scholarly journals Opening up ideological spaces for multilingual literacies at the margins of the Portuguese education system? Ethnographic insights from a Russian complementary school

2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 (259) ◽  
pp. 161-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olga Solovova
Keyword(s):  
Education System ◽  
State Policies ◽  
Safe Space ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Discursive Space ◽  
Speakers Of Other Languages ◽  
Significant Phenomenon ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
European Migration

Abstract Eastern European migration to Portugal is a relatively recent yet significant phenomenon due to its impact on national legislation and discourses about language, citizenship and identity. Along with other migration movements to Portugal, it has also brought about changes in state policies. The monolingual order within the Portuguese education system has been reinforced through the adoption of the notion of ‘Portuguese as a non-native language’ and the creation of different categories of speakers of ‘other’ languages. While these discourses predominate within the national educational system, other discursive spaces (such as complementary schools and playgroups) are being constructed, on the margins of Portuguese society, where other languages and literacies are being learned and used, alongside Portuguese. This paper presents some insights from longitudinal ethnographic research (2004–2013) that was carried out in a complementary school for Russian-speaking children in Portugal run by their parents and grandparents. It looks into the complex ways in which literacy ideologies and practices were reproduced, contested and negotiated in this particular discursive space. It also shows how students drew on the language, literacy and semiotic resources within their communicative repertoires in different ways as they responded agentively to tasks set by the teacher. The paper concludes with reflections on the potential of the complementary school as a “safe space” for fostering flexible multilingual pedagogies.

Uncanny Babushka: Migration, aging and the search for a new sexual Self

Sexualities ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 136346072098292
Author(s):  
Martina Cvajner ◽  
Giuseppe Sciortino
Keyword(s):  
Older People ◽  
Sexual Minorities ◽  
Longitudinal Research ◽  
Social Boundaries ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Research Projects ◽  
Geographical Mobility ◽  
Sexual Change ◽  
Women Pioneers ◽  
European Migration

Geographical mobility may have a powerful influence on sexual change. The sexual dimension of migration has mostly been studied in reference to its role in shaping aspiration for mobility. It has been documented how the promise of an erotically desirable future plays often an important role in many migration subcultures. Mobility, moreover, has been recognized as one of the ways in which many types of sexual minorities have escaped repression or pursued greater autonomy. In this paper, we argue that the same phenomena may be observed in the migration of older people. For some mature persons, particularly women, migration provides an alternative to de-sexualization and stigmatization. In many of these cases, however, the subjective process of sexual change is triggered indirectly, and sometimes serendipitously, by the experience of geographical dislocation. In fact, the experience of re-sexualization may be utterly independent from any pre-emigration aspiration to change one’s sexual Self. The paper – on the basis of two longitudinal research projects on the women pioneers of the Eastern European migration to Italy – explores the role played in their settlement by the discovery that, in the new environment, their age did not disqualify them from romance. The different reactions to these opportunities have created a strong differentiation among migratory trajectories. For the women pioneers who have decided to explore it, this unexpected lovescape has made possible to draw some crucial social boundaries and to trigger the birth of a distinctive sexual field.

scholarly journals The taste of trauma: reflections of ageing Shoah survivors on food and how they (re)inscribe it with meaning

2015 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 349-65
Author(s):  
Ben Kasstan
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Nazi Regime ◽  
Significant Relationships ◽  
New Meanings ◽  
Home Food ◽  
Support Facility

Drawing on ethnographic research in the UK’s only support facility for ageing Jewish Shoah survivors, this paper charts the ‘foodways’ in a Centre where satiety is experienced as an emotional as well as a physical need. How the experience of genocidal violence and displacement give rise to particular tastes of trauma is explored, firstly through the symbolism of bread which is metaphorically leavened with meanings and memories of survival – both in Judaism and for the survivors interviewed. Bread is positioned as a true reflection of lived experience for survivors of both ghettoes and concentration camps, who construct a specific and salient relationship with food. This illustrates the perceived difference between them and members of the Centre who escaped the Nazi regime as refugees or by the Kindertransport. Foods associated with the concentration or extermination camps are (re)inscribed with new meanings, as a steaming bowl of Polish barley soup ultimately embodies the ingredients of memory but also the recipe of survival. It can also stew the nostalgia of pre-war lives for Eastern European Jews and their recollections of the heym (Yiddish, home). Food is a conscious strategy of care in the Centre that mediates the embodied trauma of participants, and this paper draws on comparative examples to argue that refugee and survivor communities more generally may possess culturally-significant relationships with food that remain poorly understood.

