Negotiating Identities in Nordic Migrant Narratives: Crossing Borders and Telling Lives

This edited volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to the question of how identities are negotiated and a sense of belonging established in a world of increasing migration and diversity. Transcending field-specific approaches and differences in foci, the authors investigate how identity is constructed and mediated in face-to-face interactions (in real time and fictional writing), how writers use narratives to express their reorientation and their identity negotiation in a new homeland, and how material objects convey layered meaning to identity and belonging. This engagement with spoken, written and material mediation of identity resonates with recent sociolinguistic investigations on how language is connected to and intersects with embodiment, materiality and time. The volume will be of interest to students and scholars of globalisation and migration studies, sociolinguistics and narrative analysis, anthropology and cultural studies.

Pia Lane is Professor of Multilingualism at the Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan (MultiLing), University of Oslo, Norway, and her research interests include narrative analysis, language policy, language shift and language revitalisation. She edited Standardizing Minority Languages (with Costa and De Korne) and is co-editor-in-chief of Linguistic Minorities in Europe.

Bjørghild Kjelsvik is Associate Professor of Norwegian Language at the Department of Teacher Education, NLA University College, Oslo, Norway. She holds a PhD in Linguistics. Her research interests include discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology and narrative analysis. She has published research on asylum interviews as oral narratives.

Annika Bøstein Myhr is Associate Professor of Norwegian Literature at the University of South-Eastern Norway. Myhr holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and has published extensively on Russian and Scandinavianliterature. She is the editor of Twist (2021), and co-editor of Sårbarhet og litteratur [‘Vulnerability and literature’] (2021, with Dancus and Linhart).