ExLaLE (Exploring Language and Literature in Education) is an interdisciplinary seminar series dedicated to research in the intersection of the broad disciplinary fields of language, literature and education. ExLaLE aims to be a platform for junior scholars and is managed by doctoral students of the national research school CuEEd-LL.

Spring 2024

Completed seminars

Welcome everyone to the first ExLaLe Seminar, part of the ExLaLe Seminar Series organized by the CuEEd-LL PhD students!

We hope you can join the ExLaLe seminar next Friday, January 26th, 14:00-16:00 CET, for a discussion with Semeneh Ayalew Asfaw on

Schooling vs. Education: the making of rebellious subjects in postwar Ethiopia

Join the online seminar here:

https://stockholmuniversity.zoom.us/j/62849906150?pwd=QUJ5cCtNVnJyZWo1WGFXVUx2T1Ivdz09 External link, opens in new window.

His talk will focus on how university students in Addis Ababa, and Addis Ababans generally, in the postwar period reshaped the "hegemonic" discourses they received from state-affiliated institutions (the university, the theater and the like) to form a rebellious cultural and political subjectivity that paved the way for the Ethiopian Revolution of 1974. This historical understanding of the Ethiopian Revolution encourages us to view education, self making, and cultural formation as processes involving a complex interplay between subject formation from above (for example, the imperial state and its institutions) and from below (students, urban dwellers and the general citizenry). It also encourages us to view discourses and practices associated with modernity as being contested and as being informed not just by the ideas and interests of a ruling clique but also by the ideas and interests of the ruled, often with transformative and unexpected consequences.

Chair: Tesfaye Ayele, PhD student in the CuEEd-LL research graduate school

For any questions, contact: exlale.seminars@outlook.com.

Find more information on the seminar here.
See a flyer about the seminar here. Pdf, 304.4 kB, opens in new window.

Polycentricity in heritage language education: Insights from Sámi and Finnish.

Flyer ExLaLe Jonas Iversen Opens in new window.


Presenting this topic is Dr. Jonas Yassin Iversen, who holds a PhD in education from Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences. He is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the same institution. His research interests include minoritised language education, multilingual education, and multilingualism in teacher education. The seminar will discuss the following:

 

Research from heritage language (HL) education in Scandinavia has found that this form of education constitutes a transnational space where teachers and students negotiate complex relations between competing imaginations of the homeland, diverse diaspora communities across the globe and their current locality (Daugaard, 2020; Straszer et al., 2020). Thus, HL education entails a wide range of competing centres the teacher can reference (e.g. Blommaert, 2010). The teacher can choose to teach the HL with reference to a particular ‘imagined homeland’ or towards an ‘imagined locality’, meaning the teacher’s perception of the students’ current locations, or anywhere on this continuum. In a diasporic context, teachers and students may also experience a sense of peripherality in relation to the imagined centre. This might lead some students to orient towards other centres than their teacher. In this presentation, I discuss how two Sámi HL teachers in Norway and one Finnish HL teacher in Sweden navigated this complexity through their HL teaching.

 

23 feb 14:00-15:30
Join us via Zoom: https://stockholmuniversity.zoom.us/j/68795001700

Becoming a person who reads in Swedish? Fiction reading practices of highly educated multilingual adults.

22nd of March 14.00-16.00

Flyer - ExLaLe- Wilinger Opens in new window.

 

Dr. Henriikka Wilinger holds a PhD in Swedish with a didactical orientation and works as associate senior lecturer at CAKL, Centre of Academic Learning, at Malmö University. She instructs in Swedish as a second language and in higher education studies, and her research areas include multilingualism, sociology of language, and literature didactics.

 

The seminar will revolve around Henriikka's dissertation project External link, opens in new window., which explores how and why adult migrants with academic backgrounds read literature. Two connected studies investigate second language learners' fiction reading practices in an advanced Swedish course at two universities, as well as in free time, several years after such a course. The method is qualitative, and the data consists of syllabuses, observations of an oral exam, as well as interviews with teachers, students, and multilingual individuals living in Sweden permanently. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the thesis, the data is analyzed with a broad variety of theoretical tools, based on three cornerstones: literary education, second language learning and sociolinguistics.