Martha Sif Karrebæk

Lasagna for Breakfast: The Respectable Child and Cultural Norms of Eating Practices in a Danish Kindergarten Classroom

Abstract This article examines socialization into healthy food practices in a culturally heterogeneous kindergarten class in Denmark. The study uses linguistic ethnography, an interpretive research approach in which ethnography is combined with micro-analysis of interactional sequences, and both dimensions are compared with macro-social issues. “Healthy food” and “healthy eating practices” are categories embedded in a particular cultural understanding but I demonstrate that teachers orient to these categories as natural, neutral and self-evident. Teachers treat food items considered healthy as obligatory lunch-box contents, and such healthy food items are associated with traditional majority food culture. Additionally, teachers hold specific expectations regarding the healthiest order in which to consume food. Overall, as healthy food and eating practices are normative and cultural issues, minority culture children are put under institutional pressure to assimilate into the dominant (food) culture, and by so doing demonstrate their respectability.

Everyday languaging : collaborative research on the language use of children and youth

This book contributes to current theory building within applied linguistics and sociolinguistics by looking at the role of language in the lives, realities, and understandings of real children and youth in an urban setting. Collectively the studies amount to a comprehensive account of how urban children and youth construct, reactivate, negotiate, contest, and navigate between different linguistic and sociocultural norms and resources.

Thai veggies and hair removal products: space, objects and language in an urban greengrocery

ABSTRACT This contribution investigates practices of meaning making in an urban greengrocery in Copenhagen. It deploys audio-recordings, small-scale ethnographic fieldwork and pictures as data. The paper argues that diversity is treated as an everyday condition, and conviviality as a communicative norm. Analytically, it focuses on the way that space, objects and language are all used as resources by participants. A particular focus is put on space, which obtains meaning and significance through the different relations into which it enters. The spatial repertoire connects space to the resources available here, e.g. objects, language, activities and practices. The resources are regarded as a meaning potential, which can be brought up and made relevant by participants. In addition, space is the locus of different activities, and space is emplacement. Last, space is discursively produced. Through discourse, space is related to time in the projection of (future and past) spacetimes, and to locations elsewhere to which the greengrocery is compared.

Hip Hop, Education and Polycentricity

Hip hop has been one of the most influential global forms of popular culture among youth during the past two decades (Bucholtz 2011), and it has received increasing attention in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology and educational studies. The studies of critical hip hop (language) pedagogies, in particular, has focused on hip hop as a means of drawing out-of-school experiences of language closer to classroom pedagogy and curriculum (Hill 2009; Alim, Ibrahim and Pennycook 2009; Alim 2011). These frameworks often emphasise creative, limitless and counter-hegemonic linguistic practices as a significant part of the pedagogical and political potentials of hip hop culture. In this chapter we focus on the way hip hop practices are appropriated by a group of adolescents in positioning themselves as educationally ambitious. We investigate what local meanings these practices achieve and their relations to wider semiotic models and norms to discuss the interplay between education, activities, and popular cultural resources. Against the background of previous hip hop research, the case study we report from involved some surprising discoveries. The boys we studied formed a rap-group and engaged in various local hip hop events and initiatives led by different mentors. They were certainly creative in enacting streetwise and school-positive personae, but their hip hop literacy and linguistic practices fell short of challenging hegemonic educational norms.