Session Information
31 SES 17 A, Risk or Opportunity – A Question of Perspective? Language and Education in Transnational School Careers Part 2
Symposium
Contribution
The focus of this contribution lies on family biographies and on the question of the importance that “own” and “foreign” languages receive regarding the transition of transnational paths of education. Thereby, languages constitute an important access path to educational institutions or employment opportunities with the help of the respective certificates earned in educational institutions. At the same time, languages form an important basis for family memory and processes of communitarisation that have to be overcome after arriving in a new environment. In the project that forms the basis of this contribution, familial practices of narrating and remembering are observed, following the question how practices of memorisation become important for forms of communitarisation in families with migration histories. In addition, family biographies are collected through family interviews in which family members of different generations are present (Hildenbrand 1998). Families that live in a new environment after having fled go through transformation processes on a familial level that are connected to different challenges and possibilities. Following Angela Keppler (1994) who reconstructs forms of communicative communitarisation in table discussions and conceptualisations of remembrance work (Inowlocki 2003) and remembering as social practice (Rosenthal 2010), language-related order can be examined according to its importance for transnational paths of education and migration. Following Monica Heller (2007), language and multilingualism are conceived as social practices so that it is not language as a supposedly neutral medium that is the subject of the analysis, but language as in its importance for situative negotiation processes and biographic attributions of meaning. Methodologically, the project takes a reconstructive perspective that takes situative logics into account as well as the biographical processing of situative experiences. From this perspective, therefore, the two approaches can benefit from one another (Dausien/Kelle 2005; Schnitzer 2017). Key results that are gained on the basis of empirical material show different dimensions of linguistic order in the context of transnational paths of education and migration regarding families. In this context, the following questions are raised in the presentation: In what manner do “own” and “foreign” languages become important in family biographies and transition processes? In doing so, what “national” language order become effective to the extent that they enable or refuse scopes of action?
References
Dausien, Bettina/Kelle, Helga (2005): Biographie und kulturelle Praxis. Methodologische Überlegungen zur Verknüpfung von Ethnographie und Biographieforschung. In: Völter, Bettina et al. (Eds.): Biographieforschung im Diskurs, VS, 189–212. Heller, Monica (2007): Bilingualism as Ideology and Practice. In: Heller, Monica (Ed.): Bilingualism. A Social Approach, Palgrave Macmillan, 1–22. Hildenbrand, Bruno (1998): Biographieanalysen im Kontext von Familiengeschichten: Die Perspektive einer Klinischen Soziologie. In: Bohnsack, Ralf/Marotzki, Winfried (Eds.): Biographieforschung und Kulturanalyse. Transdisziplinäre Zugänge qualitativer Forschung, Leske + Budrich, 205–224. Inowlocki, Lena (2003): Fotos ohne Namen, Geschichte ohne Ort. Fragmentarische Tradierung und „Erinnerungsarbeit“ in Familien ehemaliger jüdischer Displaced Persons. In: Cyprian, Gudrun/Heimbach-Steins, Marianne (Eds.): Familienbilder. Interdisziplinäre Sondierungen, Leske + Budrich, 155–170. Keppler, Angela (1994): Tischgespräche. Über Formen kommunikativer Vergemeinschaftung am Beispiel der Konversation in Familien, Suhrkamp. Rosenthal, Gabriele (2010): Zur Interdependenz von kollektivem Gedächtnis und Erinnerungspraxis. Kultursoziologie aus biographietheoretischer Perspektive. In: Wohlrab-Sahr, Monika (Ed.): Kultursoziologie. Paradigmen, Methoden, Fragestellungen, VS, 151–175. Schnitzer, Anna (2017): Mehrsprachigkeit als soziale Praxis. (Re-)Konstruktionen von Differenz und Zugehörigkeit unter Jugendlichen im mehrsprachigen Kontext, Beltz Juventa.
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