JYU English seminars 2024-25

Please note: for accessibility purposes, all our talks have automated captions in English (both live and in the recordings linked below). If you also wish to involve your own sign language interpreter, please get in touch to discuss practicalities.

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

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👇Scroll down to see abstracts for all talks.👇

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ABSTRACTS

Sarita Monjane Henriksen, Semiotic superdiversity in an urban linguistic landscape: a case study in Mozambique

One of the most defining features of African countries has been their multilingual and multicultural nature, with citizens being mostly bilingual or plurilingual and proficient in a variety of languages. However, as a result of increasing mobility and migration, European countries -- once perceived as relatively homogenous in linguistic and cultural terms -- now also display growing levels of superdiversity. This raises challenges regarding language management in schools and classrooms, and in society at large.

This paper looks at Mozambique, one of the most highly linguistically diverse countries in the world, with its official language Portuguese co-existing alongside various languages of African origin, and other European languages such as English and French, as well as Asian languages. The paper analyses societal and education language policies and practices through an ethnographic semiotic lens. Key foci include people’s perceptions and views on existing languages, official discourses on languages, discussions of language hierarchies, and the role of language in education and development. Further issues of linguistic human rights in education and society are also covered. Altogether this highlights the key insights brought about from a thorough analysis of semiotic superdiversity in an urban landscape in the global south.

Cecilia Gialdini, Language Policy Tools: The Multidimensional Linguistic Justice Index

This paper aims to contribute to developing equitable and effective language policy and planning (LPP). In essence, linguistic justice encompasses both the ethical and pragmatic aspects of linguistic inclusion and the management of linguistic diversity.

First, the paper presents an operational definition of linguistic justice, drawing inspiration from the capability approach. This approach conceives linguistic justice, enabling individuals to engage in as many language-based capabilities as possible. These capabilities encompass various activities and experiences that inherently require language for their realisation. The paper applies the Constitutional Approach to select the most relevant language-based capabilities representing fundamental public goods and services. This method of capability selection examines the constitutions of a sample of countries to identify the most critical beings and doings that people have chosen to codify within the document.

Secondly, each identified language-based capability is associated with a statistical indicator and evaluated based on criteria such as data accessibility and computational simplicity. This approach ensures the creation of a practical yet expeditious index for assessment. These indicators are computed for different linguistic groups within a jurisdiction, encompassing both autochthonous and allochthonous minorities, with slight variations in computation to accommodate specific identity claims of autochthonous minorities.

The final result of this process is the Multidimensional Linguistic Justice Index (MLJI), a versatile tool tailored for policymakers, civil servants, and academics. This index aggregates the values of diverse linguistic indicators through the arithmetic mean, yielding a singular numerical representation of linguistic justice for a given jurisdiction. The results from different jurisdictions, or even within the same authority over time, are visually presented through a modified box plot, categorised into four clusters representing different levels of linguistic justice (low, medium-low, medium-high, high). The MLJI is designed for policymakers, civil servants, and academics.

Venla Hannuksela, Minority and majority language schools as arenas for promoting political engagement: A case study from Finland

In Finland, the Swedish-speaking minority votes in elections consistently more actively than the Finnish-speaking majority. Because this difference cannot be explained by socioeconomic differences, explanations must be searched for in political socialization.

In this talk based on a large-scale survey data, I discuss how Finnish- and Swedish-speaking lower secondary schools foster partly different educational cultures. In particular, Swedish-speaking schools seem to cultivate a more open classroom climate for discussing political and societal issues. This in turn promotes important prerequisites of political participation, such as political interest and political self-efficacy. One clear reason for the more open classroom climate in Swedish-speaking schools is that students in Swedish-speaking schools experience a more coherent sense of belonging within the class.

However, openness to discussion does not necessarily mean openness to difference. Diversity in sociocultural values weakens the sense of belonging to the class community more in classes in Swedish-speaking than in Finnish-speaking schools. Therefore, the open classroom climate in Swedish-speaking classes does not benefit from political diversity unlike the open classroom climate in Finnish-speaking classes. 

Again, all this is not reducible to socioeconomic differences. And so, because schools are tasked with preparing and enabling young people to participate in politics -- while also mitigating socioeconomic inequalities -- these findings raise key questions and lessons about pedagogy and classroom climate.

Daniel N. Silva, The digitalization of grassroots activism: Trans-peripheral cooperation, communicative practice and the enactment of hope in Rio de Janeiro

In this talk, I discuss how collectives in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas (low-income neighborhoods built by residents) tailor affordances of digitalization, communicative practices and trans-peripheral cooperation to counter Brazil’s (in)securitization.

Scholars in sociolinguistics have increasingly grappled with the notion of (in)securitization as the “practice of making ‘enemy’ and ‘fear’ the integrative, energetic principle of politics displacing the democratic principles of freedom and justice” (Huysmans, 2014:3).

Residents of favelas have been the targets of tough (in)securitizing practices, including exceptional policing, everyday armed management by extra-legal regimes, and a consequent stifling of political expressions. I follow collectives of favela residents and their non-favela allies in their ‘counter-securitizing’ strategies, that is, in their contesting of the state (and private) logic of security as exceptional use of surveillance and force.

My talk will elaborate on the tailoring of digital affordances, ways of talk, and networks of cooperation by Mariluce Mariá and Kleber Souza; Coletivo Papo Reto, and Cecillia Olliveira. Mariluce Mariá and Kleber Souza have devised “digital rockets”, i.e. alarms for surviving armed power on digital networks. Coletivo Papo Reto has tailored a similar technology on WhatsApp groups and social media, and combined it with affordances of enregisterment, including through “speaking to the point” with residents. Cecilia Oliveira, a Black journalist working for the Intercept Brazil, has scaled up these grassroots initiatives by developing the Fogo Cruzado (Crossfire) digital app, a resource that uses the input of users to offer real time information on shootings and other events. These counter-security tactics have reached different publics and provided minorities with possibilities of resisting legacies of colonialism, slavery and anti-Black racism.

