Research in SLA has traditionally involved mainly well-educated language learners. Therefore, scholars have recently pointed out the need to investigate more diverse populations of L2 learners (Andringa & Godfroid 2019). The present project responds to this call by examining the role of educational background in vocabulary-learning-strategy use and vocabulary knowledge in immigrants studying L2 Swedish. Research on individual differences in SLA suggests that strategy use may affect learning outcomes and that strategies might also be successfully instructed (Griffiths, 2022). Hence one can speculate that well-educated learners have generally more efficient strategies, giving them an advantage compared to less educated learners. However, findings are inconclusive with regard to the relationship between educational background and strategic behavior (LaBontee 2019). The present study addresses this knowledge gap.

In this ongoing project, a questionnaire was distributed to 42 adult immigrants studying L2 Swedish at the A2 level. The group was heterogeneous with regard to age (Mdn = 35; IQR = 2545), length of residence in Sweden (Mdn = 4; IQR = 2–5), years of education (Mdn = 10; IQR = 9–14), and language background; the most represented L1s among the participants were Arabic, Kurdish and Farsi. Vocabulary knowledge was measured with a modified version of Bokander’s (2016) SweLT test, with items selected to match the participants’ level of L2 Swedish. Use of vocabulary-learning strategies was examined with a modified version of Labontee’s (2019) SVLSS 2.0 test. Together, these data enable us to explore interactions between educational background, vocabulary knowledge, and strategy use, while controlling for participants’ age, time of residence, and language background.

Data collected so far indicate that learners with a shorter education generally use fewer vocabulary-learning strategies, compared to learners with longer education. Importantly, learners with shorter education also appear to prefer basic strategies, like writing and rehearsing wordlists, and this preference is negatively correlated with vocabulary knowledge. In contrast, learners with longer education prefer contextual strategies, like guessing the meaning of new words, and this preference is positively correlated with vocabulary knowledge. In other words, while lesseducated learners appear to focus on rehearsing words, more well-educated learners strive to learn new words in an autonomous way, which may enable them to acquire a larger vocabulary. These results suggest that research on vocabulary-learning-strategy use in well-educated L2 learners cannot be directly generalised to other populations. In addition, the findings may be helpful for L2 teachers aiming at individualising their strategy-use instruction. 

In our presentation we analyse how the chapter book Seacrow Island (1964 in Swedish), the original television series of the same name and the subsequent films have been reimagined as two new picturebooks illustrated by Maria Nilsson Thore (2019, 2020). We will discuss the artistic/didactic/considerations given to at once remaining respectful to the source material and to making the story an understandable and enjoyable experience for a new generation of readers.

Astrid Lindgren’s works belong to Sweden’s cultural heritage and many of her books have been translated into multiple languages and are read around the world. It is interesting to ponder which of Lindgren’s books will live on as classics and what adaptations are required in terms of their content, language, style and form for this to happen. Here, it is also appropriate to consider what Göte Klingberg called medium-choosing adaptations, in order to give due consideration to how a story can maintain the reader’s interest in a new millennium (Klingberg 1972: 95). Likewise, to observe the artistic deliberations involved in the illustrator’s visualisations (Nikolajeva & Scott 2001: 41-60). In the context of children’s literature, classics are often adapted works that are more or less reworked versions of the source material, whether originally intended for children or adults. Many of the works we now call classics would not have survived without this reworking (Ehriander 2015: 26-27). It is also striking that the story of Seacrow Island, the archipelago and the people who live there, is now being reworked for a younger readership in much the same way as many of Lindgren’s other works, in keeping with the changing times and changes in reading habits over the half century since the first generation of children encountered the fictional world of Seacrow Island (Almgren White & Ehriander 2020).

Selected Bibliography

Astrid Lindgrens bildvärldar (ed.) Helene Ehriander & Anette Almgren White, Göteborg: Makadam 2019.

“Ett litet djur åt Pelle” – en bilderboks relationer till Vi på Saltkråkan. Anette Almgren White & Helene Ehriander, HumaNetten, 2020, p. 231-255.

“Pictures of Alma in Katthult: Emil’s Mother the Writer in an Intermedial Light”, LP Publishing Contemporary Literary Criticism series: Astrid Lindgren, to be published 2021.

This presentation aims to broaden research of children’s culture and sustainability by treating the visual arts in an educational environment, namely Sofia Sundberg's play sculptures at a Swedish preschool. Place for life and place to grow are the project’s governing principles, to be inaugurated in February 2023. The sculptures are designed to become bearers of life by promoting biological diversity. The sculptures differ therefore from traditional play sculptures that since modernism are experience-based (Druker 2008). For one sculpture, the artist also creates a book dedicated to story time.

During the presentation, the artist relates the idea, the artworks, preparations, inauguration and collaboration with the municipality and school. Anette Almgren White contributes with a theoretical anchoring in ecocriticism, intermediality and children's perspective by exploring approaches to the environment, sustainability and collaboration between man, animal, and nature the sculptures encourage. Useful concepts in this context are ecoliteracy and cross-species solidarity to understand the interdependent relations. (Almgren White 2020).

