Struggling to be tydelig: Some language ideological underpinnings of health literacy

Ingvild Badhwar Valen-Sendstad from the University of Oslo presents her research.

In this talk, I will present the small stories (Georgakopoulou, 2015) of Yasmine, a migrant woman whose everyday life is impacted by health impairment. I explore the health literacy strategies that Yasmine relies on to navigate Norwegian welfare and healthcare and to plan a sustainable career path after sick leave work. I combine Busch’s theorization of the lived experience of language (Busch, 2015) with Norton’s model of language investment (e.g., Norton, 2013) to explore how Yasmine invests in a sociopragmatic style to achieve an ideologically deemed ‘appropriate’ health literacy. This style, described by Yasmine as tydelighet (meaning clear, obvious, distinct, and so on), takes a prominent shape in her narratives about her strategies to cope with overlapping social disadvantages, inequality, and uncertainty about the future. Interestingly, Yasmine also relies on help from her social network to restyle her health literacy, what I refer to as health literacy brokering. My analysis draws on the ethnographically oriented data material that Yasmine and I generated between November 2019 and February 2021. This analysis is in progress, and I look forward to feedback from this seminar’s attendees.

References

Busch, B. (2015). Expanding the Notion of the Linguistic Repertoire: On the Concept of Spracherleben —The Lived Experience of Language. Applied Linguistics, amv030. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amv030

Georgakopoulou, A. (2015). Small Stories Research: Methods – Analysis – Outreach. In A. De Fina & A. Georgakopoulou (Eds.), Handbook of Narrative Analysis (pp. 255–271). Wiley-Blackwell. https://doi.org/http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-111845815X.html

Norton, B. (2013). Identity and Language Learning: Extending the Conversation (2. Edition). Multilingual Matters.