Ingegerd Rydin

Diasporic Mediated Spaces

Within the context of migration and globalisation of media, questions concerning the transformation of culture have become manifest among communication scholars. Due to alterations in the global political and economic order, such as deregulation of the media market, the media landscape has undergone extensive transformations during last decades of the twentieth century. Moreover, processes of decolonisation and post-colonisation, the opening of borders in Europe and the outbreak of wars, have led to increased migration movements and generated a flood of people, who for different reasons are looking for new places and new homes. Cultural communities are no longer fixed in particular geographical spaces. As a result we are facing what Hall has called ‘the global post-modern’ (1996), involving the possible shifts of power relations and cultural hierarchies that in particular apply to diaspora, people connected to a cultural community, now living dispersed. What interests us here are the processes of cultural transformation that are taking place within ‘the global post-modern’ where increasing numbers of people are negotiating their identities between continuity and change, between similarity and difference. In the new place, senses of homely belonging are necessarily being constructed with references to both the new place and to what has been left behind.

Using "Facebook" as a Co-Learning Community in Higher Education.

Students’ cultural capital plays a major role in their success in higher education. In Sweden today, many students come from diverse cultural, social and educational backgrounds. Knowledge of requirements in academic systems differs widely. Some students feel insecure about how to interpret academic codes, thus weakening these students’ opportunities for academic success. The major goal of this project was to lay the groundwork for a more equal educational system. Using social media, in this case conversations (e.g., chats) in a closed forum on Facebook monitored by a tutor, we aimed to improve student integration into academic culture. We differentiated two central themes related to student conversations on Facebook: (1) Access to academic habitus – cracking codes and (2) Emancipation by co-learning – extended academic codes. It was found that students participating in study groups created on Facebook learnt to better crack and extend the codes extant in university studies.

Identität, Staatsbürgerschaft, kultureller Wandel und das Generationsverhältnis

Veranderungen der globalen politischen und wirtschaftlichen Ordnung, die Offnung der Grenzen in Europa sowie eine Reihe kriegerischer Auseinandersetzungen haben zu verschiedenen Migrationswellen gefuhrt, in Folge derer Menschen sich aus verschiedenen Grunden eine neue Heimat gesucht haben.