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Research leader:

Maria Bäcke

The multi-disciplinary and international network-based research environment CCD, Communication, Culture and Diversity, established in 1997 at Örebro University, focuses on issues of learning and communication in institutional educational settings and places of work.

Research context

The world today, marked by mobility and migration, has created new conditions for human-beings and for research. These make it necessary to (re)consider the conditions for communication or languaging, as well as for learning and identity production.

New media categories are steadily developed through technological innovations. Media products for information, entertainment and education are accumulating and creating today’s dense media landscapes. These changing features are a challenge to learning and communication in educational settings and places of work and communicative practices. Patterns of interaction are in a state of transformation in order to understand how to choose technology, media and genres for different situations, and how to link these, CCD has made this a priority.

Research goals

The research within CCD strives to critically understand the premises for communication and participation in analogue/real-digital/virtual contexts in educational and professional settings. Current CCD research address the following:

  1. Language policies for communication in language learning, as well as in historically diversified, multilingual and pluricultural settings.
  2. Community affiliation, inclusion and exclusion, related to marginalized groups.
  3. Pedagogical tools research for meaning-making, reading and writing, in media-dense local-global contexts.

This knowledge production has the potential to provide insights into the nature of social practices and of inclusion and exclusion.

The three central terms Communication, Culture and Diversity form a point of departure for research on communication in analogue-digital-virtual-real settings and function as objects of study both methodologically and theoretically.

 

  • Communication: how meaning and messages are constructed, diffused, interpreted and transformed in analogue-digital environments where human-beings engage in social practices.
  • Culture: an aspect of social life and used to understand processes that are part of social and historical patterns and norms which shape contexts where people (inter)act. Cultural expressions, media and genres across modalities, literature, film etc, also constitute research objects within CCD.
  • Diversity: a concept used to understand how social categories, for example culture, ethnicity, functionality, class, or gender, get (co)created and become (in)visible.

Several disciplines, for example the educational sciences, language and literature studies, media and communication sciences, history, religion, deaf studies, gender research, come together in various CCD projects across national boundaries.