Research project funded by the Center for Research, Development, and Innovation (CIDI)
at Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, Sede Central Medellín [File No. 074B-02/13-S80]
technical data for the project
- Principal Investigator: Dr. Raúl Alberto Mora
- Co-investigators: Melissa Castaño, Nathalie Gómez, Carla Pulgarín, Natalia Ramírez, and María Camila Mejía-Vélez
- Design stage: June 2012 - January 2013
- Data collection stage: January 2013 - June, 2014
- Data analysis: June, 2014 to December, 2016
Description
This was the maiden project from LSLP (SRG-L2 at the time). It started from the combination of two events: Dr. Berry's interest in conducting a study on urban literacies and the work that Melissa and Nathalie (plus Camila Giraldo, a former researcher) were doing for their WebQuest on language interference in Medellín. This conjunction brought these researchers together and they started profiling the project all through 2012.
The goal of this project, drawing from ethnographical approaches to literacy (see Heath & Street, 2008), was to understand and describe how people in Medellín were using English in different urban spaces. While there has been interest from different government and economic entities to promote policies and activities for the use of English, one thing remained unclear: We did not really know how people were using it in different spaces. There was an underlying assumption that we had to bring English to the city, yet we did not know exactly how English operated in the city.
That question of how, and not if, English appeared in different spaces, fueled our questions and our research.
The goal of this project, drawing from ethnographical approaches to literacy (see Heath & Street, 2008), was to understand and describe how people in Medellín were using English in different urban spaces. While there has been interest from different government and economic entities to promote policies and activities for the use of English, one thing remained unclear: We did not really know how people were using it in different spaces. There was an underlying assumption that we had to bring English to the city, yet we did not know exactly how English operated in the city.
That question of how, and not if, English appeared in different spaces, fueled our questions and our research.
The City as Routes we Would Travel
Between 2012 and early 2013, the team added three more members: Carla, Cami, and Natalia. They joined the group and helped us define the routes (drawing inspiration from Stuart Hall's idea of culture as "roots and routes" [see Willis, et al., 2008, for a clear explanation of Hall's ideas]) that we would navigate to describe the practices. While we had an extended framework that covered both physical (i.e. those attached to an edifice) and cultural (i.e. those that people, not buildings, define) routes, the size of the city made us realize that we had to zero in on the physical ones for this project and, consequently, we realized that this was just the first phase of what is now a larger project on urban literacies.
The routes we chose, then, were:
The routes we chose, then, were:
- Advertising - Melissa and Natalia
- Restaurants - Nathalie and Cami
- Malls, Bookshops, and Libraries - Carla, Natalia, and Cami
Academic Presentations and publications
During the course of this project, this research team presented a total of six international (including the first-ever AERA), one local, and one national presentation and published one proceedings paper and a book chapter. Here is the yearly detail.
2013
2013
- August - XXX Social Sciences Symposium (UPB-Medellín)
- October - UPB Student Research Group Annual Meeting
- November - International Association for World Englishes (Arizona State University)
- May - Regional Student Research Group (Antoquia Node) Annual Meeting
- May - International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (University of Illinois)
- August - ISLE 3 (University of Zurich) [Joint presentation with Gaming Literacies Phase I
- September - VI International Colloquium on Foreign Language Research (Universidad Nacional de Colombia)
- April - American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting (Chicago, IL) [Also published on the ERIC Database]
- October - ASOCOPI 50th Annual Conference (Medellín)
- INTED2016 (Valencia, Spain) - Publication in Proceedings
- Book chapter, English literacies in Medellin: The city as literacy (with Carla Pulgarín, Natalia Ramírez, and Maria Camila Mejía-Vélez)