JYU English seminars 2021-22

Series convenor: Dave Sayers. Please send any queries to dave.j.sayers@jyu.fi. 

ABSTRACTS

Shondel Nero, The power of narrative: Climate skepticism and the deconstruction of science

This presentation discusses the research behind Shondel Nero’s new co-authored book, The Power of Narrative: Climate Skepticism and the Deconstruction of Science

(Oxford University Press, 2020). The book begins by asking, why and how is it that climate skeptics have been able to challenge climate scientists' findings about a changing climate which, after all, is a matter of science? She approaches the question not by studying the lobbying and political machinery behind skepticism, which others have studied, but by looking at the narrative of skepticism (commonly referred to as denial), appreciating its linguistic and other properties, and persuasive power. The book ends with a discussion of some ways forward, emphasizing that some of the necessary actions begin to address climate and science skepticism in general revolve around language.

Amiena Peck, Place making in the digital space: virtual linguistic landscapes, identity and affect

The field of Linguistic Landscapes has undergone several shifts over the past decade and one space which houses many possible potentialities for understanding signs-in-space is that of the digital sphere. Building on pioneering work on digital ethnography (cf. Pink, 2016, Varis, 2016, Murthy,2008) I operationalize Madiano and Miller’s (2013) theory of polymedia in order to explore the virtual space beyond multimodality and language on social media platforms. Drawing on illustrative examples from my YouTube channel, Amiena Inspired and convergent platforms, I explore the nature of polymedia for digital ethnographers. Madiano and Miller explains how polymedia “is ultimately about a new relationship between the social and the technological, rather than merely a shift in the technology itself” (2013:169). As one methodological entryway, I use autobiographical portraits to ground the emotionalizing and/humanizing processes which led to the creation and functionality of the platforms under study. By drawing on personal narratives I am able to provide a deep digital ethnography of social platforms that begin in the social world but are often studied largely in its digital space. By engaging with autobiographical ethnographic accounts of polymedia and affect, it is hoped that a more nuanced view of the digital space as an increasingly emotive, human space is foregrounded.

M. Sidury Christiansen, Memes, icons, and pop culture: Chronotopic motifs for identity construction online 

This presentation discusses the chronotopic construction of our identities online. After a brief overview of sociolinguistic concepts, the author will explain how users begin constructing identities, first visually manipulating letters and punctuation. She will discuss how language ideologies shape the multimodal choices that users assign and embody, and how they use multiple semiotic resources to repackage their identities using memes, icons, and pop culture. Through a chronotopic lens, the author will examine examples of identity construction and how motifs from the past, some of which are traditional, serve to shape current and progressive views. The presentation will end with a recap of the role that language plays in the construction of identity, the advantages that it gives to language itself, and the steps that institutions and educators can take in order to promote sociolinguistic change that will make it possible for all of these identities to be seen and respected.

Mayamin Altae, Iraq’s English Language Curriculum: A tale of two eras! And ‘three’ for Mosul

Iraq continues to suffer ongoing political unrest and violent threats to personal safety. This has seriously affected educational provision; nowhere more so than in Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city. This talk examines three issues: 1) how teacher-leaders describe and understand their empowerment to build inclusive education systems; 2) how professional learning communities can support inclusive practices; 3) what role digital skills can play in the modernisation of an inclusive Iraqi curriculum. Interviews were conducted with two teachers, two headteachers and two inspectors; the latter work directly with the Iraqi Ministry of Education and local communities. As teacher-leaders reframe their understanding of their role in the changing context of Iraq, they become better empowered to build sustainable learning communities. Digital skills are crucial here. This talk also includes discussion of a recently funded British Council "Hornby Project" to carry out a research project around the teachers use of technology in Mosul's schools in Iraq.

Kristine Køhler Mortensen, Teaching “Danish sexual morals”: Issues of gender and sexuality in civic education for asylum seekers

This presentation examines how concepts of gender and sexuality are increasingly mobilized as symbolic values in Danish immigration politics. The Danish national self-perception rests on an idea of widespread tolerance especially regarding gender and sexuality. However, understandings of gender and sexuality as represented in Danish immigration discourse draw clear boundaries between insider and outsider. As of recently the Danish parliament decided to introduce compulsory teaching in so-called “Danish sexual morals” at Danish asylum centers as a way to correct and secure ‘the foreigner’s’ sexual behavior. The presentation discusses how gender and sexuality are articulated and culturally contextualized in such teaching activities. Based on fieldwork conducted at a Danish asylum center, I investigate how the requirement for teaching “Danish sexual morals” is dealt with by practitioners, teachers, and asylum seekers. Based on participant observation and audio recordings of classroom interaction I demonstrate how teachers experience a split between “cultural imperialism” and “good intentions” and thus simultaneously come to reproduce and pose challenges to static concepts of particular national sexualities. Additionally, interactional analysis shows how asylum seekers push back against dominant understandings of culturally specific conceptualizations of gender and sexuality by offering personal narratives that reveal countering experiences.

