The city Biel/Bienne is experiencing an economic boom. Alongside the traditional watch industry, Biel/Bienne has set its sights on diversification and is now exploring the service and communication sector. This recent development is particularly interesting due to its link to the city’s bilingual character which in turn, is regarded as a major factor in the economic upswing. In the service and communication sector, bilingualism – or even multilingualism – has effectively become the actual...

In line with the growth of linguistically mediated knowledge in the neoliberal new economy, the international health care sector requires some of its workforce to be multilingual, reflecting an increasing multilingualization as a means of economic expansion and localization. Similar to other service-oriented industries that cater to an international audience, language skills and multilingual repertoires mean an added value to the products of health care providers. This invites us to...

The object of the present investigation is to undertake ethnographic studies at three sites: a non-governmental organization dedicated to adult education, a public hospital, and a multinational company based in Spain.

At the turn of the century, the globalized economy, the weight of international agencies and transnational migrations have increased the demand for multilingual competences in the workplace. In particular, humanitarian agencies must recruit and train mobile and multilingual skilled workers to deploy their humanitarian missions.

The focus of the PhD project is placed on linguistic and cultural discourses which come to light in the course of merging communes in the Canton of Graubünden. The reform of political structures is currently a major topic on the political agenda, and the issues of language and culture are particularly sensitive at the language borders in Graubünden.

This project lays out a critical approach towards a pedagogy of diversity that takes social inequality among children as a starting point and reflects on how social processes at school transform social inequality into educational inequality. The project investigates the ideological foundations in intercultural pedagogical theories as well as their inherent socio-cultural and egalitarian excesses.