The study examines online searching as a digital health literacy practice and focuses on parents of children with congenital heart defects. Over the period of four years, we have conducted interviews with couples at different stages of pregnancy or parenthood and have encouraged them to reflect on their literacy practices when receiving a heart defect diagnosis, during the remaining time of their pregnancy and when living with a child with a heart defect. We have also read and analysed health blogs written by parents and focused on extracts where literacy events are described. Searching for information and support online is one of the most frequent practices amongst the participants in the study. The aim of this paper is therefore to highlight the complexity of looking for information online in order to take health decisions and provide care to a child with congenital illness. Based on what parents say they do when searching online, we focus on three main paths to knowledge: looking for medical facts, looking for other parents’ experiences and looking for practical information. We discuss digital health literacy practices as complex activities that often involve parents in the diagnosis and in the child’s medical care to such an extent that parents build up knowledge and become experts, not only in finding information and support but in talking and writing about their child’s illness. We also problematise the notion of trustworthy health information and show how facts and opinions often go hand in hand in platforms where health issues are discussed. Finally, we show some of the affordances and restrictions inherent in using the internet as a source for meaning making and learning about children’s health. The results reinforce our understanding of the socially framed nature of health literacy and make us focus on the digital as an additional important aspect in the practice of health literacy.
De senaste decenniernas breddade rekrytering till högre utbildning har lett till alltmer heterogena studentgrupper. Samtidigt har en offentlig debatt pågått med ett fokus på brister i studenters skrivande. Forskningsfältet academic literacies (Lea & Street 1998) ifrågasätter ett sådant ensidigt bristperspektiv och förespråkar istället fokus på skrivandets sociokulturella sammanhang. Litteracitet betraktas här som en kontextburen praktik (Barton 2004), som bäst tillägnas i autentiska och funktionella sammanhang (Gee 2012). Utifrån ett sådant synsätt ifrågasätts varför studenter oftast erbjuds separata insatser i det akademiska skrivandet, trots att stöd inom ämnesstudierna skulle vara mer framgångsrikt. Forskningen om effekterna av sådan undervisning är dock fortfarande mycket begränsad.
Vårt forskningsprojekt syftar övergripande till att utforska effekter av ämnesintegrerad undervisning i akademiskt skrivande. Projektet ansluter till ett pågående högskolepedagogiskt utvecklingsarbete vid Södertörns högskola, där Utvecklingsenheten för högskolepedagogik och bildning, Biblioteket och Studieverkstan, som arbetar med olika typer av studie- och skrivstöd, samverkar med ett antal ämnen om ämnesintegrerad undervisning i akademiskt skrivande och informationssökning. Erfarenheterna visar att de flesta, både studenter och ämneslärare, i utvärderingar och reflektioner värdesätter undervisningen och menar att den påtagligt bidrar till studenternas skrivutveckling. I forskningsprojektet vill vi försöka få en djupare förståelse för vilka effekter som undervisningen ger. Under föredraget kommer vi att presentera en pilotstudie där vi analyserar studenttexter som är skrivna under och efter studenternas deltagande i den ämnesintegrerade skrivundervisningen.
Litteratur: Barton, D. & Hamilton, M. (1998). Local Literacies. Reading and Writing in one Community. London: Routledge.
Gee, J.P. (2012). Social Linguistics and Literacies – Ideology in Discourses. London: Routledge.
Lea M.R. & Street, B. (1998). Student writing in higher education. Studies in Higher Education, 23 (2): 3-35.
The term linguistic ethnography was introduced at the beginning of the millennium to describe a large number of studies that made use of ethnographic methods of data collection and analysis to talk about context when studying language use, practices and ideologies.
The six chapters in this edited collection were among the forty papers presented in the Sixth Conference on Explorations in Ethnography, Language and Communication, at Södertörn University in 2016 and they all have a focus on methodology. A preface is included written by Karin Tusting, convenor of the Linguistic Ethnography Forum at Lancaster University.
This volume is the seventh edition, and first to include contributions written in English, in the Södertörn Discourse Studies series (Text- och samtalsstudier) from Södertörn University.
In this article we problematize our field roles as two linguistic ethnographers who aim to study the communication and documentation practices drawn upon by care workers in elderly care facilities in Sweden. Our field roles are discussed in relation to the complex nature of care workers’ knowledge and competence, which results from three different aspects of their work-identities: institutional, professional, and individual. As researchers, we found ourselves in constant dialogue with the research participants, and our field roles were continuously shaped and reshaped according to the individuals and the situations in which we became involved. Even aspects of our own identities taken into the field, such as our background and personal qualities, proved to be important in establishing good relations with the care staff. Coming closer to the participants’ professional identity proved to be of utmost importance for interpreting their choices and decisions in the workplace. Identity negotiation is presented here as a constructive way of discussing ethnographic field roles in the research field.
