Department of Slavic and Baltic Studies, Finnish, Dutch and German
PhD Defense: Anna Mammitzsch
Thesis defence
Date:Friday 22 November 2024
Time:13.00 – 15.00
Location:Auditorium 8, Södra huset, and Zoom
Anna Mammitzsch, doctoral student in German, defends her doctoral thesis "Experiencing and narrating migration: a linguistic ethnography of the identity work among German-speaking migrants in Stockholm".
Anna Mammitzsch' thesis cover
The title of the thesis in German is "Migration erleben und erzählen: Eine linguistische Ethnographie zur Identitätsarbeit deutschsprachiger Migrant:innen in Stockholm".
The opponent is Professor Jürgen Spitzmüller, University of Vienna.
The defense will be in German. The defense will be streamed via Zoom.
This dissertation explores how German-speaking migrants in Stockholm construct their identities through narratives, addressing a gap in the study of contemporary German migration from a sociolinguistic perspective.
The thesis aims to show how migrants’ narratives about lived experiences of migration and language shape their identity work. It also examines the interrelationship of belonging, categories of identification, and linguistic repertoires, which affects how and where participants make a home.
Adopting a linguistic-ethnographic approach, data sets from narrative walking tours, semi-structured interviews, language portraits, group discussions, and reflexive discussions are analyzed and presented as narrative composites. The analysis of interactional data was conducted using positioning and stancetaking analysis to understand how participants position and evaluate themselves, others, and stance objects in their stories.
The findings reveal diverse modes of storytelling used to conduct narrative identity work among German-speaking migrants, including liminal, binary, and hybrid identity constructions. Furthermore, the discussion of language portraits highlights how participants reproduce hegemonic discourses of migration as well as language ideologies. Moreover, the participants’ repertoires show how migrants navigate their complex linguistic realities in Stockholm through agentive and multilingual practices.
This thesis uncovers the challenges and privileges of an invisible minority in Sweden, as well as the role of language in negotiating belonging and identity. Additionally, it underlines the importance of considering emic perspectives in migration research and demonstrates the value of Linguistic Ethnography as an approach to capture the complexity of constructing migrant identities. Lastly, the thesis demonstrates how narrative identity is performatively staged, scaled on multiple dimensions, embodied, practiced, and designed as a discursive articulation of the self. Hence, despite previous criticism, identity continues to be an important analytical concept in sociolinguistics.
