Languages and experiences of exclusion in educational contexts

5 September 2024

This interactive lecture by Dr Yasemin Uçan from the University of Cologne kicked off the Multilingualism in Spaces of Crisis lecture series. The lecture focussed on educational policy discourses in which migrant families are addressed as potential ‘at-risk families’ and called upon to seek early non-family-based care, thereby promoting their children's acquisition of German at the earliest possible stage. The lecture demonstrated how language functions as an organising principle in educational institutions and how the monolingual orientation of educational institutions can be understood in opposition to the multilingual realities of everyday life in migrant society.