Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta

Explorations in bilingual instructional interaction : a sociocultural perspective on literacy

The research reported here attempts to understand issues of Swedish Deaf bilingual students’ secondary language learning and literacy practices. In Swedish schools for the Deaf Swedish Sign Languag ...

Shifting identity positions in the development of language education for immigrants: an analysis of discourses associated with ‘Swedish for immigrants’

The study presented in this paper focuses upon conceptualisations of language and identity in the institutionalised arena that emerged in the post-Second World War period with the specific intention of teaching Swedish to adult immigrants in the nation-state of Sweden. Our analysis focuses upon the development of the educational programme ‘Swedish for immigrants’ over time. Our specific interest relates to how categorisations are framed and what, if any, kinds of labels – pertaining to language and identity – emerge in national and local policy documents from the 1960s onwards. Taking a sociohistorical perspective as a point of departure, our analyses indicate discursive changes with regards to the categories and aims of the educational programme, making certain identity positions more accessible than others at specific times. Focusing upon categories from sociohistorical perspectives helps to reveal the social organisation and institutional means that enable society to process citizenship issues. The complex relationship between the empowerment of the immigrants, on the one hand, and the need for integration or assimilation into society on the other, becomes visible through the analysis of empirical data that spans half a century.

Challenging Understandings of Bilingualism in The Language Sciences From The Lens of Research That Focuses Social Practices

A number of different languages are present in the linguistic ecology of Sweden including Swedish; sign languages; English and other foreign languages; regional languages or varieties of Swedish; “neighbour languages” like Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, et cetera; national minority languages; and the immigrant and refugee languages of those who have come to live in Sweden. (Hult, 2004, p. 183)

Languaging in the twenty-first century : exploring varieties and modalities in literacies inside and outside learning spaces

The study presented in this paper focuses on young peoples languaging, or ways-with-being-with-words, including literacies, in everyday practices that stretch across formal and informal learning spaces. Taking sociocultural and ethnographic points of departure, the aim of the study is to investigate aspects of young peoples situated and distributed ways of engaging in knowledge production in academic ‘writing’ genres, as well as their agency in relation to pedagogic goals as administered by teachers in these practices. Through analysis of data sets consisting of field notes, video recordings and particularly literacy data, the study presents analysis of three cases of students’ work in project-based learning and instructional tasks inside and outside a ‘bilingual–bicultural’ school setting. The paper puts forth a multi-dimensional analysis of communicative and learning practices and suggests refocusing scholarly interests of ‘multilingualism’ towards an examination of different dimensions of modalities and language varieties in languaging practices. The findings indicate that student agency is central in contributing to the shaping of the nature of their languaging across the interrelated dimensions of time and space. Furthermore, this study suggests that pedagogical practices in language, including literacy, classes need to be transformed and recontextualized in order to embrace student agency.

Language, Identity and Technologies in Classrooms for the Differently-Abled

This paper reports upon some of the overarching findings from project CIT (www.oru.se/project/cit) at the CCD research network based environment in Sweden. It highlights the ways in which individua ...

Technologies at Work: A Sociohistorical Analysis of Human Identity and Communication

Abstract This article presents results from a study based on archival data from periodicals published by three Swedish non-governmental organizations (NGOs) active in the field of deafness and hard of hearing. A sociohistorical analysis of the material, which covers more than a century, from 1890 to 2010, highlights that technologies have specifically impacted issues concerned with communication and identity. The article presents key topics that have been identified, as well as similarities and differences between the NGOs with regard to their views on and interest in visually oriented and audiologically oriented technologies and methods of communication. In addition, the analysis shows how deafness, based on different perspectives, can be understood as both identity and disability and how technologies and methods of communication impact identification processes.

