Organizers: Linda Bäckman (libackma@abo.fi), Sari Pöyhönen (sari.h.poyhonen@jyu.fi) and Max Bremer (max.bremer@suomiforum.com)
Time: Friday 8.11. at 9.15-10.45
This session centres the concept of linguistic citizenship (Stroud, 2001) and invites participants to reflect on questions of language from their own perspective and a collective one through facilitated story sharing. It is led by researchers from the project Language choices and linguistic citizenship in Swedish-speaking Finland (University of Jyväskylä) in collaboration with facilitators from Story Sharing Universum, a Helsinki-based collective that strives to bring people from diverse backgrounds together to meet each other as equals through sharing everyday stories.
The concept of linguistic citizenship was coined in the context of South Africa as a way of transcending the debates on linguistic human rights, which often assume a fixed view of language and identity. Instead, linguistic citizenship places language at the heart of questions of welfare and equity, and calls for action to contest prevailing power relations (Stroud, 2001). It calls for talking about language in visionary terms by encouraging reflection on “the ways in which the humanity of each of us depends on respectful recognition of, and engagement with, the linguistically mediated humanity of others” (Stroud 2015: 35). It is these engagements with the humanity of each other that we wish to draw on in the session. We invite ETMU participants to join the café by telling their stories and listening to others. Moreover, we will together explore the potential of story sharing as a method in participatory and ethnographic research.
References:
Stroud, C. 2015. Linguistic Citizenship as Utopia. Multilingual Margins 2 (2), 20–37.
Stroud, Christopher. 2001. “African Mother Tongue Programs and the Politics of Language: Linguistic Citizenship versus Linguistic Human Rights.” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 22 (4): 339–355.