3 février 2023 --14h00 - 17h00
Animé par Isabelle Léglise et Valelia Muni Toke (INALCO, 2 rue de Lille, salle L0.01) et retransmis par zoom.
Rafael Lomeu Gomes (Univ. Oslo & UiT The Arctic University of Norway) Family multilingualism from decolonial and southern perspectives
The field of family multilingualism has been shaped in the past decades by various disciplinary traditions and their corresponding theoretical underpinnings and methodological approaches. More recently, the field has begun to embrace decolonial and southern perspectives, which is the focus of this presentation. Particularly, I draw on some concepts and lines of argumentation stemming from decoloniality, southern epistemologies, and southern theory to identify certain limitations of underlying assumptions in current investigations of language practices in the home. I will argue that taking the analytical vantage point of southern and decolonial approaches urges us to engage with local histories and epistemologies and to explore how these are shaped by local/global experiences of colonialism. In the first part of the presentation, I review studies of language practices of Indigenous peoples in contexts of settler and exploitation colonialism, families with members who have experienced forced migration, practices of family-making that question the traditional Western nuclear family model, and families engaged in transnational trajectories. In the second part, I will draw on examples of my published and ongoing research on multilingual families and media representations of unaccompanied minors seeking asylum in Norway to demonstrate that engaging with decolonial and southern approaches may advance the field of family multilingualism in ways that are worth exploring further.