The perspective includes, in addition to the visual arts works, the collaboration between sculpture and book in relation to sustainability in materials, the importance of place, young children's meaning-making and the preschool's pedagogical mission (Skaret 2014, Hvit Lindstrand 2015, Lpfö18 (Skolverket). 

All education in Sweden, or the Swedish eduscape, is permeated by discourses of compensation and inclusion, conceptualized in this study as a one-school-for-all ethos or perspective. This ethos contributes to a social-ecological framing, wherein the intentions are a society where everyone can participate as active members. This study scrutinizes the governmental strategy of 2017 to digitalize the Swedish educational system based on a one-school-for-all perspective. The study is framed by SWaSP (Second Wave of Southern Perspective) theoretical ideas, with a special focus on positionings, languaging, timespaces, and epistemological-methodological dimensions, including ethics based on the entangled tenets of sociocultural, integrationist, and southern perspectives. Furthermore, this study is anchored in three research projects and one societal developmental project. Materials - e.g., video recordings, audio recordings, photos, artifacts, fieldnotes – from these projects have been generated through (n)ethnographic methods from different institutions in the Swedish educational landscape i.e., eduscape. These span across compulsory schools to Swedish for Immigrants (SFI), within Municipal Adult Education. Three themes have emerged in the multi-scalar data analysis from across settings: (i) intended inclusion, (ii) unintended exclusion, and (iii) intended exclusion. The first theme highlights how digital tools (DTs) create inclusion for students with special needs, or those who are new to the named-language Swedish, in the classroom community, thus contributing to social-ecological sustainability. The second theme illustrates how DTs intended for inclusion in classroom practices morph into tools of exclusion for individuals in mainstream classrooms. The third theme highlights how students in the Swedish eduscape are intentionally excluded from mainstream classrooms. We argue that a social-ecological sustainable stance troubles the division of eduscapes into “mainstream” and “other” settings in contemporary societies, calling for the inclusion of all students irrespective of their positionalities. Our findings highlight that multimodal use of DTs potentially can facilitate inclusion, by providing tools where individual students can participate in and contribute to teaching and learning—what we frame as a third position of classroom organization.

This study builds on a multi-scale ethnography of policies and mundane lives of lower secondary students and teachers with a specific emphasis on recent digitalization initiatives in Swedish schools. The study aims to illuminate the discourses and processes of inclusion and exclusion within contemporary educational digitalization initiatives whose intentions relate to a one-school-for-all agenda. Sociocultural perspectives have been a key point of departure and the discourse analytical framework of Nexus Analysis has been used as a guiding analytical lens. Participant’s deployment of digital tools in educational settings have been scrutinized through interviews, classroom audio and video recordings, and other ethnographic data. In addition, the study draws on analysis of national and school policies related to digitalization initiatives and Sweden’s one-school-for-all ethos. These data come from the research project Digitalization Initiatives, and Practices (DIP, www.ju.se/ccd/dip) where a key focus is the digitalization of the Swedish school system from a perspective of inclusion and exclusion.

With a point of departure in the one-school-for-all discourse, the Swedish school system rests on values like inclusion and compensation – inclusion for all students, irrespective of background, disabilities etc., and compensation of various types of functional disabilities. Framed by the one-school-for-all discourse, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is considered both a tool for inclusion and a compensatory tool in the Swedish school. Therefore, students (and teachers) with documented special needs have had access to digital tools like laptop computers or iPads for quite some time. However, due to the high degree of independence that individual schools and teachers enjoy, access to and usage of digital tools among students without documented special needs is reported to differ considerably, sometimes within the same school. Such previous findings across previous studies led the Government of Sweden to initiate a strategy to digitalize the entire Swedish school system in 2017. This strategy has had three key focus areas:

1. Digital competence for all in the school system.
2. Equal access and usage.
3. Research and follow-up about the possibilities of digitalization.

The first two focus areas highlight the inclusive ambitions of the one-school-for-all discourse. Many secondary schools have started teaching computer knowledge, and the Swedish National Agency for Education (Skolverket) has included affordances and constraints of the digitalization of society in the curricula of different subjects, in particular in the curriculum of mathematics where programming became an integrated part, as a means to fulfill the first focus area of the strategy. A majority of Swedish secondary schools today provide students with digital tools, with the result that the one computer per student ratio has increased dramatically, as a response to the second focus area. However, for students who are diagnosed with a functional disability, an initiative to digitalize the entire student population in a school, creates a paradoxical scenario of exclusion. Thus, as the following examples from our analysis suggest, digital tools for inclusion appear to have turned into tools for exclusion in Swedish lower secondary schools.

