As the first DigiMulti year is coming to an end and another begins, we would like to thank our collaborators and participants and say a few words about the project so far and the plans for the new year.
DigiMulti, “Digital interaction and multilingualism at work and in school – the case of Lithuanians in rural Eastern Norway”, is a Young Research Talents project financed by the Research Council of Norway, hosted by Norway Inland University of Applied Sciences (INN) 2020-2024. We collect interview and digital interaction data with migrants of Lithuanian origin living in Inland Norway, as well as with their Norwegian interlocutors, in order to study inclusion in school and work contexts.
The main researchers are principal investigator Kristin Vold Lexander, PhD fellow Hilde Thyness, and professor Lise I. Kulbrandstad. Kristin leads the project and studies digital interpersonal workplace interaction (sub-project a), while Hilde looks at home-school collaboration (sub-project b). In the first phase of the project, Lise takes part in supervision and guidance.
We are pleased to have international collaborators Jannis Androutsopoulos, Egle Celešienė, Jim Cummins, and Åsa Palviainen on board. Further, Christiane Seehausen from Nansen Center for Peace and Dialogue and Mari Rysst from INN will assist us in the organisation of two dissemination events. We would also like to thank Julie Kilde Mjelva, responsible for following up on economics together with Camilla Tømta, Lucrezia Gorini, research advisor who helped with the proposal, Hege Taarud, and the research group Language teaching and learning in multilingual contexts that we are part of.
At the start of the project, we planned an intensive course in Lithuanian language in Vilnius. Like other plans this year, it had to be substituted by online interaction and we thank Jolanta Markeviciene for great teaching on Messenger! Rūta Mataitytė translated our informed consent forms to Lithuanian. A total of 16 participants have accepted to join the project to do interviews with mediagrams (Lexander & Androutsopoulos 2019) and share digital interactions. Thank you so much for your willingness to participate, and for all the interesting conversations with you so far – ačiū!
The preliminary results and research design of the project have been presented at the internal language research conference at INN: SpINN. Hilde here presented “Digital kommunikasjon og språk i skole-hjemsamarbeidet”. Kristin also presented “Digital interaction and translanguaging at the rural workplace” at the 2nd International Conference on Internet Pragmatics hosted by the University of Helsinki in October. She is part of the editorial team for the conference publication. At the Jeunes chercheurs conference Langue(s) en mondialisation. Libre(s) échange(s) à l’heure néolibérale (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3) in November, Kristin gave a paper entitled “Echanges numériques plurilingues en milieu rural norvégien – pratiques d’inclusion ?”. Further, she presented at a teacher conference in Vilnius, organised by Egle Celešienė in August.
Both data collection and dissemination will be important activities in 2021. We look forward to new conversations with the participants when the situation permits. Hilde will present her work at the International Symposium on Bilingualism 13, in a thematic session on ‘Bilingual family communication in the digital flux’ organised by Åsa Palviainen and Xiao Lan Curdt-Christiansen, and Hilde and Kristin will present together at the 17th International Pragmatics Conference in the panel ‘Indexing exclusion through style’ organised by Florian Busch, Cornelia Bock, and Naomi Truan.
We will also develop a new methodology course for the PhD in teaching and teacher education to run in the autumn.
To end this newsletter, we would like to say thanks to all of you for your support. Please check out our multilingual website digimulti.inn.no which will be used for updates as we move on with the project.
All the best for 2021,
Kristin, Hilde and Lise
Work in progress: mediagram of participant 9, version 1 after first meeting