Nicolas Femia's half-time seminar

Experiences of (dis)empowerment: exploring multilingualism(s) in a Swedish suburban school

The seminar takes place at Gothenburg University (Room: J431) on Monday, November 11 at 13:15–15:00. The talk is in hybrid form (Zoom link here). The presentation will be held in Swedish, but questions and comments may be in either English or Swedish.

Abstract

The goal of my doctoral project is to explore ideologies of multilingualism in a Swedish school environment through decolonial considerations, pointing towards the co-existence of dominant and marginal perspectives of language. To do so, the project builds on ethnographic fieldwork at an upper secondary school in a suburban area of Gothenburg as a way to reach emic perspectives on what multilingualism is and how it is engaged with in the daily life of multilingual youth. In this seminar I will present an overview of this project, during which I will point to the theoretical and methodological assumptions, as well as giving a detailed picture of the ethnographic data. Additionally, I will show how I have employed theoretical concepts both from western critical sociolinguistics and southern traditions on multilingualism in my work so far, and finally aim to discuss future work within the frame of my doctoral dissertation.