Description
This paper puts transience at the center stage of empirical enquiry and investigates the emergence of social norms during English conversation meetings with frequently changing social configurations. The data was collected at a grassroots community center in Copenhagen which has been established to improve the daily life of asylum seekers, refugees, and rejected asylum seekers. In addition, it seeks to provide a space for cultural exchange, which qualifies the center as a site for ‘organised cultural encounters’ (Sprogforum 64, 2017). The community center is therefore characterized by a frequent turnover of both volunteers, the target group and other visitors, making it a rich site for studying mobility and transience. Regular volunteer-run activities take place daily at the house. This paper is specifically based on 6 audio-recorded informal meetings where 4 rotating volunteers and 1-2 different asylum seekers come together to practice speaking in English once a week for a couple of hours. These meetings are offered as a way to assist the asylum seekers in dealing with the Danish asylum system which uses English as a lingua franca. Employing ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis (Sacks, 1992), the analysis highlights how the participants display their shifting orientations to the English conversation meetings as settings for ‘therapy talk’ (Fitzgerald 2013) or language- practice. These shifts point to an emerging social norm around appropriate conversational contributions in these transient encounters. This finding brings to attention the ongoing negotiation of social norms that can take place in settings characterized by transience due to the diversity of resources and interpretations brought in by the different participants. Finally, the paper suggests transience as a relevant lens for studying settings influenced by mobility as opposed to ‘community of practice’ (Lave & Wenger 1991) in which a certain sharedness around norms of appropriate conduct may have already been established.| Period | 28 Mar 2018 |
|---|---|
| Event title | TLANG Final Conference: Communication in the multilingual city |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Birmingham, United KingdomShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |