Creating and (re)negotiating boundaries: representations as mediation in visually oriented multilingual Swedish school settings

Abstract

This article brings together salient findings regarding communication and identity through studies of everyday social practices, studies of discourses about these practices and policy documents pertaining to special schools from previous and ongoing ethnographic projects based at the KKOM-DS (Communication, Culture and Diversity – Deaf Studies) research group in Sweden. Central findings regarding the complex nature of language usage in these ‘bilingual’ Swedish–Swedish Sign Language settings are highlighted and the key concept of different types of chaining is empirically explicated. The work presented here also takes its point of departure in how Self and Other are represented in everyday talk, in how the organisation of time and space and how the sociohistorical discourse about language, ‘bilingualism’ and identity in policy documents mediate a particular world view in terms of an ‘imagined and pure homogeneity’. Together, these two empirically grounded analyses highlight a tension between human beings' ways of being or their actions and orientations in social practices and human beings' ways of understanding and conceptualising bilingualism in educational settings. The empirical analyses suggest that understanding linguistic competencies and the organisation of the primary languages in the special schools, on the one hand, and human beings' use of both the languages, on the other hand, are very different phenomena.