• Overview
• Research Platforms
• Thematic Area A: Language, Identity and Culture
• European Level
• National Level
• Regional Level
• Thematic Area B: Language Policy and Planning
• Thematic Area C: Multilingualism and Education
• Thematic Area D: Language and Economy
• Communication, Management, Infrastructure, Training and Gender

Politics and strategies of identity in multicultural European cities

(WP3a, 2008–2010)

Summary Results

What It Takes to Become a Local

Language and culture are two different things, as research in Pula (Croatia), Szeged (Hungary) and Jersey (UK) confirms. Language is usually an important part of the identities of the people in these cities, but it is by no means the only one.

>>> Newsletter article

>>> Poster by Anita Sujoldžić (presented at the conference "New Challenges for 
        Multilingualism in Europe", Dubrovnik, 11–15 April 2010)

Rationale

Multicultural cities are increasingly viewed as dynamically constructed contexts, rather than statically defined places with co-existence of pre-fixed, and largely un-mixed different minority or immigrant groups, stable identities and static cultures. Their multilingual and multicultural landscape is shaped in a complex way by globalization, immigration and tourism, resulting in a simultaneous reinforcement of global and local forces characterized by and resulting in shifting group boundaries and construction of new identities. To understand and explore urban reality of the cities as centres and sites of contestation of these social transformations research must move beyond the recognition of multiculturalism as ideological and political societal ideal and confront complex and, in many cases, unique challenges that this reality entails and creates.

Language use offers a unique access to the complexity of the city, as linguistic practices both represent the urban reality and construct it at the same time through day-to-day interactions and public display of visual images and language signs. Language use reflects and articulates a particular social and cultural dynamics related to the problem of urban identity as a relational, contextually -embedded, and power-laden phenomenon through the interplay of not only oppositions and differences, but also of intersubjective and collective experiences of those shared cultural spaces of belonging which open up the possibility of a cultural hybridity and intercultural identities without an assumed or imposed hierarchy. 

Objective

This WP will undertake research and comparative analyses within selected urban contexts (possibly Pula, Szeged, Cheb or Cesky Tesin, Riga, Jersey) characterized by a substantial presence of immigrant and ethnic minority groups and activities of tourism. We wish to explore to what extent the image of the particular city, with its spatial and social structure, as well as socio-economic and historic context determines discourse on multicultural interactions as well as to explore the ways those images shape a sense of identity, and how these identities affect and are shaped by interpersonal and inter-group communication. In this regard we especially want to see how language figures in their self-perception of the processes of (non-)belonging in the given spaces.

To achieve this aim, the research will focus on differences in the perception of "the other". In analysing the discourses of othering we shall focus on how social actors, i.e. citizens, migrants and tourists, in their day-to-day interactions and linguistic exchanges, define these cultural differences and their significance to social relations. By looking into factors and processes through which different dimensions of identity become salient, we will seek to analyze how power relations influence the dynamics of identity negotiation and the re/articulation of potential hierarchy of differences. We wish to identify the schemes and frames of recognition and participation involved in addition to those of exclusion and rejection emerging in terms of both individual and group identities. In analysing the materials we want to explore the complex interplay across the linguistic and visual discourses of cultural diversity as threat, problem to manage, or fortunate resource. In other words, we shall be researched refer tointerested to trace down the management of urban spaces in the promotion of intercultural encounters and dialogue as opposed to competition and conflict. In this regard particular attention will be given, on the one hand to the analysis of urban linguistic landscape of public signs as expression of multilingualism and cultural diversity and their symbolic and identity-formation functions. On the other hand, we shall also trace down collective and/or individual life narratives of successful settlement among the various waves of migrants. At this point we shall have to attend to the intersection of the impact of tourism as "the industry of difference," on linguistic and communicative manifestations of global and local identities and the impact of global discourses of managing cultural diversity at the time of trans-national migration. In this regard we want to focus on the linguistic and visual strategies of containment of the various groups in the (local) media, the strategies of preventing their group cohesion and the containment of their stories of individual pain and sufferings as well as through host-tourist, local authorities-migrant encounters that might either reinforce self-identity against difference or erode cultural identity through manipulating cultural heritage for short-term economic and political, cultural advantage.

Description of work

As this WP is built in comparative perspective and examines the intersection of migrant and tourist encounters, during months 19-24 certain themes and work methods will be defined to ensure the possible points of convergence of the research results. Key-concepts and central questions to be shared by the participant research teams will be formulated for the sake of a research protocol. Additionally, an initial background of the socio-economic and historic context, including information on the local dynamics of migration and tourism, as well as the corresponding distribution, use and vitality of different languages in public and private domains, of each of the case studies will be made to identify specific conditions and to facilitate cross-cultural comparisons. Months 25-30 involve fieldwork in each city to gather data on linguistic and visual semiotic cultural practices relevant to identity construction, involving those of management of urban spaces that contain, obstruct or facilitate intercultural dialogue (local media programmes, cultural clubs, markets, transportation centres, popular squares, neighbourhoods, etc.), day-to-day- interactions of various social actors, and/or linguistic landscape of visual data and signs. Months 31-36 will be dedicated to discourse and semiotic analysis of collected empirical data, comparative cross-cultural analysis, and the elaboration of a synthesis of the results obtained.

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This Work Package Description as pdf

Contacts WP 3a