Culture as idea and practice in youth and family life

Astrid Ag defends her PhD thesis.    

 

In my dissertation, I investigate the linguistic and cultural practices among adolescents with ethnic minority backgrounds when they interact with peers and teachers at school, with immediate family members at home, and with peers on social media sites. I look into their local language practices while simultaneously relating the practices to broader societal discourses to see if and how the adolescents and their families respond to them.

I argue that in order to describe the participants’ diverse practices, it is necessary to approach these aspects empirically through language and everyday interactions. I have done so with linguistic ethnography as the basic methodological orientation for my research, and my study is based on various kinds of spoken and written data material, which have been collected during a two and half yearlong ethnographic fieldwork at a Copenhagen based school.

 

Assessment Committee

  • Professor Anne Holmen, chair (University of Copenhagen)
  • Professor Karin Aronsson (Stockholm University)
  • Professor Sarah Van Hoof (Ghent University)

Moderator of the defence

  • Associate Professor Janus Spindler Møller (University of Copenhagen)

Copies of the thesis will be available for consultation at the following three places:

  • At the Information Desk of the Library of the Faculty of Humanities
  • In Reading Room East of the Royal Library (the Black Diamond)
  • At the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, Emil Holms Kanal 2.