick, England)

Participation

There will be a limited number of 45-minute slots available for presentations (including ca. 15 minutes for questions and comments). We would welcome presentations from different contexts and various kinds of institutional settings as well as different research methods and materials (including work in progress). If you would like to present research related to the topic of the workshop, please send an abstract (approx. 300 words) to florian.hiss@uit.no (until 15 August 2015).

All participants will also be asked to prepare short contributions to the discussion of general issues from the point of view of their own research.

Organizers

Florian Hiss (UiT – The Arctic University of Norway) // Project: Linguistic and Cultural Diversity at Work (NFR/SAMKUL)

Tamás Péter Szabó (University of Jyväskylä, Finland) // Project: Finding own words: Metadiscourses, identities and strategies instudents’ and teachers’ interactive practices in standard and alternativesettings. (EU FP7 Marie Curie IEF)

Hilde Sollid (UiT – The Arctic University of Norway)

(The original call can be read on the homepage of UiT – The Arctic University of Norway)