Lorna Quandt, Sign language and embodied cognition: bringing together EEG, behavior, and emerging technology

In this talk, Dr. Quandt will share recent work on using EEG methodology to examine embodied processing in signed language users. The talk will draw upon results from behavioral and cognitive neuroscience studies from the past few years of her work in the Action & Brain Lab at Gallaudet University, the world's premiere university for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. Several convergent EEG studies support the notion that sign language users show enhanced processing of movement- and sign-related stimuli. Dr. Quandt will also present recent work on educational technology. Immersive virtual reality presents an enormous potential for learning 3-dimensional, spatially complex signed languages, especially with recent advances in motion capture, animation, and hand tracking. Dr. Quandt's research team has undertaken the mission of designing, developing, and testing an immersive virtual reality environment in which non-signing adults can learn American Sign Language from signing virtual human avatars, created from motion capture recordings of fluent signers. One significant challenge of this work lies in how signed language learning can best be measured in following a short-term educational experience. Alongside traditional learning measures of memorization and recall, sensorimotor EEG activity will be assessed in order to understand how the sensorimotor system changes in response to learning signed language content.

Joseph Comer, The complex cultural politics and political economies of typographic creativity:Building ‘alternative reality’ in the landscape of Palapa

In this paper, I present a case study of how creative professionals use language and express linguistic and ‘graphic’ ideologies (Spitzmüller 2012, Jaworski 2018), by exploring how typographic choices can constitute forms of social action (cf. Jaworski and Järlehed 2015). I re-visit the social meanings of language invention and ‘writing system mimicry’ (Strandberg 2020) within the context of contemporary global mobility, capitalism, and sociopolitical upheaval.

In order to bring these diverse themes together, I discuss in-process research undertaken into Palapa (stylized ‘Palapa’): an art project, immersive installation and (until recently) prominent feature of the semiotic landscape of Fusion Festival, a counter-cultural arts and music festival held in northern Germany. While functioning as the festival’s main stage, Palapa’s façade was built to broadly resemble a disordered, untidy streetscape, rich with ‘language’: a typeface which functions as a script for the invented language of the ‘alternative world’ created at the stage (cf. Heller 2017).

My discourse-analytic and (auto-)ethnographic examination of media produced by Palapa’s creators (as well as interview data) informs understanding of how forms of language invention and typographic ‘play’ express ideologies within/about the precarious present and the future. My hesitant conclusions draw threads between this stage, its typeface, and the broader cultural forces and political economy/ies that affect creative and counter-cultural practice and produce often-contradictory meanings, causes, and effects.

Keywords: Semiotic landscapes, typography, invented languages, language ideology, anti-capitalism

Csilla Weninger, Digital literacy: Skill, social practice and ideology

It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that governments the world over view digital literacy as the panacea for states’ economic, social and civic needs. As a strategic priority area, digital literacy has made its way into educational policies and curricula, and educational institutions at different levels have been tasked with developing their students’ digital literacy skills through cross-curricular approaches or dedicated subjects. There is substantial agreement on the key components of digital literacy as a complex set of technical-technological skills, critical-evaluative competences and creative-expressive dispositions. Moreover, a host of different frameworks and conceptualizations have also been proposed – both from scholars and from transnational organizations – for the curricular implementation of digital literacy in educational institutions (e.g., Law et al., 2018; Sindoni et al., 2019). What seems to have received much less attention in scholarly (and certainly, in public) discussions of digital literacy is the ways in which it is also, fundamentally, an ideological practice.

In this talk, my goal is to consider what it means to say that digital literacy is an ideological practice and what such a recognition means for teaching or developing it in schools. I do this by first drawing parallels between ‘traditional’ literacy and digital literacy, reaching back to New Literacy scholars’ arguments about literacy and ideology. As I will argue and illustrate, we can see striking similarities between then and now, especially concerning the prioritization of certain aspects of (digital) literacy, the trend toward quantification, and a massive cultural divide between home and school uses of (digital) literacy. The key implication of these insights is that as teachers and educators we must have awareness of the ideological nature of digital literacy before we can develop it meaningfully and without alienating our students.