1. Before the digitalization initiative, students with special needs were often the only students in the classroom with their own digital tools. This marked them as students with special needs, even thoughthe digital tools provided features which made it possible for them to study at the same pace as their non-marked peers. When all students received digital tools within the framing of the digitalization strategy, the effect was that the compensatory advantage for the students with special needs decreased and they started experiencing a lagging behind effect in educational settings.
2. An outcome of the digitalization strategy was that many schools stopped buying paper editions of textbooks in order to be able to reserve resources for the procurement of digital tools and other digital resources. Therefore, students are currently required to use digitalized textbooks. This offers the possibility to use digital features like text-to-speech, i.e. the written text is synthetically read aloud. Wearing headphones, the students listen to the texts simultaneously while they may read it on their individual screens, something that is easier for students with diagnoses like dyslexia, or those who are new to the named language Swedish. However, the combination of digital tools and headphones tempts students to engage with non-school tasks (like scrolling Spotify playlists or watching YouTube videos) instead of reading an assigned text. This results in students who best need time to study lagging behind in school tasks.

Discourses of compensation and inclusion circulate in the Swedish school system. However, for students with special needs these discourses can imply a further exclusion if this means a compensation and inclusion for mainstream students. After the digitalization strategy was implemented, digital tools have become an integrated part of the Swedish lower secondary classrooms. For students with special needs, digital tools can function as compensatory measures and facilitate learning. However, this study suggests that digital tools for everyone can become counter-productive for students who are marginalized to begin with.

Our analysis highlights and troubles the binary dichotomies of being abled and disabled, or what being a student with special needs implies as compared to those who do not have any diagnoses or special needs. When functionally disabled students or students with special needs are seen as “problems” who can be “fixed” with digital tools, the tools themselves risk becoming hindrances for the students’ educational development. To come to terms with this, students, regardless of prerequisites, need to be understood as individuals with individual needs, and whose needs call for individual solutions that are part of solutions for all students. This study also highlights how a discourse analytical framework of Nexus Analysis can be used to shed light on complex social relationships across different types of data.

Från inledningen: Vi har alla en berättelse, en historia över våra liv, med minnen och händelser. Det är berättelser som hänger intimt samman med andras berättelser. Vi berättar, men vi blir också berättade. Fokus för detta kapitel är en kurs vid namn Flerspråkighet och interkultulturalitet i förskolan om 7,5 högskolepoäng som ingår i Skolverkets fortbildningsinsats i det så kallade Förskolelyftet, numera benämnt som kommunförlagda förskolekurser.

This paper introduces the theme of Languaging, Diversity and Democracy. Contemporary issues of participation and ways-of-being and positions the 12 individual papers that constitute the 2022 double special issue of Bandung: Journal of the Global South. Its interest lies in contributing to knowledge that is relevant for contemporary human challenges related to issues of mobility, digitalization, and communication in and across different geopolitical regions across the planet and across virtual-physical spaces. Raising concerns regarding universalizing tendencies of special issues (and collected volumes generally), and based on the premise that what kind of knowledge matters is tied up with the issue of whose knowledge and in what named-language this knowledge matters, this paper raises critical queries that focus on the narrators positionality and gaze, the composition of scholarly narratives, the flow of narratives, what vocabularies circulate in frontline scholarship, including the organization of special issues, etc. Drawing attention to the universalizing Euro/America-centrism that shapes what counts as knowledge, the paper draws attention to the taken-for-grantedness of what counts as international languages of publishing which eclipses alternative epistemologies, ways-of-thinking and ways-of-being. It argues that by taking such issues as inspiration in the curation and editing of this double special issue, participatory processes and ways-of-being enabled a contribution to the doing of democracy and diversity in the scholarly enterprise. Such work of democratizing academic publication work calls for unlearning to learn that is closely related to the theme explored in the double special issue. Aligning with analogue-digital languaging in contemporary existence, the paper also traces the journey of how this double special issue has come into being.

This paper contributes to a re-thinking, un-learning, and re-learning agenda by interrogating some core ideas and assumptions related to contemporary societal and planetary concerns, including concerns within the research enterprise. Transcending the first step that calls for pausing and re-thinking, this paper troubles universalizing vocabularies that naturalize conceptual framings and ways/waves-of-being in research and educational practices. Furthermore, it illuminates the ways in which scholarship has become complicit in re-cycling and re-creating reductionistic ideas that loop back into educational practices. Its overarching argument aligns with an emergent call within research and higher education for going beyond its universalizing monolithic ethos that has become naturalized in contemporary digital-analog entangled existence. Framed as alternative theorizing that is variously termed post/decolonial/southern thinking, these emergent perspectives are part of the introspection that is critically needed in mainstream academia, in particular in the Learning Sciences. This paper argues that this is needed to contribute to both Epistemic and Existential sustainability, i.e., E2-sustainability. E2-sustainability enables transcending issues of environmental-, economic-, social-, and cultural-sustainability: E2-sustainability assumes and includes these. Marked by alternative conceptual framings and pushed by a mobile gaze, this theoretical paper argues that major and minor shifts in thinking are needed for attending to contemporary societal and planetary challenges. E2-sustainability in the scholarly realm has relevance for transcending ethnocentrically framed biases and siloed framings of contemporary education and higher education, including teacher education. Troubling key, taken-for-granted universalizing truths and using the areas of language and educational scholarship as illustrative points of departure, this paper raises concerns regarding the outsourcing of important educational agendas to technologies, including digitalization on the one hand and concepts that build on contentious assumptions on the other hand. It is such default outsourcing that is troubled through a curiosity-driven multiversal and global-centric mobile gaze wherein both northern and southern knowledge-regimes need to be privileged. The theorizing presented in this paper builds on a Second Wave of Southern Perspectives (SWaSP) framing that has relevance for both north-centric and south-centric scholarship, including writing research. Explicitly multi/inter/cross/trans-disciplinary, this work is relevant to Epistemic and Existential sustainability given its non-allegiance to the imaginaries of mono-disciplinarity, nation-state essences, or universalisms.

