Evangelia Prokopiou

“Silent” monologues, “loud” dialogues and the emergence of hibernated I-positions in the negotiation of multivoiced cultural identities

Drawing on dialogical self theory (Hermans, 2001) and employing a case study approach, this article aims to provide insights into the dialogical processes through which two British-born siblings of Pakistani background construct and negotiate their cultural identities. The analysis suggests that both young people were moving towards their multivoiced cultural identities through a constant positioning and re-positioning within their communities, which resulted in dialogical negotiation of aspects of differences/similarities and belonging within their majority and minority communities as well as living in a multicultural society. When their negotiation is a struggle shaped by issues of racism and religious discrimination, two opposing processes are constructed, a dynamic dialogical and a monological one. We introduce the notion of hibernated I-positions as a resource to deal with rapid change, threat and uncertainty. I-positions that are inactive, or are in a hibernated state and silenced, are always available to re-emerge and become engaged in a new dialogue to help retain identity continuity. In this article, we challenge linear assumptions which assume that all immigrant groups undergo the same kind of psychological acculturation process.

Child language brokering in schools: why does it matter?

This paper will report on the planning of a small-scale project that is now in progress, which aims to lay the foundation for developing a Guide to Good Practice for the use of Child Language Brokering (CLB) in school settings. This project will investigate the perspectives on CLB of teachers in schools in multilingual areas and young adults who acted as language brokers in the course of their own school career, triangulating the responses of the two groups so as to bring distinctive and complementary perspectives to the topic. In addition to laying the foundation for the development of guidelines for schools, the research team hopes to lay the basis for further work on theorising the social and cultural significance of Child Language Brokering. The study will involve (i) an on-line survey of teachers in primary and secondary schools and of ex-CLBs and (ii) an interview study exploring detailed questions in depth with a small number of selected respondents.

Rethinking Ethnic Minority Young People’s Participation in Multiple Sociocultural Contexts and Its Impact on Their Cultural Identities

Back in 1979, Urie Bronfenbrenner proposed his ecological model of human development, a multi-level system which describes how individuals relate with their multiple social contexts. In 1991, Carl Ratner proposed a modification of Bronfenbrenner—s basic model in which the layers are pictured as interpenetrating. This illustrates how the macrosystem passes through an individual—s exosystems and microsystems and how the impacts of all these systems influence the development of an individual. However, although both versions of the model illustrate well how individuals are connected with their multiple contexts they are still models that have a monolithic image of society. What happens in the case of ethnic minority children and young people who are members of a pluralistic society?