Tayyaba Tamim & Rabea Malik, Investments in Education and Intergenerational Shift or Continuity of Gender Norms

The paper explores the role of sustained investments in education in marginalized communities and its effect on social gender norms. The arguments of the paper are based on some findings of a wider 3-year ongoing study in poor peri-urban contexts in Pakistan, with generalizable lessons for similar context elsewhere. Several gender norms, if not all, embedded and naturalized in culture and tradition germinate and maintain gender inequality. The questions are then: a) How does education intersect with social gender norms in the community and to what effect? B) Is there intergenerational change in these factors?

Eight communities in two provinces were selected where a non-profit organization had been working for more than a decade, and was well reputed for providing affordable quality education. In-depth individual interviews were conducted with Head teachers, teachers, parents, alumni, and dropouts. Focus groups were also conducted with key informants.

The research framework for the study was informed by Amartya Sen’s capability approach and Naila Kabeer’s work to understand how social conversion factors inhibit or facilitate agency. The paper outlines results indicating intergenerational shift or continuity of norms in three dimensions: education, marriage, and work. From these we draw methodological and theoretical lessons to be applied in other contexts.

Lucy Jones, “Double the trouble”: Analysing LGBTQ+ youth identity through an intersectional lens

In this paper, I consider the benefits of an intersectional approach for the linguistic analysis of inequality. I bring together developments in intersectionality scholarship with key propositions from sociocultural linguistics to put forward a series of principles for the analysis of marginalised identity construction. In doing so, I present selected data from my recent ethnographic fieldwork with LGBTQ+ youth groups in England. I take a queer linguistics approach to show how four of my participants’ identity constructions reveal their marginalisation in society, using discourse analysis to show how they position themselves in relation to the wider world. All four of the young people featured here are transgender, but their experiences differ in terms of their race, class, citizenship, family circumstances, and sexual identity. I show how these factors inform each participant’s positionality as a young queer person, illustrating through my analysis the principles mentioned above. Ultimately, I argue that, through an intersectional analysis of identity as it’s constructed through language, we can better understand how marginalised speakers’ lives are constrained by external structures of power and oppression.

Edit Zgut-Przybylska, A critical discourse analysis of anti-imperialism and historical grievances in Eurosceptic populist rhetoric: insights from Hungary and Poland

As a result of various crises, the European Union (EU) witnessed the rise of Eurosceptic and/or populist parties in its member states. However, the link between Euroscepticism and populism remains under-theorized, and the East-Central European (ECE) region is still surprisingly under-studied. This presentation aims to fill these gaps by studying the development of Eurosceptic populist narratives in Hungary and Poland.

Connecting the literature on Euroscepticism and the ideational approach to populism, it is shown through Orbán’s and Kaczyński’s discourses how (1) the EU is equated with ‘the corrupt elite’ that stands in conflict with ‘the pure people’ (the Hungarians and Poles); and (2) how the EU is claimed to act against the notion of popular sovereignty.

While this presentation highlights differences between the Eurosceptic populist narratives of the two party leaders, a politically driven ‘anti-imperialist’ theme prevails in both cases, which differentiates them from their Western-European counterparts as well.

Birgül Yılmaz, Language, (in)securitisation of migration and counter-securitisation 

Sociolinguistics offers key empirical tools for the study of (in)securitisation as an everyday lived experience, in particular the processes of “making ‘enemy’ and ‘fear’ the integrative, energetic principle of politics” (Huysmans 2013:3 in Rampton, Silva and Charalambous 2022:2). Securitisation is a process which involves discursive and non-discursive strategies e.g. taking fingerprints from migrants, building walls on borders, and establishing forms of governmentality (Bigo 2006; Huysmans 2006). These subject migrants to security apparatuses that frame them as ‘threats’ via circulation of texts and images in media and digital platforms. In this talk I examine the discourses of (in)securitisation that surround migrants, and the countervaling discourses employed to create alternative forms of securitisation. I report on ethnographic work among migrants in two neighbourhoods of Athens, and I draw out insights and lessons for research into contemporary (in)securitisation of migrants more broadly.

The role of language, language learning, language as practice and multilingualism (Milani and Levon 2024) in shaping the processes of (in)securitisation has been examined in institutional domains such as educational settings (Charalambous, Charalambous and Rampton 2016), “Secure English Language Tests” for migrants (Harding, Brunfaut and Unger 2020), and citizenship and settlement test regimes that subject migrants to inequalities (Khan 2022). However, sociolinguists have not dealt with (in)securitisation in counter-spaces such as squats (Butler 2012) of migrants, often shared with other marginalized populations; nor has it explored the shared political, economic, and social struggles among these groups within a weak welfare system, such as in Greece.

In this talk, based on ethnographic research in two neighbourhoods of Athens, I provide an overview of (in)securitisation and counter-securitisation of migration, i.e. “recognising existential threats but advancing alternative analysis and solutions” (Rampton, Silva and Charalambous 2022:24). I also examine the discursive practices of the research participants and ways in which they disrupt, subvert, and counter for (in)securitisation imposed upon them.

The aim is to account for the relationship between language, (in)securitisation and counter securitisation as an everyday discursive practice of migrants, within a solidarity/ alternative infrastructure.