About

Objectives

• We focus on material culture, objects and technology, and how they are enmeshed in the ways we communicate, learn and live multilingually;
• We explore manual and digital arts-based approaches and how they affect our rapport to language, literacy and communication;
• We develop methods helping to overcome boundaries of communication and to foster civic participation in various contexts of education and arenas of civil society;
• We provide support and training to students, families, stakeholders and community institutions, in view of enabling people to become agents of change challenging stereotypes and discriminatory behaviours (see Coming together in Stop Motion Animation)

Research interests

Working in the fields of education and sociolinguistics, we explore the role of objects in communication, teaching and learning, and their relationship with language. In particular we engage with various forms of multimodal, object-based pedagogies, such as digital storytelling, and stop motion animation. We do this (1) to get a better understanding of language ideologies as mechanisms of social marginalisation and discrimination, and (2) to think forward about ways to overcoming them.

Theoretical framework

Inspired by sociocultural and post-human, new materialist perspectives on language and communication, we explore and critically examine (post-)structuralist positions on language, and its ontological status in language and semiotic theory. We see this mainly as an experimenting with different perspectives on the communicating human subject with the aim to renew (critical) awareness and inspire new forms of (pedagogical) practice related to teaching, learning and living multilingually.

Methods

We predominantly work with qualitative methods (e.g. ethnography, observation, interviews, document analysis and creative, arts-based approaches) in ethnographically oriented studies.

^{Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash}