The multi-disciplinary research platform Culture, Communication and Diversity (CCD/KKOM) focuses on issues of learning and communication. Places of work (e.g. government agencies, the health care sector, adult education), preschool, compulsory school and upper secondary school, digital environments are studied from the perspectives of learning, identity and language use. Research here has a theoretical grounding in sociocultural and post-colonial perspectives, the focus being on ethnographically inspired studies of how processes (e.g. learning, competencies, problem solving, socialization) develop in social practices.
The three central terms ”culture”, “communication” and “diversity” in CCD are closely related. Each of them functions as an object of study as well as methodological and theoretical perspectives. “Culture”, an aspect of all social life, is used to analyse processes that are part of social and historical patterns and norms which shape the context where people act and interact. “Communication”, here seen as culture, focuses how meaning, identities and relationships are co-produced in interpretive communities of social practices. The term “diversity” is used as a theoretical starting point in order to understand how social categories, for example, ethnicity, deafness, or gender, are co-created in a range of arenas. Such categories are viewed as social constructions which are of significance both inside and outside institutional contexts. The senior and junior researchers associated with CCD/KKOM represent themselves a “diversity” of different social categories and have a range of multilingual competences (including different spoken, written and signed languages).
Dominating research themes in the multidisciplinary CCD/KKOM environment include (i) Communication and Language Studies, (ii) Deaf Studies, and the areas of (iii) Identities, (iv) Technologies and (v) Marginalisation processes. The themes literacies, multilingualism and Deaf Studies represent internationally strong profiles.
Four research schools/platforms are represented in the CCD/KKOM research environment. Several disciplines and universities collaborate in each of these research schools/platforms.
(i) Educational Sciences with a focus on Didactics (abbreviated FS UVD; started in 2007).
(ii) The national research school Literacy, Multilingualism and Cultural Practices in Contemporary Society (abbreviated LIMCUL). LIMCUL is funded by the Swedish Research Council since the end of 2008.
(iii) The Swedish Participatory Research Consortium (abbreviated SPARC; started in the spring of 2011).
(iv) Technology-based Knowledge Processes (abbreviated TKP; started in the autumn of 2011).
The project leader of the national research school LIMCUL is a senior researcher at CCD/KKOM.