This article reports on research addressing the role of incident reporting at the workplace as a textual representation of lean management techniques. It draws on text and discourse analysis as well as on ethnographic data, including interviews, recorded interaction, and observations, from two projects on workplace literacy in Sweden: a study in an eldercare facility and a study in a large factory. Analysis of the data set demonstrates striking similarities, both in the way incident reporting texts are structured and worded and in the literacy practices that contextualize them. Dominant characteristics in the texts are the absence of actors and the structured, process-based approach of problems and problem handling. The forms often generate conflicts in the ways workers are asked to textually represent an incident. In this article, we argue that lean thinking has penetrated texts and literacy practices of two considerably different workplaces, and this has a large impact on the way workers are instructed to think and act with regard to problem handling techniques.
In this article, we discuss the results of a study within the project Language work as care work. The study focuses on the documentation practices of carers and assistant nurses within three elder care facilities in Sweden. The aim is to explore how representations of work and work content are remediated and recontextualised in some of the key written genres in the nursing home. In this process different discourses, and thus different versions of the practice of caring, are promoted and restrained. In order to show how the literacy practices and written text genres of elder care construe different meanings of caring we closely examine four key genres in the communicative chain and analyse them in terms of genre and discourse. The data discussed here was collected in an eighteen months ethnographic study, using participant observation, qualitative interviews and collection of key texts as the main tools.
In this paper we examine how traditional views of normality are negotiated, indorsed and resisted when talking about children with heart defects. Having as a starting point an ethnographic project that aimed to study knowledge construction when being pregnant or having a child with a heart defect, we focus on argumentation put forward by clinicians and parents in order to understand the forms that normality takes in relation to children's health and illness and the way that it is constructed argumentatively and linguistically. More specifically, we draw data from recorded doctor-patient consultations, ethnographic interviews and entries from family blogs and forums and focus on those instances where normality is negotiated as a means of providing a medical consultation or of taking and motivating decisions about the child's health and everyday life. The analysis is conducted by identifying content and logical topics in the data and showing how constructions of normality and alternative conceptions are constructed in discourse. Discourses are additionally related to discursive, semiotic framing and the realization of norms. Our results highlight a duality that is being painted both in the clinicians and in the parents' discourse when negotiating the illness and the accompanying risks in the child's everyday life. Some of the traditional norms being re-constructed and re-negotiated in the data are those of stigmatization, diversity, responsibility and freedom of choice.
Hur har den nordiska forskningen om språk och kön växt fram och hur ser fältet ut idag? Vilka är de teoretiska och metodiska utmaningar vi har att tackla i framtiden? Den åttonde nordiska konferensen om språk och kön ägde rum på Södertörns högskola den 10 och 11 oktober 2013 och ägnades åt dessa frågor.
I Könskonstruktioner och språkförändringar publiceras tio artiklar från konferensen. Volymen visar på den bredd som finns inom ämnet, men också på trender och tendenser som dagens forskare särskilt intresserar sig för. Ett starkt tema i konferensvolymen är feministisk språkpolitik, och fler artiklar rör det nya pronomenet hen. Men det finns också artiklar som berör forskningsfältets framväxt i Norden och mer framåtblickande bidrag om hur forskningen kan bli en del av den antidiskriminerande politiska aktivismen av idag.
In this paper we examine health literacy as a set of practices that unfold in networked activity systems. Focusing on the literacy practices of pregnant couples and parents of children with heart defect, we show that they participate in multiple activities with the object of constructing knowledge about the child's condition. The contexts for these activities are doctor-patient consultations and the parents' online searching and sharing. The study builds on ethnographic interviews, recorded medical consultations and collection of texts from online forums, blogs and social media. An analysis based on literacy practices and activity theory shows that these activities enable parents' learning, but they can also be restricting as to the mediating tools they provide and the rules that dictate the tools. Additionally, the object of learning about heart defect is not always clearly formulated and stable but it keeps alternating and expanding. As a result, the parents cross boundaries between activities with different mediating tools, rules and communities and thereby different possibilities for learning. We show that doing health literacy is comprised by a set of recontextualised practices of looking for medical and experiential knowledge and it is by a combination of the two that meaningful learning is achieved.
In this paper, we conduct a critical discourse analytical study of asylum interviews in order to contribute to knowledge and awareness of (a) how asymmetrical power relations are discursively (re)produced as well as manoeuvred and negotiated during the interaction and (b) what this means in terms of positioning of the participants. Focusing on a number of metacommunicative sequences characterised by a notably high degree of interpersonal complexity, we examine how participants are positioned and how positioning is discursively realised. We draw on eight observed and recorded asylum interviews conducted in Sweden 2018–2021. Metacommunicative positioning is analysed mainly with a focus on speech functions and modality. We show that metacommunication is used by all participants largely as a means of constructing an asylum narrative within the framework of an institutional discourse. The participants can position each other in (dis)advantageous ways in their attempts to deny, or sometimes claim, responsibility for miscommunication. The applicants generally obey the metacommunicative instructions given by other, more powerful participants. However, we also show an example of an applicant who makes resistance to the institutional discourse. Furthermore, all participants use metacommunication as a tool to guide each other in the conversation, thereby positioning themselves as responsible for the co-construction of the asylum narrative. Finally, we underline the benefits of conducting critical discourse analysis in the study of asylum interviews, although such studies can barely change the fact that the asylum determination process is unequal and asymmetrical in its core.
