Towards Creating and Interpreting Spaces of Self-Enuciation for Learners in Languages and Intercultural Communication.

This research project is an attempt to approach the notion of cultural identity from a qualitative and interpretive perspective. To this end, the project initially offers working definitions of key concepts and discusses the extent to which the themes of language, culture and identity are variably deployed and developed in different types of academic discourse. The project then proceeds to analyse the recurrent social themes of mobility, difference and otherness, simulation, and language, knowledge and social power in an effort to build a socio-theoretical foundation for the discussion of cultural identity and empowerment in the context of second language (L2) learning and the emerging field of Languages and Intercultural Communication (LAIC). Following the proposal of a model of identity enunciation and empowerment, the theoretical discussion attempts to appropriate the metaphor of the "third space of enunciation" (Bhabha, 1995) frequently employed in LAIC circles for a qualitative approach to cultural identity in language and intercultural learning. To this end, the project turns to Holstein & Gubrium's (2000) postmodern notion of narrative identity and proposes to adopt their qualitative analytic framework of interpretive practice to investigate possible spaces of self-enunciation in the context of L2 learning and LAIC. The discussion then proceeds to outline the working design of a cultural identity research project including the scope and boundaries of study subjects, data gathering and transcription procedures, and approaches to data analysis. Finally, the project offers a critical analysis of the study's implementation and findings, on the basis of which potentials for further research on narratives of cultural selves in language and intercultural learning are discussed