91̽��

Tuesday 11 March (room J412)

9.00 Welcome by Johan ����������

Hope

9.10-9.40 Towards a Sociolinguistics of Potentiality: Building spaces of otherwise through decolonizing English

Muzna Awayed-Bishara, Tel Aviv University

In my talk, I respond to Caroline Kerfoot and Christopher Stroud’s call to expand and Southernize sociolinguistics, through the lenses of Elizabeth Povinelli’s notion of spaces of otherwise. Focusing on multilingual contexts, I examine how colonial languages (e.g., English) could offer minoritized language speakers decolonial possibilities to create new meaning-making spaces. These are spaces of potentiality where alternative social projects embody a complex interplay of utopia and dystopia. Employing the Southern notion of sumud pedagogy as a localized application of Stroud’s notion of Linguistic Citizenship, I examine how Palestinian Arabic-speaking youth in Israel employ English to de-construct social constructs and reject imposed subjectivities. Combining my voice as a Palestinian sociolinguist in Israel with the voices of Palestinian youth from Haifa, I illustrate how English offers decolonial options for constructing new modes of being, belonging, and knowing. 

9.40-10.10 City of Dreams? Dissensual Art, Semiotic Citizenship, and the Right to the City

Johan ��ä���������, University 91̽��

In this presentation, I draw on recent work on linguistics citizenship that focus on the built environment (Burnett & Walsh 2024) and art (Milani 2023) to analyze and discuss a series of site-specific and collective art installations and performances in the city 91̽��, and their interactions with the social, material and ideological environment. Centered around the trope of Dreams and produced in 2022 and 2023, these artworks challenge neoliberal urban governance and planning, claim the right to the city for marginalized practices and constituencies, and use a broad range of semiotic means to stage and make us imagine another world. Juxtaposing the artworks with the dystopian backdrop of vertical urbanism and reading them as dissensual (Rancière 2010) counter-monuments (Krzyzanowska 2016) that challenge the status quo, I examine how they, albeit momentarily, open utopian spaces of otherwise and invite us to make “the impossible possible” (Lefebvre 1996), thus comprising “a political locus for hope” (Stroud 2023).

10.10-10.40 Discussion moderated by Christopher Stroud

10.40-11.00 Coffee

Love

11.00-11.30 Imagining Other Worlds through Other Words: Khurbn, Yiddish, and the ethics of the otherwise

Tommaso M Milani, The Pennsylvania State University

In this talk, I want to address the topic of this workshop by engaging with current theoretical developments in linguistic citizenship scholarship, which encourage us to “listen beyond and within ‘noise’ to those who inhabit discounted bodies and speak unvalued languages, to move beyond ‘community’ and ‘selfhood’ to becoming otherwise with others in projects of world-building, simultaneously prompting research which seeks to be ‘ethically otherwise’” (Kerfoot and Stroud 2024). I will do so by thinking through Yiddish and Khurbn (the Yiddish word for the Holocaust) (see Milani and Richardson 2023; Milani and Lukow, in preparation). More specifically, I illustrate how, through Yiddish and the remembering of the Khurbn, some Jewish intellectuals perform acts of linguistic citizenship that go against the grain of hegemonic discourses about migrants and Palestinians. And in doing so, they enact an ethics of otherwise and a politics of solidarity.

11.30-12.00 Ukrainian Voices in Sweden: Language and trauma in an ethnographic project with Ukrainian women in Stockholm

Natalia Volvach, University of Stockholm

In this talk, I present results of an ethnographic research project with Ukrainian women in Stockholm, conducted over the past six months from September 2024 to February 2025. Foregrounding the individual experiences, the project builds on traditional and creative methodologies (Elliot & Culhane, 2016), such as open-ended interviews and walking tours, language portrait and figure crafting workshops, as well as participants’ multimodal documentation of their lived experiences of language (Busch, 2017, 2020) through images and reflections with QualNotes.

The presentation is intended to initiate a discussion on questions of forced migration due to war, trauma, and multilingualism (Busch & McNamara, 2020; Drozdzewski & Dominey-Howes, 2015). Since one of the project outcomes is an intended art exhibition and a creation of an online archive, the talk also seeks to open up a dialogue surrounding politics and practices of communicating research beyond academia while dualizing creative forms of writing, drawing, and crafting.

12.00-12.30 Discussion moderated by Marcelyn Oostendorp

12.30-14.30 Lunch

Care

14.30-15.00 Towards a Space of Care: Linguistic citizenship and human variation

Stina Ericsson, University 91̽��

Applying the notion of Linguistic Citizenship to people's interaction with the designed and built surroundings, this talk looks at the micro-level of people's varied experiences and participation. I take the 'commons' of a citizenship of care (Stroud 2023) to mean both the physical urban space that people move through, and immaterial needs such as the need to belong and be part of social interaction. Data is in the form of a 360-degree video recording of an urban walk, with representatives from the Municipality 91̽��, representatives from the Municipality's Senior Citizens' Committee, and researchers. The purpose of the walk was for the participants to jointly examine equalities and inequalities in the physical environment. Based on extracts from the recording, I explore how ingredients of 'spaces of otherwise' (Kerfoot & Stroud 2024) emerge in relation to human variation.

