New and old research projects

relevant en bronloos

I'm coming down with a serious case of NRE (New Research Energy) from sheer excitement over my new thesis topic - it's going to be about the Luxembourg referendum about voting rights for long-term inhabitants without the luxembourgish nationality, in June of this year. The referendum outcome forms an intersection between the movement towards greater status for the Luxembourgish language at the one hand, and a general tendency in the EU towards more nationalism and protectivism of the national culture and language, at the other. Then again, the fact that they had such a referendum in the first place seemed pretty progressive to me.

A new thesis idea is good news for this blog, which will regain its previous rate of being updated half-frequently. You'll be seeing more on the history of integration language tests and the history of the Luxembourgish language here within the forseeable future. For now I was thinking I would put up some of the assignments I wrote in the first year of the master that turned out OK.

Here part one in the series! This is a paper I got full marks for. I followed a Facebook page for (2nd generation) Moroccan-Flemish youth for some weeks and then analysed their language use. It was really fun to do and I think the result is pretty clear and structured.

Ana Ansara? Discourse-Centred Online Ethnography on an online community for Flemish Moroccans.

In this report, material from a Flemish – Moroccan Facebook community is used to analyse the role and meaning that the participants' different languages have to them. This study is intended not only to shine light on questions about migrant cultures, but also on the usefulness and viability of discourse-centred online ethnography (DCOE) as a research method. Click here for the full document.