Max SpottiTilburg University | UVT · Department of Culture Studies
Max Spotti
PhD
Programme leader of the research line Rapid socio cultural changes at the online offline nexus
About
74
Publications
11,727
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1,125
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Asylum seeking procedures and identity construction through techno-social infrastructures
Primary school classrooms as places for language ideological debate, recognition and misrecognition
Digital Literacies and within that the gains and the losses for learners of an L2 when moving from the printed to the
screen-mediated media
Additional affiliations
September 2012 - present
Education
September 1999 - September 2000
Publications
Publications (74)
This edited volume consists of chapters celebrating the career of scholar Sjaak Kroon, who has produced ground-breaking work in the field of ethnography of education, immigrant minority language teaching and language politics. The chapters cover the use of immigrant minority languages in education and the development of policies at all levels and a...
Taking the sociolinguistics of superdiversity as its point of departure, the present contribution investigates the sociolinguistic regimes present in the spaces of an asylum-seeking center located in Flanders, the Dutch speaking part of Belgium. In so doing, it looks at the spaces present in the center as loci where ‘the guests’ who inhabit them ar...
This edited Volume entitled Language policies and the politics of language practices consists of contributions stemming from the field of ethnography of education, minority language teaching and language politics more in general. Starting from past contributions hunched in a more Fishmanian ‘sociolinguistics of spread’ where the driving question ha...
Classrooms and schools, whether falling in or outside regular education, endorse the task of presenting those who attend them with legitimate knowledge in a given historical context (Young 2009). Their main means for achieving this task is language, both as a means of instruction and a subject of education. Already back in the 1960s, working on the...
This contribution focuses on the discursive construction of refugees within the process of civic integration in the Netherlands. The study – that uses interpretive ethnographic means of data collection and analysis – takes as its case in point the Common Room, a communal building belonging to a regionally supported foundation meant to facilitate –...
Drawing on the notion of sociolinguistic scaling, the present contribution argues for an understanding of an asylum-seeking centre as a unit of inquiry in which sociolinguistic repertoires are played out during intercultural communicative encounters. The contribution shows how the centre’s spaces encapsulate time- and space-bound interactional regi...
This paper explores the intersection of New Speakers in conditions of globalisa-tion led mobility and it investigates the implications the phenomena may have for language policy making. It first describes two historical phases in language policy development that are closely related to a sociolinguistics of stability. In there, it crit-icises how pr...
Contemporary societies are strongly marked by a new complex web of relations, regulations and practices much as a response to new globalization processes along with the advent of digital media technologies. Human mobility, in particular, becomes a key element in the understanding of recent times as it has brought an unprecedented diversification of...
Nieuwkomers moeten mee (kunnen) doen in de samenleving. Om dit te bereiken is het nodig dat nieuwkomers kennis hebben over de Nederlandse of Belgische samenleving, dat ze een stabiel leven met perspectief kunnen leiden, dat ze worden opgenomen door hun omgeving en dat ze de Nederlandse taal leren.
This paper examines
the negotiation of sociolinguistic regimes across the spaces of an asylum-seeking
centre located in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. It considers whether the category of ‘L2 learner in need of integration’ is a valid category
for addressing the guests at the centre or whether socio-technological platforms like
the...
This paper presents a critical examination of key concepts in the study of (signed and spoken) language and multimodality. It shows how shifts in conceptual understandings of language use, moving from bilingualism to multilingualism and (trans)languaging, have resulted in the revitalisation of the concept of language repertoires. We discuss key ass...
The chapter deals with the process of identity (mis)recognition that has led to the rejection of an asylum seeking application. Spotti addresses discrepancies between the story narrated by the asylum seeking applicant and the type of factual knowledge sought by the officials judging the truthfulness of his identity claim, as well as between officia...
This paper deals with a volunteer teacher teaching Dutch as an L2 to asylum seekers at a Red Cross asylum seeker centre in West Flanders, Belgium. More precisely, it investigates the practical professional knowledge of this volunteer teacher, taking a peek into her meta-pragmatic judgements about language and her views on her students’ literacy ski...
In the present contribution we deal with multilingual classrooms and superdiversity. More specifically we deal with the consequences that a revised understanding of language – based on the concept of language repertoires – has for language education as well as for educators caught in the transition between diversity and superdiversity. After highli...
This book is the fruition of five years? work in exploring the idea of superdiversity. The editors argue that sociolinguistic superdiversity could be a source of inspiration to a wide range of post-structuralist, post-colonial and neo-Marxist interdisciplinary research into the potential and the limits of human cultural creativity and societal rene...
