At the heart of the challenges of late-modern societies is SOCIAL INEQUALITY. The term refers to the academic success or failure of whole immigrant populations in European schooling systems. My study approaches inequality from a sociolinguistic angle and investigates primary schools in Vienna, Austria. In my presentation I will focus on parents’, teachers’ and children’s multilingual VOICES, i.e. on their manifold ways to make themselves successfully ‘heard’. However, schools are institutions and as such restrict those manifold voices aiming for success. Moreover, the voices of parents, children and teachers often collide. And yet, in this seemingly chaotic concert of voices, there are PATTERNS of reproduction, but also of overcoming inequality. I will show how to detect some of these patterns.
Katharina Brizić is a Sociolinguist and Professor of Multilingualism Studies at the University of Freiburg, Germany. She has been holding several research and teaching appointments, e.g. at the University of California, Berkeley (USA), the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Humboldt University Berlin, and others. Her focus is on issues of migration, multilingualism, academic success, and social inequality, with specific consideration of central Europe, the Balkans and the Middle East. Among her most recent studies is a Viennese Home Language Survey and a study on multilingual refugee biographies from the Kurdish areas of the Middle East. In her work she aims at contributing to a deeper understanding of language and discourse, collective memory, conflict and peace.
Contact : peter.voss@uni.lu | http://dtucalidie.uni.lu