Despite recognition accorded to the fluid meaning-making nature of languaging and the hegemonies of global-North framings in the scholarship, language scholarship itself continues to be marked by divisions and essentialist practices. This research continues to be organized within bounded areas of expertise that have become naturalized through universalist divisions and labels. Here one or more of the following tends to constitute an organizing principle: language modalities (oral/written/signed languages, multimodality), spatiality (digital-analogue/national/regional/home/institutional languages.), relationality (mother tongue, foreign/native/indigenous languages.), numericity (first/second languages, bi/multi/plurilingual), etc. Specializations in the language scholarship also include demarcated domains, language subject areas and identity positions. Such research, it is argued, is complicit in the creation of bounded areas of expertise that furthermore shape language conceptualizations, including the organization of institutional teaching and learning. The “Epistemic Justice and Languaging” invited colloquium has key relevance for democratic agendas in the contemporary world, not least since applied language scholarship shapes children, youth and adults lives inside and outside institutional settings. This dialogical space brings together senior-junior presenters and discussants from across the globe. Four papers will be “pitched” on the colloquium theme with space for discussant and audience engagement. Each pitch interrogates knowledge regimes with the intent to offer newer (less recognized) ways of understanding language and language learning from epistemic justice alignments.

This chapter draws attention to salient tensions between the increasing recognition accorded to the heterogeneity and complexities of human communication in Northern places on the one hand and the naming traditions regarding what is glossed as language in the language scholarship (broadly conceptualized) in these spaces on the other hand. It spells out analytical tenets that constitute a Second Wave of Southern Perspectives, SWaSP framing that emerges in conversations with and at the cross-roads of multiple overlapping theoretical positions. A SWaSP framing highlights the need to go beyond programmatic hegemonic tendencies in the mainstream scholarship with the intent to create a global-centric multiversal or pluriversal agenda. The chapter presents four illustrations regarding naming traditions from across time and physical territories glossed as the North and the South to engage with SWaSP tenets and highlights tensions when attention is focused on naming traditions. Systematically drawing attention to these tensions constitutes dimensions of justice and solidarity where the agenda is to de-center naturalized hegemonies when language is loose in institutional settings.

While promises of equity mark (inter)national declarations and laws that contemporary democratic societies subscribe to, accessibility and participation for-all continues to remain out of reach for increasing numbers of people and “named-groups” across the global-North/South. Going beyond issues regarding gaps between progressive policies and people’s accounts of their experiences, this paper illuminates the mundane nature of participation by putting the spotlight on people’s everyday lives in and across different societal sectors. By doing so, it illustrates the mundane nature of processes that constitute the “policies of equity and language as participation”. Issues of promises in policies in contemporary democratic societies like Sweden are discussed as framings that need to be decentered and troubled through a multi-scale analytical gaze at the mundane, messy and wild nature of human life. The study draws on data from three projects where data generation has and is taking place through (n)ethnographic fieldwork and cross-scale policy sourcing. Drawing inspiration from the entanglements of two theoretical framings of significance to participation and equity – sociocultural integrationist perspectives and decolonial Southern theories, this paper maps human geographies and performative co-agencies, and illustrates how practices intrinsic to one arena are disrupted or maintained through practices in others. The study also discusses representations of “named-language”, “named-modality” and “named-identity” through a Southern analytical aperture that calls for acknowledging the roles of different types of semiotic resources when human meaning-making is made salient.

The overarching issue raised in this chapter relates to making visible the naturalization of Northern or North-centric hegemonies in higher educational settings broadly, including the scholarship curated there. First, I call for the need to RE-visit how language is conceptualized in general and in HE, and second, I contribute to RE-centering the mainstream stance that continues to marginalize scholarly explorations where social practices are center-staged. While this agenda strives towards a solidarity vision for a future academy that builds upon epistemic justice, a caveat here is our own academic trajectories in terms of the ontological and epistemological stances we are dialoguing with, and what vocabularies we have been nurtured to engage with in those trajectories.