Many-ways-of-being across sites. Identity as (inter)action

The work presented in this chapter takes a social constructionist point of departure on identity. It presents empirically framed analysis of different data-sets from a couple of global North contexts. The data focuses upon identity-positions in contemporary mass-media sites including virtual spaces, academic global spaces and research on aspects of identity. The authors highlight the relevance of decolonial perspectives on these contexts and argue for the need to put the spotlight (again) on understanding identity in terms of performance, as action. In addition to re-emphasizing the need to attend to identity as performance, as action in scholarship, the chapter attempts to illustrate the myriad ways in which such a position gets articulated within and across contemporary sites of interaction, in specific academic genres, and calls for the need to augment these from decolonial perspectives. The chapter attempts to contribute to a small, growing body of literature that calls for the reconfigurations of centers and margins.

Disabling and Enabling Technologies for Learning in Higher Education for All: Issues and Challenges for Whom?

Integration, inclusion, and equity constitute fundamental dimensions of democracy in post-World War II societies and their institutions. The study presented here reports upon the ways in which individuals and institutions both use and account for the roles that technologies, including ICT, play in disabling and enabling access for learning in higher education for all. Technological innovations during the 20th and 21st centuries, including ICT, have been heralded as holding significant promise for revolutionizing issues of access in societal institutions like schools, healthcare services, etc. (at least in the global North). Taking a socially oriented perspective, the study presented in this paper focuses on an ethnographically framed analysis of two datasets that critically explores the role that technologies, including ICT, play in higher education for individuals who are “differently abled” and who constitute a variation on a continuum of capabilities. Functionality as a dimension of everyday life in higher education in the 21st century is explored through the analysis of (i) case studies of two “differently abled” students in Sweden and (ii) current support services at universities in Sweden. The findings make visible the work that institutions and their members do through analyses of the organization of time and space and the use of technologies in institutional settings against the backdrop of individuals’ accountings and life trajectories. This study also highlights the relevance of multi-scale data analyses for revisiting the ways in which identity positions become framed or understood within higher education.

Center-Staging Language and Identity Research from Earthrise Positions. Contextualizing Performances in Open Spaces

This chapter uses the moonrise-sunrise phenomena metaphorically to explicate two perspectives that highlight the ways in which we commonly approach and/or understand communication and identity (including culture). Represented by moonrises, the first position highlights a relatively less “visible” norm that nevertheless potently shapes our understandings of communication and identity. This dominant default norm is marked by a monolingual—monocultural or monoethnic perspective. It is “naturalized” in Eurocentric global North discourses and is often not made visible in either mundane discourses or the academic literature. In other words, this position 1 is taken as the given. In contrast, the more visible second position, represented by sunrises, highlights the common human condition vis-a-vis communication and identity. This condition however, paradoxically gets marked as the deviant, marginalized, not-normal in global North discourses. Position 2 gets framed in academic discourses and commonsensical thinking through concepts like bi/multi/plurilingualism, bi/multiculturalism and multiethnicities. Recent terminology that has emerged within European literature on globalization, framed by migration flows into European geopolitical spaces (and digitalization) include concepts like super/hyperdiversity (Vertovec 2006). The author argues that the more common human condition of diversity gets deviantly framed, marking and making visible (albeit as the not-normal) multiple language varieties and membership in multiple cultures and ethnicities. These two positions represent normative global North discourses where communication, identity, including culture are approached through, as well as reduced to, technicalities and essentialist epistemologies. Such understandings are critically relevant for the organizing of institutionalized learning for children and adults across geopolitical spaces generally, and in global North contexts like those of Sweden especially. Going beyond these two hegemonic positions and informed by decolonial alternative epistemologies, this chapter center-stages a third perspective wherein language-use or languaging and identiting or identity-positionings, including culturing represent dynamically different ways of approaching and/or understanding human behavior and the human condition. Drawing upon the iconic images taken by the crew of Apollo 8 in December 1968, the author deploys the phenomenon of “Earthrise” to substantiate such an alternative position. Earthrise is a phenomenon that contrasts in significant ways with moonrise and sunrise conceptualizations of communication and identity.

Identity Revisited and Reimagined

Identity revisited and reimagined : Empirical and theoretical contributions on embodied communication across time and space