In the present contribution we deal with multilingual classrooms and superdiversity. More specifically we deal with the consequences that a revised understanding of language – based on the concept of language repertoires – has for language education as well as for educators caught in the transition between diversity and superdiversity. After highli...
Work on globalization has been concentrated on typical sites where features and phenomena are abundantly available: the huge contemporary metropolis with its explosive and conspicuous diversity in people and languages, its hyper-mobility and constant flux. Less typical places – peri-urban and rural areas, peripheral areas of countries, peripheral z...
This study, part of a larger linguistic ethnographic enquiry carried out in two primary school classrooms in Flanders and the Netherlands, sheds light on the perils faced by the ethnographer caught between pupils’ inventiveness and his own ethnographic naivety when dealing with these pupils’ ethnolinguistic identity construction. The study first fo...
This article offers an ethnographical investigation of online identity practices revolving around baifumei -- one of gender ideals for Chinese females. It is found that baifumei identiy, despite its general desirablity, is morally inapproachable for many. In face of potential moral skepticism, some women tend to distance themselves from baifumei in...
This chapter deals with the testing regimes for (a) admission and (b) integration of immigrants in the Netherlands. Focusing on policy documents and government reports, with a special emphasis on those issued in 2006 and 2007, the chapter illustrates how the developments that have taken place in the Dutch political discourse on immigration and soci...
The present article deals with what we feel to be an unexplored path in present day sociolinguistics and a viable way toward making sociolinguistics more cognitive and cognitive linguistics more social. Naturally, sociolinguistics has a strong interest in issues of variation and change, variation being typically conditioned by social factors, such...
To the extent that every science has its banner and rallying cry, multilingualism would be that of sociolinguistics. In the face of a widespread societal dismissal, degradation, denial or abnormalization of multilingualism, sociolinguistics has since the 1960s been making the claim that multilingualism is a positive thing in societies. It represent...
Current ethnographic research shows that Dutch educational policy is caught between two positions. First, it constructs pupils from imm igrant minority groups as educationally disadvantaged and, as a consequence, fosters mainst ream (language) education as the means for their social integration and emancipation (Bezemer, 2003). Second, it leaves Du...
The present ethnographic case study investigates how the identities of immigrant minority pupils are constructed in a multicultural classroom in a Flemish primary school. From the analysis of the class teacher's discourse, it emerges that both Flemish native pupils’ identities and those of immigrant minority pupils are constructed as homogeneous: t...
This study investigates how immigrant minority pupils in a primary Flemish 5th Form construct their self-ascribed identities in terms of their cultural and linguistic affiliations. Two generalizable findings emerging from these pupils' discourse seem to shed light on synchronic variation and diachronic change in their strategies of identity constru...
Immigrant minority pupils' identities take a secondary position in the curriculum of the Dutch (primary) educational sector where the jargon of minorities (Extra & Gorter, 2001: 5) addresses pupils as allochtone leerlingen (immigrant minority pupils) and where the teaching of their community languages has stopped following governmental regulations...
As a result of politically, economically and socially motivated migration, which started in the seventies, Belgium has undergone a considerable demo-linguistic change. Flanders, the Dutch speaking part of Belgium, is no exception to this (see, Ramaut 1998; Verlot and Delrue 2004). While for those immigrants who belong to Western European groups the...
Current ethnographic research shows that Dutch educational policy is caught between two positions. First, it constructs pupils from immigrant minority groups as educationally disadvantaged and, as a consequence, fosters mainstream (language) education as the means for their social integration and emancipation (Bezemer, 2003). Second, it leaves Dutc...
At present, western European societies are at the same time facing the aftermath of massive immigration movements and the challenges of new globalization waves. Education is at the heart of this twofold experience. On the one hand, it is confronted with the demand of developing a canon for national identity construction. On the other hand, it is he...
Projects
Projects (4)
In contexts of crisis and controversies, bipartisan positioning, and polarising political tendencies, minorities and migrants tend to emerge as a scapegoat to explain social, educational, health, and economic problems, leading to the spread of far-right ideologies and to the dissemination of fake news and hate discourse. Such discourse emerges and disseminates at a high pace in social media and social networks, through text and multimedia resources, meaning that a high level of digital literacy, understood as the capacity to critically read, interpret and engage with (multimodal) news and discourse in digital supports, is needed to navigate information on these hot social themes and their educational implications.
CoMMiTTEd, an ERASMUS PLUS approved by the German Agency, addresses these issues by planning, developing, testing, and evaluating resources for digital teaching education, aiming at enhancing student teachers’ critical thinking through enrichened critical (multimodal) discourse analysis abilities and digital teaching competences.