Contemporary mobilities across and within Northern and Southern places-spaces call for according visibility to the global circulation of discourses with the specific intent of (re)viewing conceptual “webs-of-understandings” that mark and perpetuate the continuing naturalization of North-centric hegemonies and enabling ways of widening dialogical apertures in the Educational Sciences. This paper offers theoretical reflections vis-à-vis recent (re)discoveries of the performative dimensions of “languaging” in North-centric places, highlighting how these conceptualizations appropriate what is “normal diversity” and “normal languaging” in Southern places while continuing to exclude South-centric conceptual framings. It also calls attention to the compartmentalized disciplinary domains in which such discussions take place. Such theorizing can be understood as a Second Wave of Southern Perspectives that center-stages identity-diversity and linguistic-diversity across Nor thern and Southern places-spaces, highlighting the need to globalize dialogues within the Educational Sciences and Language Studies. Inspired by a more overarching “turn towards turns” (Bagga-Gupta 2019) in general, and linguistic-, boundary- and decolonial-turns more specifically, this paper thus center-stages issues related to the need for destabilizing North-centric knowledge regimes and engaging analytically with global-centric alternative epistemologies where Southern framings and scholarship are brought into conversations. Here challenges of researching children and adults’ “ways-of-being-with-words” across digital-analogue institutional-everyday life settings in the 21st century appear to be imprisoned in 20th century educational conceptual framings. Bagga-Gupta, S. (2019). Learning Languaging matters. Contributions to a turn-on-turn reflexivity. In S. Bagga-Gupta, A. Golden, L. Holm, H. P. Laursen & A. Pitkänen-Huhta (Eds). Reconceptualizing Connections between Language, Literacy and Learning. Rotterdam: Springer.

Taking the problem of fragmentation of knowledge within contemporary hegemonic knowledge regimes as a point of departure, this paper offers an undisciplinary mobile gaze and makes visible the workings of naming people and naming language in Swedish educational spaces. It talks with mainstream notions regarding human diversity and communication by aligning with scholarship that talks back by troubling naturalizations regarding knowing and learning generally, and what it means to be human more specifically. The aim of the paper is to highlight the need to interrogate how educational research itself perpetuates a hegemonic recycling of problematic and reductionist concepts vis-à-vis human diversity and communication. This talking with and talking back constitutes a delicate balancing act wherein engagement with alternative global epistemologies, rather than global-North naturalized points of departure are critical. Drawing traction from ongoing discussions on decolonizing scholarship, this paper talks with the ways in which taken-for-grantedness regarding a “linguistic order of things” shapes education and thereby troubles the status quo. It explicitly draws attention to a Second Wave of Southern Perspectives (SWaSP) framing whose tenets build on two theoretical clusters of relevance to issues of human diversity and communication, including the complicity of scholarship in making visible/invisible multiple knowledges regarding the same. The paper argues for going beyond programmatic theoretical and methodological stances and juxtaposes three telling examples from across time to illustrate its agenda. By taking an undisciplinary stance, mainstream epistemological rules can be recognized as timespace creations that can be transgressed in the knowledge production enterprise.

This paper highlights the erasures of normal-languaging and normal-diversities that mark the contemporary human condition. Its aim is to make visible North-centric assumptions regarding the nature of language by asking what, when, why and where language exists and how it plays out in global-local, analogue-digital timespaces. In particular, the study presented in this paper troubles the interrelated ‘webs-of-understandings’ regarding language, identity and culture that are embedded in both traditional concepts and neologisms. It illuminates the looped taken-for-grantedness of established and emerging discourses in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Drawing attention to boundary-markings in scholars languaging that have become naturalized, the paper critically appraises how conceptual epistemic hegemonies continue to flourish across northern-southern places-spaces. It thus, also discusses the relevance of such questions in doing research itself. Inspired by an overarching reflection on various ‘turns’ (like the multilingual-, boundary–and mobility-turns), this paper calls for moving from North-centric knowledge regimes to engaging analytically with global-centric epistemologies where gazing from a mobile-loitering stance is key. This means that this paper poses uncomfortable and revised analytical–methodological questions that potentially destabilize existing global/universal understandings related to language, identity and culture.

The research conducted on Saami indigenous groups at the Swedish State Race Institute of Race Biology founded in 1921 and the Vipeholm experiments conducted on intellectually disabled people during 1945-55 have been condemned as being ethically dubious and have contributed to the establishment of rules that regulate practices within and outside of research. For instance, rules and praxis have been setup that discourage calling attention to human identity categories in the public realm. Thus, while gender categorizations are encouraged in research and in institutional work, naming practices that involve race and functional disabilities are frowned upon or not allowed at all. This paper draws upon ethnographic fieldwork across time (2008-2018) and institutional settings in different projects where the recurring issue of the work of naming identities emerged as salient. The paper presents the problem of disciplining the undisciplined nature of the work of naming people in Swedish spaces. It also presents insights regarding how researchers, public institutions like schools and governmental bodies, and private agencies like regional theaters navigate, comply, challenge and bend rules related to how people are named. The Swedish concepts ras and döva (English: race & deaf) will be used to illustrate tensions regarding what is sanctioned and how members of different settings deal with identity categorizations. The paper aims to trouble the simplistic non-naming stance pushed by society and (for the most) accepted by researchers. Building on the meaning-making enterprise of human languaging, its agenda lies in the epistemological task of scholarship.

