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Focus Area: Cultural Translation – arts, culture, values and religion
Imagining the West - Perceptions of the Western Other in Modern and Contemporary Eastern Europe and Turkey
The project "Imagining the West" was established in 2006 through a four-year grant from the Research Council of Norway. In addition to permanent faculty, the project funds three PhD projects and one postdoc project. Researchers are studying dynamic processes of identity formation, shaped and informed by the most important single bipolarity in terms of which religious, national, and civilizational communities, major political and cultural projects/movements have been defining themselves and one another ever since the Enlightenment, namely the East-West divide. Looking at it from an "Eastern platform", the central concern is with questions both about the origins of, and about the cultural and social practices that reproduce and sustain this divide, even after the demise of communism. This undertaking goes beyond the delimitations of earlier works, not only by twisting the traditional perspective around by 180 degrees and allowing the East "to talk back", but also by (a) a consistently interactionist approach, and (b) by the extension of a purview beyond the discourses of the philosophes and their late-modern heirs to cover the discourses of various professionalized academic, political and administrative elites, including the media. The project is developing new knowledge about the main tendencies, historical-cultural forms, patterns, and significance of perceiving, understanding and explaining the "West" in Eastern Europe and Turkey through the modern era until today.
Language Encounters – Linguistic Interference in Multicultural Norway
The project “Language Encounters – Linguistic Interference in Multicultural Norway” (http://edvarda.hf.ntnu.no/spraakmoeter/) is funded by the Research Council of Norway for the period 2003 – 2007. The main aim of the project is to deepen our knowledge in research areas of language contact and change where Norwegian and other languages meet. The project focus on linguistic contact, interference, and change in two areas: Norwegian as a second language and the vulnerability and possible domain loss of Norwegian in academic writing and discourse. This is done through an integrated approach where insights from theoretical linguistics, sociolinguistics, phonetics, and second language acquisition are exploited. The project has supported three PhD projects in the period 2003-2007.
The phonetic element of the project analyses speech production and perception, developing perception tests where listeners with Norwegian as their native language evaluated different aspects of original and computer-manipulated speech produced by second language users of Norwegian (naturalness, intelligibility, etc.). The grammar element analyses inter-language grammars in the acquisition of Norwegian as a second language, both in initial and advanced stages. The socio-linguistic element analyses the use of English and Norwegian in academic discourse in Norway, especially investigating problems of domain loss.
