Multilanguaging in the ‘global village’: Dis/connections & dis/parities

Organizers

Alexandra Georgakopoulou (King’s College, London)

Presenters

Jannis Androutsopoulos (Hamburg): Polycentric orientations in digital diaspora: the case of Senegalese diasporians in Norway (tbc)

Elaine Chun (University of South Carolina): Multilingual choices on Korean beauty videos on YouTube (tbc)

Korina Giaxoglou (Open University) & Teresa Spilioti (Cardiff): Weird Languaging in the ‘global village’: the case of Sin Boy and mumble rap in Greece

Carmen Lee (Chinese University of Hong Kong): “English is our 2nd language, konglish is our mother tongue”: Languaging in online comments during livestreams of a socio-political protest

Abstract

Multilingual activities & practices in digital spaces present much scope for exploration, especially regarding the following two questions:

How do media affordances and a culture of surveillance shape users’ and groups’ potentials for multilingual choices and creativity, as attested to in numerous face-to-face environments (e.g. with processes of translanguaging)? How do they affect notions, ideologies and practices of multilingualism in the global North & South, especially amongst individuals in transit or in diaspora?

How do normative orientations to languages and multilingual resources get (re)configured online? What points of connection or disconnection, parities or disparities, inclusion and exclusion are (re)created amongst participants and in what ways? 

This colloquium seeks to address the above questions with a calibrated approach to social media as both architectured, algorithmically engineered and regulated spaces and as agentively malleable, multi-participatory and open to contingency. We also intend to scrutinize the socio-material and political potential of digital environments for multilanguaging, in a broad sense, that encompasses the multi-semiosis (e.g. visuality, embodiment) and trans-mediality of people’s engagements. 

Organizer’s Bio

Alex Georgakopoulou is Professor of Discourse Analysis & Sociolinguistics, King’s College London. She has developed small stories research, a paradigm for studying identities in everyday-life stories. Her latest study of small stories on social media has been carried out within the ERC project ‘Life-writing of the moment: The sharing and updating self on social media’ (www.ego-media.org). She is currently completing a monograph on ‘Quantified Stories: A narrative analysis of metrics on social media’ (with Stefan Iversen & Carsten Stage, Palgrave) and the editing (with Anna De Fina) of the CUP Handbook of Discourse Studies.