At an overarching level this paper attempts to draw attention to emerging trends in the humanities where alternative ways of doing science reconfigure epistemological traditions and research methodologies, the role of intellectuals and their engagement with current conditions of the world, including ways in which scholars gazes are constituted. Drawing on what we call a Second Wave of Southern Perspectives (SWaSP), that sees the entanglements of two clusters – the first of which comprises contemporary ways of reading anticolonial, postcolonial and decolonial thinkers with offerings of Southern perspectives, and a second where contemporary theories about language and communication that considers their cultural and social dimensions, this paper calls for a mobile global-centric gazing. More specifically this paper actualises ontoepistemological trajectories that feed into the scholarship about multilingualism, looking at its different possible beings and becomings that enable a variety of ways of conceptualising multilingual practices. We do this by first presenting a brief review about recent discussions related to the concept of repertoires in the field of multilingualism and pathways that can move these debates in different directions. After this, we present possible ways to go beyond the sociolinguistics of multilingualism, by considering contemporary challenges in the knowledge production enterprise.

This paper presents critical reflections regarding entangled relationships between access, communication and inclusion and illustrates how these play out across multiple analytical scales, ranging from interactional data analysis to engagement with policy data. The study draws on our ethnographic fieldwork from two large projects where roughly 45 18-50+ year-old people have been shadowed across settings. The study aims to illuminate dimensions of analyst’s participation in terms of the flow of the everyday lives of people they track within and across physical-online spaces and within and across education, workplaces, cultural settings, homes, leisure-time, governmental agencies, health services, social media, etc. Such a stance acknowledges the mobile yet situated, partial and limited nature of contemporary existence and that of knowledge generation within the research enterprise.

By engaging with what we call a “second wave of southern perspectives” (SWaSP), the access that scholars have and the identity-positionings of people they track can be understood in terms of (non)support i.e. (non)affordances of different settings for human beings’ possibilities to engage in social practices. In addition to bringing into dialogue different theoretical clusters within a SWaSP framing, the study goes beyond essentialized ways of understanding methodologies or single project reporting, and attempts to shed light on the chained entanglements, intersections and enactments of policy and practice, artefacts and humans, including the ways in which such relationships seldom present themselves in an intuitive manner for the analyst (or project participants).

A SWaSP framing is attended to as dimensions of doing multiple-scale ethnography, in terms of being positioned as scholars who are mobile across contemporary physical-online spaces, are reflexive about their mobile gaze and who follow individuals, tools and inscriptions as they emerge across online/physical/private/institutional spaces. Where someone is, how and when people meet, what such meetings offer in terms of positionality, opportunities, meaning-making and learning, are riddled with continua and disruptions that not only create analytical and methodological dissonance in mainstream scholarship but, more significantly, emerge as challenges for scientific enquiry by taking onboard the very theoretical and methodological implications of such continua and disruptions.

Built upon alternative epistemologies and going beyond straight-jacket methodologies, this study juxtaposes four cases across geopolitical time spaces with the intent to (i) discuss trans methodological framings, and through these (ii) unpack the role that boundaries and liminality play in the constitution of what is glossed as human and collective language and identity. We argue that a researcher’s mobile gaze is highly relevant in making visible and troubling processes that contribute to the re-enforcing naturalization of archaic conceptualizations pertaining to not only language, identity, nation-spaces, but also nationalism. Applying a SWaSP, Second Wave of Southern Perspective framing, the paper troubles mainstream methodologies and epistemologies and engages with peoples mobilities (including the scholars mobile gaze) and the processes of boundary creations across time and the global-North/South by including the South in the North and the North in the South. We gaze analytically at (i) Sápmi across northern Scandinavia and Russia; (ii) Nagalim in the tri-junction area of the eastern parts of India, Myanmar and China; (iii) massive displacements that ensued during the violent emergence of the nation-spaces of India and (West) Pakistan through the creation of the Radcliffe Line in 1947; and (iv) the urban to rural Pandemic induced exodus across the internal boundaries of the nation-spaces of India in post-March 2020. Conceptualizations that build upon the materiality of and the boundary-marked nature of language, identity, and nation-spaces (and their populations), salient features across these four cases, are also – we argue – etched in mainstream scholarship despite having been challenged through historical, philosophical, and empirical explorations. SWaSP’s reflexive tenets call attention to the cost of disruptions, the counter-flows related to colonially marked mobilities in disentangling analytical engagement as a trans methodological stance. This builds on the scholar’s mobile gaze at the entanglements of time-spaces, vocabularies, epistemology-methodology and positionalities.

