“It’s all in the family” - but in which one?

Families are social spaces in which everyday perceptions are strongly influencing research agendas and outcomes. Who are the members of a family? How are they perceived to interact and how often? Which experiences are shared in transnational families? How are social expectations concerning gender, migration, integration and language use relevant in the family? What is the role of the researcher and what are their options?

Invited (early career) researchers talk about research experiences from a number of transnational, globally distributed settings, draw on post- and decolonial literature to question some of our shared assumptions and discuss our own ideas of families and how these ideas influence what we are interested in.

Discussants:

Mahtab Dadarsefatmahboob, PhD student at UDE
Rafael Lomeu Gomes, Postdoc at the UiT The Arctic University of Norway
Judith Purkarthofer, Juniorprofessor at UDE

We invite
students in teacher education, in languages and social sciences (and all others) and
early career researchers, university teachers and researchers in related fields

We plan to use English as well as German (and other languages as they occur, i.e. Brazilian Portuguese, Turkish and Farsi)

Date and Time: Tuesday, 27th of February 2024 at 5pm / 17h
Casino des Gästehauses der UDE, Reckhammerweg 3, Campus Essen

Further information:

Mahtab Dadarsefatmahboob

Mahtab has studied English language and literature as well as European Studies and is a future PhD student at UDE. Her interests lie in the intersection of motherhood and migration, media and multitudes of experiences.
Further readings
to follow

Rafael Lomeu Gomes

Rafael works as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. His work as a sociolinguist analyses the role of language in social processes that perpetuate or challenge various forms of inequity along axes of gender, race, social class, and nationality in multilingual contexts shaped by immigration.
Further readings:
Lomeu Gomes, R. (2018). Family Language Policy ten years on: A critical approach to family multilingualism. Multilingual Margins 5(1): 54-76.
Lomeu Gomes, R. & E. Lanza, eds. (2023). Family multilingualism: Decolonial and Southern approaches. Special Issue of Journal of Multilingual Theories and Practices.

Judith Purkarthofer

Judith researches multilingualism in education, with families and in other social spaces. PhD from the University of Vienna with Brigitta Busch, then research and teaching at the University of Oslo, the Humboldt University in Berlin and since 2020 as a junior professor at the University of Duisburg-Essen. She is particularly interested in participatory research and creative methods with children and adults, as well as in transfer projects between science and practice. With Sandra Ballweg (Paderborn), Judith created the Netzwerk Familiensprachen to foster exchange among researchers from Germany and the region who are interested in family language policy.
Further readings:
Purkarthofer, J. (2023). Transnational families' social spaces 'in between': Expectations, decision - making and belonging in light of educational choices in Norway. European Educational Research Journal, 22(4), 482-495. doi:10.1177/14749041221106846
Purkarthofer, J., E. Lanza & M. F. Berg. (2021). Discourses between the public and the private: Transnational families at the crossroads.Applied Linguistics 43(3): 563–586. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amab053