scholarly journals Caught between nationalism and transnationalism: How Central and East European states respond to East–West emigration

2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 338-352 ◽  
Author(s):  
Myra A Waterbury
Keyword(s):  
State Policies ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Large Wave ◽  
East European ◽  
Policy Responses ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Transnational Engagement ◽  
East West

This article seeks to explain the varied policy responses to the large wave of emigration from Central and Eastern European states during the last two decades, focusing on the cases of Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and Poland. Differing degrees of emigrant engagement by these states are explained by the role of internal minorities as active members of the emigrant population and the overall political and demographic relevance of historical kin. This study contributes to our understanding of what shapes state policies towards different types of external populations. It also highlights the particular challenges of state-led transnational engagement in a supranational border regime.

Churches and violence in north-eastern Guatemala: Between safe space and lions’ pit

2019 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 435-451
Author(s):  
Saskia Simon
Keyword(s):  
Specific Role ◽  
Safe Space ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Social Fabric ◽  
Safe Spaces ◽  
Evangelical Churches ◽  
North Eastern ◽  
Living Together

Based on an ethnographic research led in north-eastern Guatemala between 2011 and 2013, this article problematizes the idea usually advanced in sociology of religions that churches represent safe spaces allowing the reconstruction of social fabric in violent contexts. Analyzing collective mechanisms of ‘living together’ in this region, the author shows the specific role of the Catholic and Evangelical Churches as spaces where struggles have taken place, but where they nevertheless represent safe spaces for expression.

Speech that silences, silences that speak

2013 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 292-319 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan W. Woolley
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
Educational Environment ◽  
Safe Space ◽  
Educational Goals ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Public High School ◽  
School Contexts ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Urban Public High School

This article questions what happens to “safe space” in classrooms when students are marginalized by their social locations and identities. Based on three years of ethnographic research in a Northern California urban public high school, the author examines how language like “that’s so gay” and “that’s so ghetto” leaves distinct traces of gender, sexuality, race, and class meanings and relations. Drawing on students’ deployment of “that’s so gay” and “that’s so ghetto” in school contexts, this research demonstrates how these expressions marginalize the students that they target. Such speech acts interpellate students’ bodies and identities in an educational environment that strives toward constructing “safe” and “politically correct” space. Complicating the very possibility of such educational goals, this article highlights the violence of performative speech acts while closely examining the thin line between politically correct speech and hate speech, which may look different yet lead to similar results — the violence of silencing.

scholarly journals Imagining Citizens as More than Data Subjects

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francisca Grommé ◽  
Evelyn Ruppert
Keyword(s):  
Collaborative Design ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Official Statistics ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Academic Researchers ◽  
Design Workshop ◽  
Ethnographic Narratives ◽  
Opening Up

The article presents a methodography of a collaborative design workshop conducted with national and international statisticians. The workshop was part of an ethnographic research project on innovation in European official statistics. It aimed to bring academic researchers and statisticians together to collaborate on the design of app prototypes that imagine citizens as co-producers of official statistics rather than only data subjects. However, the objective was not to settle on an end product but to see if relations to citizens could be re-imagined. Through a methodography composed of two ethnographic narratives, we analyse whether and how a collaborative design workshop brought about imaginings of citizens as co-producers. To retrospectively analyse the workshop, we draw on feminist and material-semiotic takes on ‘friction’ as characteristic of collaboration. ‘Friction’, we suggest, can enlarge the repertoire of collaborative speculative practice beyond notions of rupture or consensus. Finally, we suggest that this analysis demonstrates the potential of methodography for opening up and reflecting on method in STS through eliciting the possibilities of collaboration.

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