About the group

Migration – the movement of people, ideas, texts, and elements of material and nonmaterial culture from one space to another, and crossing borders – have been fundamental for social development and shaping individual and collective identities.

The research group consists of scholars dealing with linguistics, literature, and cultural studies. We are interested in representations of migration in various discourse types (e.g., political, journalistic, and academic) and narratives (e.g., literary fiction, movies, biographies, memoires, and travel literature). We link these interests to a few broad research questions:

  • How is individual and collective identity shaped, (re)constructed, and negotiated in discourses and narrations?
  • How do our perceptions of ourselves and others relate to cultural background and national belonging? What is the role of language in that context?
  • How does our perception of the other change across languages and cultures?

Specific subprojects, topics of interest, and questions examined include:

  • Verbal, multimodal, and visual representation of migration in various discourses: the role of visual and multimodal symbols, metaphors, and metonymies and their identity-building force
  • North/South relationships, exchanges, and migration across media, with a special focus on imagological and borealistic approaches to fiction and nonfiction narratives
  • Mapping of migrant memories about urban landscapes or other places connected to the southern homeland and the new northern home
  • Border poetics, border concepts, and border trauma in fictional and testimonial published migration narratives in Swedish and Norwegian
  • Literary works and how they represent experiences of flight, displacement, homelessness, and identity loss; how they question the concepts of home, identity, and nation
  • Linguistic and sociocultural issues in communication, in particular verbal and non-verbal forms of interaction in various discourse types and in narratives (e.g., fictional dialogues) seen from monolingual and cross-linguistic perspectives
  • Children’s and young adult’s literature in Scandinavia and beyond (in particular, in southern Europe): circulation of texts and stories, their (de)formation, translation, and reception

Academic programs and courses

EUS4010 – Master's course Borders, Bodies, and Memories. Textual and cultural representation of contemporary migration in Europe. An interdisciplinary course offered for the first time at the University of Oslo in spring, 2018.

Resources