Engaging with four geopolitical timespaces, and the concepts of liminality, lim/lines/ borders/boundaries, mobility and memory, against the backdrop of pre-, anti-, post- and de-colonial ideas, this study illustrates how tenets of what we call a “Second Wave of Southern Perspectives” (SWaSP) can illuminate the myths and imaginations that continue to give credibility to the idea of bounded language, identity and nation-states, including the role of languaging as constitutive dimension of these processes. The study presented in this paper has two aims. First, it explicates a SWaSP framing wherein the role of languaging is both a key dimension of the (multi-scalar) organization of everyday life inside and outside institutional physical-digital spaces, and of the remembering of lim i.e., lines or boundaries as dimensions of belonging. Second, by juxtaposing ideas about belonging and (shifting) boundaries across time and spaces, it highlights the mechanisms involved in contemporary re-enforcements of archaic conceptualizations of language, identity and nation-spaces across global settings. We argue that these mechanisms constitute a similar endeavor across the global-North/South, not least given recent discussions related to mobility and digitalization more generally wherein issues regarding democracy and equity are increasingly confronted with rising right-wing agendas and a racial renaissance. We attempt to show how identity tensions of “individuals/communities” and “an-other” are co-construed and argue that such processes contribute to the re-enforcing naturalization of archaic conceptualizations pertaining to not only language, identity, nation-spaces, but also nationalism.

The nature of virtual-physical continua, including their entanglements are explored by discussing how virtual sites for (language) learning emerge in practice, in policy and in research. Augmenting our arguments through a series of illustrative examples, we argue that learning constitutes the constant and ubiquitous ontological dimension of human existence. These examples focus upon - virtual sites (both as they have been explored in research and how they have been (re)presented in policy) as the loci for identifying answers to what is real and what is virtual, including their boundaries, - the myth of technology as educational panacea, and - the challenges that the dematerialization of our everyday wired lives brings to the future of the research endeavor. A “mind as action” theoretical framing with relevance to contemporary learning is discussed, the implications of such conceptual challenges are outlined and policy envisaging’s from the mid-1990s are compared to more recent promises of the “online revolution”.

This study goes beyond issues of the established binaries of medical–social or inclusion–exclusion that broadly frame disability scholarship. It uses multiscale ethnographic data to unpack and illustrate the complexities of identity through the investigation of social practices inside and outside institutional settings (schools, adult education, workplaces, health care) to understand the ‘doing of’ participation and marginalisation in situ. The study identifies gatekeeping patterns that shape (in)accessibility and illuminates prevailing assumptions regarding dis/ability, otherness, marginalisation and participation. While special arrangements and support in institutional activities are important dimensions of the everyday lives of people who are different from the norm, the handling of such special arrangements requires specific knowledge and competences to be used in appropriate ways and for specific tasks or situations. In that, we argue, lies the balancing act that people who fall outside various norms struggle with over the course of their lives.

This paper builds on a recent publication that presents the results of the analysis of a complex dataset created by focusing on the support services offered by fifty-five university and Swedish Folk High School institutional websites to individuals and groups designated as being ‘peripheral’. The study focuses on the ‘situated nature’ of institutional policies, that is, i) how policies become operationalised in local institutional contexts, ii) the nature of expectations placed on participants in the provision of support, and iii) the ways in which different target groups are conceptualised and categorised. Analysis of the post-upper secondary institutions’ web-pages presents a birds-eye view of the overarching support that is provided nationally and differences and similarities between the provision provided by the university and the Swedish Folk High School sectors are explicated. Challenges and dilemmas related to how support provision is ear-marked for individuals and groups are identified and discussed. 

Building upon long-term collaborations, this paper aims to explicate a going beyond agenda by illuminating the entanglements of policies and practices with a focus on discourses related to participation, communication and being human in a democratic society in the 21st century. It builds upon work that we have jointly led, first in the Swedish Arts Council project DoT (Delaktighet och Teater/Participation and Theater) between 2012-2015, and since then in the Think-Tank DoIT (Delaktighet och Inkluderings Tankesmedja/Participation and Inclusion Think-Tank). Bringing together knowledge regimes from the sectors of research and higher education on the one hand and the performing arts on the other hand, this collaborative work has raised important insights related to discourses regarding equity and participation inSwedish democratic spaces where an education-for-all and a culture-for-all are important policy goals.

