Transient Multilingual Communities

Project description

The Transient Multilingual Communities project (2016-19) was funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research. Spencer Hazel was Co-Investigator, working with colleagues from the University of Copenhagen and Copenhagen Business School.

The project investigated what we call transient multilingual communities (TMCs). These are defined as social configurations where people from diverse socio-cultural and linguistic backgrounds come together (physically or otherwise) for a limited period of time to work on a shared activity.

The project was structured around a number of case studies from different societal sectors in different countries in Europe and Africa, including:

• the construction industry
• refugee integration programmes
• the voluntary sector
• the arts
• academia

Working within these settings, the team sought to identify differences and commonalities. In particular, how members of TMCs come to agree on the social and linguistic norms that underpin their collaboration.

By identifying how successful collaboration is achieved in TMCs the project develop specific suggestions for how activities in such settings can be organised and supported in order to achieve the desired goals.

Findings from the project will be published in a forthcoming book, Transient Social Configurations (published by Palgrave).

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