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  • Essay / Multilingualism and identity in transnational workplaces in Sweden

    Table of contentsIntroductionResearch questionsResearch planThe dataThe subject groupParametersData collectionEthical considerationsTheoretical backgroundSuggested timelineIntroductionThe project explores how the social identity of young immigrants is achieved during interactions in the workplace. I suggest studying activities in the workplace that are accomplished through interaction. For this project, I would like to focus on two types of interactional activities in the workplace: (a) task-based activities such as assigned group projects, and (b) various institutional discussions, especially conversations between peers, conversations with clients and job interviews, among others. The data collected from workplace activities will be supplemented by individual interviews which in themselves could provide me with additional and important insights into the identity work of immigrant youth. By identity I mean the display or attribution to a social category that can be formed, modified, negotiated and thus realized in interaction through verbal and non-verbal means (using speech and other embodied resources) to refer to oneself and make inferences about oneself. and other. In this project I intend to study immigrants who are considered young adults (here aged 18-25) who, at the time of their arrival in Sweden, were registered as unaccompanied minors, which means they were migrant children who moved to Sweden alone. or became separated from their families during transport. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get the original essayAccording to the Swedish Migration Agency, over the past decades, the registration of unaccompanied minors has increased gradually every year. The number in 2007 was 1,264 children, it increased to over 7,000 in 2014 and reached an unprecedented number of 35,369 in 2015. Although the majority of this group of immigrants are still awaiting the decision on their application asylum and their residence permit, there are often transnational contexts that welcome job seekers with diverse language skills, where these young immigrants have typically found jobs such as workshops, service industries and factories. From my daily observations due to my current work assignments interacting with many young immigrants, I realized that one of their challenges at work is, on the one hand, managing their linguistic and communicative practices with their customers, group leaders and other workers. On the other hand, in these linguistically and culturally diverse contexts, they must assume identities or manage the identities assigned to them, as they engage in the various activities organized sequentially. These identities may be characterized by discursive or situated practices (see for example Zimmerman, 1998), with regard to individual or group categorization, that is, the use of language constituting people as members from the same social group or from a different social group (see for example Day). , 1998). This project therefore aims to study the processes and strategies by which the target group of immigrants shows how to cope with daily communication at work and how to manage and respond to linguistic diversity which often introduces and favors one language to the detriment of other. others (often Swedish and sometimes English) as the organizational/official language while other languages ​​are usedin everyday interaction at work (e.g., Hill & van Zyl, 2002). More importantly, these processes and strategies reveal how assumed or assigned identities are used as resources in the workplace. I also emphasize the cross-cultural and social diversity of language in performance and identity and discuss how speakers use language to maintain or cross "cultural and linguistic boundaries" (e.g. Fredriksson, Barner-Rasmussen and Piekkari 2006, 407) when carrying out their activities. . Various terms will be used in the study, such as membership categorization analysis (MCA) (Sacks 1979), normative and non-normative categories, identity realization and “translocality” (Greiner & Sakdapolrak 2013) in the formation of identity that transcends borders, to express a certain theoretical hypothesis about the object of study. The theoretical framework is based on the ethnomethodological analytical approach to conversation (Sacks, 1992; Antaki & Widdicombe, 1998) in which this study is part of broader discourse analysis (Zimmerman, 1998), and is inspired by a sociocultural linguistic perspective combining sociocultural and linguistic aspects. anthropology (Bucholtz & Hall 2005), language and identity as discursive products of social interaction and situated performances (Bourdieu, 1977, 1982; Giddens, 1984; Gumperz, 1982; Heller, 2007a, b ; Pujolar, 2008) and interactional linguistics (e.g., Mondada 2014). This research proposition contributes to the idea that identity emerges and is accomplished in interactional contexts, rather than being inherited and predetermined (Bucholtz & Hall 2005, Keevallik 2010). Research Questions By studying interactional activities on workplaces, this project will attempt to answer the following questions: How, in workplace interactions, do participants – in particular the study group – (as speakers, who are spoken to or whose we talk about) are they classified into categories with associated characteristics or characteristics? What are the verbal and non-verbal resources used to (co-)construct such categories? What are the consequences of identity work in the workplace, both for young immigrants and their colleagues? How are social categorization and identity formation in interaction used as resources to accomplish daily activities in the workplace? In answering the questions mentioned above, the project will certainly also discuss how these immigrants, as multilingual and multicultural transnationals, demonstrate their linguistic practices through multimodal means of interaction. Research PlanData The data used for this project will consist primarily of video and audio recordings of workplace interactions. I intend to make an ethnographic observation of the setting and collect video and audio recordings of interactional activities. Ethnographic notes will be used as additional information where relevant for clarification of the recording materials. I will also conduct post-activity interviews (REF) with people involved in these activities, including both immigrants and their co-interactants in the workplace activities. The reason interviews are necessary is (a) to investigate participants' understanding (or possible misunderstanding) of these activities and (b) to increase my own understanding of people's contributions (including specific linguistic terms at work, jargons, etc.) if relevant for the analysis ofprimary data, i.e. records. The subject group As explained, I intend to collect my data from workplaces where young immigrants (between 18 and 25 years old) work. I will particularly choose young immigrants who were previously registered as unaccompanied minors with the Swedish Migration Agency. Although the majority of unaccompanied minors in recent years are from Afghanistan and it would be beneficial for me to share a common language with them, I will nevertheless gather data from a variety of young immigrants with linguistic backgrounds. various to make the project more inclusive with regard to the target group. Settings Settings will be in at least two regions of Sweden, namely in the counties of Stockholm and Östergötland. As I have been working with unaccompanied minors for 3 years, I have contacts with a number of companies such as Östgötasvamp in Vikingstad, one of Sweden's largest mushroom producers and Euroform in Tranås, a solution producer of plastic systems, and STAGA, a product and process development company all of which are characterized as multilingual workplaces populated by Afghans, Syrians, Chechens, Bosnians, Eritreans, Palestinians, Greeks, Somalis, Bulgarians, Bosnians, Thais and Swedes as workers. Data CollectionThe research will be longitudinal and will gather data on young immigrants to analyze their experiences of multilingualism in the workplace through interviews, observations, video recordings, recorded narratives or data from investigation. Data will be collected at specific intervals (e.g. once a month), so that I can record daily routines and activities over a long period of time to detect any changes in roles and activity structure. The video recordings will be transcribed, digitized and the selected extracts will be analyzed in detail for the purposes of the study. Throughout the research, ethical rules are strictly followed according to the advice given by the “Ethical Review Committee”. Ethical considerations The project will comply with the ethical principles put forward by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) and will also follow the newly introduced law known as the GDPR. (b). I will also design a data management plan for the project regarding the management of personal information contained in my data, saving the material on a secure server on the university website and how to make the data used in the project publicly accessible (this is of course, a sensitive issue on which I would like to receive advice with the help of potential supervisors and department management) Theoretical background The study adopts an ethnomethodological conversation analytical approach, analyzing and uncovering the interactional and methodical practices that workers use to make sense of their social world (Garfinkel 1984, Goffman 1961) and understand commonsense daily routines and activities (Fitzgerald, Housley, and Butler 2009). The research will be part of an intersubjective (vs individual), praxeological (vs cognitive) and performative approach to identity (Bucholtz & Hall 2005). Following conversation analysis (Sacks, 1979) and an ethnomethodological approach (Garfinkel 1967), identity is only procedurally relevant for speaking in an interaction when participants are clearly oriented to it (Schegloff, 1997), through which the everyday establishment of social identities and the rules that regulate interactions can be explained (cf. Stokoe and Weatherall 2002). SE and how.