This paper tells the story of obstacles and challenges to fieldwork in a research project exploring migrants’ narratives in the asylum process in Sweden, where, rather than facilitating data collection, the Swedish Migration Authority appeared to create barriers. This had implications both for the project and for individual case workers and interpreters; in the praxis of informed consent, our own strict interpretation became an unnecessary drawback; and in our attempt to overcome the obstacles, we actively involved the national press. The discussion is framed within an overall concern for the role of research in society, and its benefits and risks in relatively closed sectors, raising issues of personal privacy, security and trust.
Vilka hinder, möjligheter och förbättringspotentialer finns när det gäller tolkning i asylprocessen? I denna artikel delar berörda personer med sig av sina erfarenheter. Framför allt kommer asylsökande och offentliga biträden till tals, men även Migrationsverkets handläggare. Artikeln bygger på en intervjustudie.
Vilka svårigheter upplever professionella tolkar i asylintervjuer – och vilka är deras strategier för att göra ett så bra arbete som möjligt? I denna artikel delar sex erfarna rättstolkar med sig av sina erfarenheter. Artikeln bygger på en intervjustudie.
I ett protokoll fört under en asylintervju återfanns en obegriplig mening som den asylsökande inte kände igen. I denna artikel undersöker vi vad som ledde fram till denna mening. Med samtalsanalys som teoretisk och metodisk ansats går vi igenom en 3,5 minuter lång sekvens hämtad från den ljudinspelade, tolkade asylintervju där den obegripliga meningen fördes till protokollet. Språken som talades var svenska och ryska. Protokollet skrevs på svenska. Undersökningen visar hur flera faktorer och samtliga deltagare i asylintervjun, på olika sätt, styr och formar framväxten av den asylberättelse som manifesteras i protokollet.
Generellt för tolkade samtal gäller att tolkens återgivningar av det som sagts på det andra språket möjliggör parternas delade förståelse – samtidigt som de skapar ett icke-konventionellt turtagningsmönster. Specifikt för asylintervjuer är att ett detaljerat protokoll av det som sägs förs, samtidigt som intervjun pågår. Hur det samtidiga protokollskrivandet påverkar turtagningsmönstret har inte undersökts i någon större utsträckning i tidigare forskning.
Artikeln visar på svårigheter som kan uppstå när en institutionell berättelse samkonstrueras när den parallellt dokumenteras i ett protokoll. Kunskap om detta är av vikt för såväl praktiker inom asylprocessen, som för vidare studier av tolkning i offentlig sektor.
The aim of this study is to demonstrate how the presence of an emerging written record may affect the content of an asylum narrative, based on which a decision concerning the asylum claimant's right to receive protection eventually is taken. The lion's share of studies on interpreter-mediated asylum interviews to date focus on risks involved with assigning non-professionals to perform the interpreting. This study draws specifically on a 3.5 min-long sequence taken from an asylum interview involving a professional interpreter, working between Russian and Swedish, and the corresponding paragraph of the Swedish-language written minutes, produced in parallel by the caseworker at a Migration Agency office. The study demonstrates something that hasn't been highlighted much in the literature on asylum interviews, namely the mutual impact of the interpreter-mediated communicative format-the specific turn taking order and the restricted linguistic transparency-and the parallel record keeping; the intricate passage from two spoken languages to an asylum narrative in the form of a text written in one of these languages.
Asylintervjun är förmodligen den mest kritiska delen inom asylprocessen, och de allra flesta intervjuer sker med hjälp av tolk. När tolkningen inte fungerar är det djupt problematiskt. Det drabbas inte minst den asylsökande och är ett hot mot rättssäkerheten i asylprocessen.
Kunskapsöversikten avser att ge en bild av den forskning som finns om tolkfunktionen i asylprocessen, med särskilt fokus på de intervju- och förhandlingssituationer som förekommer när myndigheter handlägger och beslutar i frågor om asyl, alltså mötet mellan migrationsmyndigheter och asylsökande. Översikten bygger på forskning om tolkning i institutionella miljöer i allmänhet och forskning om tolkning i asylprocessen i synnerhet.
Den mynnar ut i ett antal övergripande slutsatser och rekommendationer, varav den viktigaste är att det finns ett akut behov av att stärka och professionalisera tolkfunktionen i asylprocessen.