15.00-15.30 When linguistic citizenship becomes nationalism

Marcelyn Oostendorp, Stellenbosch University & Christopher Stroud, University of Western Cape and University 91̽��

Acts of linguistic citizenship are acts that use language as medium and/or target of transformation. These acts go beyond standardized monolithic understandings of language and/or claim new positionalities and new relationalities for speakers of marginalized varieties. Linguistic citizenship is thus a mode of theorizing language as a semiotics of ‘becoming with others’ beyond liberal-modernist notions of citizenship. However, can what start out as linguistic citizenship instead become nationalism? In this paper we explore this question through the Afrikaans language movement. The Afrikaans language movement developed in response to practices and discourses that elevated standard Dutch and English above the local varieties that was used in South Africa, the so-called ‘kombuistaal’ (kitchen language), later developed into Afrikaans. However instead of going beyond standardized notions of language, the movement essentialized the speakers of Afrikaans and created divisions within Afrikaans-speaking communities. In this paper we plot the conditions, processes, and practices that lead to this perversion of linguistic citizenship through our close reading of poems, and historical narratives. In contradiction, we also offer glimpses of “going beyond” the fetishization of language as artifact with data from Mozambique, Kenya and South Africa. We argue that slipping into nationalism is an example of the utopia/dystopia dialectic of linguistic citizenship. Our goal is to contribute towards understandings of the conditions and processes that create linguistic dystopias and utopias.

15.30-16.00 Discussion moderated by Tommaso Milani

Wednesday 12 March (room J415)

9.00-9.40 Reinventing the legitimate speaker of Suburban Swedish: Negotiating boundaries through linguistic citizenship in a Swedish classroom

Nicolas Femia, University 91̽��

While scholarship in the Global South has underscored the notion of linguistic citizenship as involved with the struggle for marginalized epistemologies of language, little research has focused on similar situations in contexts of the Global North, such as Sweden. In this talk, I will focus on an ethnographic study that explores a classroom interaction in which four female students at an upper secondary school in a suburb 91̽�� engage in dialogue with their teacher concerning the (in)authenticity of the Swedish rapper Dogge Doggelito as a legitimate speaker of Suburban Swedish. By doing so, the students engage in an act of linguistic citizenship to resist dominant conceptualizations of Suburban Swedish and reinvent ideological boundaries of language following their own experiences of multilingualism. Thus, this study highlights the potential of linguistic citizenship as a tool for creating spaces in which multiple perspectives on language can co-exist in Swedish education.

9.40-10.20 Navigating the tensions between a multilingual self and a monolingual ethos to family language policy: Understanding children’s language practices through linguistic citizenship

Abraham Yeshalem, University 91̽��

Inspired by Linguistic Citizenship (Stroud, 2001), a notion sprouted upon the conceptualization of language (multilingualism) as a messy, complex, and dynamic practice and thereby draws our attention to speakers’ agency and engagement with languages, I will discuss children’s everyday language practices and their multilingually-mediated familial experiences in the home as showcase to illustrate how they navigate the tensions between their multilingual selves and the pervasive monolingual ethos that informs how and what language to use and cultivate in the home. To this end, I draw on multimodal ethnographic research data taken from a larger study that examines the family language policy (FLP) of nine migrant families of Ethiopian backgrounds in Gothenburg, Sweden. The data was collected using a multipronged methodological approach that brings semi-structured interviews and participant observation with language portrait methods of body-mapping (Busch, 2018) and space-mapping methods (cf. Gilligan & Ball, 2010; Purkarthofer, 2019).

10.20-10.40 Coffee

10.40-11.20 Yiddish, Bureaucratization, and Linguistic Citizenship

Simon Bauer, University 91̽��, and Tommaso M Milani, The Pennsylvania State University

This presentation discusses some preliminary results from an ongoing study on Yiddish in Sweden, bureaucratisation, and linguistic citizenship. Here, we focus in on the establishment of an official state language centre for Yiddish. While providing a structured avenue through which the language can be promoted, this state recognition and appropriation of Yiddish begs a few questions. We focus in particular on the tension between on the one hand the affective dimensions of linguistic citizenship and on the other the bureaucratisation and rationalisation of language policy through state interventions. In sum, we answer (1) how processes of bureaucratisation and rationalisation affect which language practices are possible; and (2) what affordances for agency Yiddishists see in their language work in relation to these new institutions. To do so, we approach language policy from the viewpoint of the language activists. Based on individual interviews with people instrumental in the establishment of the language centre and those working there we investigate how they view the recognition of Yiddish as a national minority language and the establishment of the language centre. In essence – what does it provide, and what does it hinder?

11.20-12.00 Concluding discussion moderated by Christopher Stroud