Building upon tools developed at the intersections of the two sectors that we represent, project DoT built concretely upon meetings (between people and between sectors) as a fundamental strategy for change in societal arenas. It aimed to contribute towards a more equal and democratic society in the 21st century. Through collaboration and exchange, research and documentation, DoT engaged the performing arts, the infrastructure of cultural politics, and researchers. Its intention was to generate multidimensional stories that revealed and potentially (re)created understandings regarding the complexity of human existence. Going beyond the long-standing binary of medical-linguistic models related to deaf children and adults, DoT focused on making visible the deaf-hearing collaborative nature of the Deaf-Hearing World (Bagga-Gupta 2017, 2020). It asked what enables leaving the binary mainstream and moving towards re-positioning all people in a third, multidimensional space that constitutes contemporary society (Weckström & Bagga-Gupta 2020). For the performing arts, such a query meant shifting from dichotomizing discourses and spaces that attempt to include marginalized groups (for instance deaf people) in the majority culture, towards multidimensional perspectives that open up for new cultural expressions, potentially accessible for all.

Drawing upon ethnographic data from two sub-projects in DoT and the annual cultural-policies of Örebro County, Sweden between 2012-2020, this paper describes a third position related to participation and communication by focusing on people’s ways of being in and across policies and practices. It problematizes the audiology-framed identity positions of being hearing or deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) with the intention of unpacking the socialization processes that position people as being “normal” and “disabled”; such a stance also highlights societal norms regarding rights and privileges for accessing interpreters in order to communicate. The primary data includes recordings of what in contemporary parlance is understood as “in the wild” and that Lincoln and Guba called “Naturalistic Inquiry” (1985). Thus, “natural” in situ data, including digital sites and written documents, are focused upon. The study aligns itself with SWaSP (Second Wave of Southern Perspectives) tenets that emerge at the intersections of decolonial or Southern epistemologies, ontologies and methodologies on the one hand, and presuppositions related to sociocultural integrational perspectives on communication on the other hand. It focuses on the social dimensions of collaborations that play out in people’s lives and the nature of what is and can be meant by the label’s language and identity. The study thus illuminates what is called language and identity by engaging in empirical explorations that illustrate them in terms of what they are, where they reside, when and why they emerge in and across the contexts of policy and praxis.

A third position requires an explicit acknowledgment that humans live in dynamic, complex contexts where all individuals are potential members across settings. It challenges the performing arts on the one hand and research on the other hand, where invisible, taken for granted norms and praxis shape routine ways of working, (dis)enabling a shift towards alternative ways of understandings. Thus, for instance, a third position calls attention to issues of authenticity and the need for leaving behind unidimensional “categorization panic” in the performing arts when institutions are called upon to handle working with identity representations of being lesbian, black, wheelchair users or being deaf. A third position also illuminates the importance of and the ways in which interpretation services in relation to Swedish–STS (Swedish Sign Language) shape institutional discourses related to rights and responsibilities on the one hand, and hearing and DHH individuals’ experiences and participation on the other hand.

The findings presented in the paper point to tensions in the discourses of a one-society-for-all that facilitate or obstruct DHH individuals’ participation and their possibilities to be citizens on an equal footing with hearing people in relation to access, rights and responsibilities. In line with results from parallel projects where other societal sectors are focused upon, the findings highlight that the discourses in policy position DHH individuals as being handicapped in the context of performing arts. Unequal power relationships position them in passive roles, as handicapped, albeit with major responsibilities and curtailed opportunities to shape their own access and participation including rights and responsibilities.

The findings trouble mainstream Global North discourses in terms of webs of understandings that reproduce norms and bounded nomenclature, thus enabling the exploration of alternative possibilities that emerge in a third position with regards to language and identity. A third position does not adjust deviance to mainstream binary norms with regards to inclusion-exclusion, but pushes norms beyond what is considered as deviance, in language as well as everyday life, policy action plans and what is possible to measure and tabulate. Accepting diversity as a normal part of societal arenas poses challenges to current solutions for fulfilling the Swedish vision of a society for all, where all citizens across the country are seen as having equal opportunities for participating in a rich and diverse cultural life.

References

Bagga-Gupta, S. (2019). Identity Positioning and Languaging in Deaf-Hearing Worlds: Some insights from studies of segregated and mainstream educational settings. In Leigh, Irene & O’Brien, Catherine (Eds.). Deaf Identities. Exploring new frontiers. (162-192). Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190887599.003.0008

Bagga-Gupta, S. (2017) Signed Languages in Bilingual Education. In: S. May (General Ed), Encyclopedia of Language and Education. O. García and A. M.Y. Lin (eds) Volume 5: Bilingual and Multilingual Education. (131-145). Rotterdam: Springer. https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-319-02258-1_12

Lincoln, Y. & Guba, E. (1985). Naturalistic Inquiry. Newbury Park: Sage.

Weckström, P. & Bagga-Gupta, S. (2020). On going beyond dichotomies towards 3rd positions. Some theoretical and pragmatic implications with regards to culture-for-all and a society-for-all. In Bagga-Gupta, S. & Weckström, P. (Eds.) On 3rd positions in democratic contexts. An education-for-all, culture-for-all and a society-for-all. Research Report (in English and Swedish), Jönköping University, School of Education and Communication. Nr 11. ISBN-nr: 978-91-88339-22-5. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hj:diva-48145