Visiting Researchers

In 2022, I spent four months as a visiting researcher at the Waterloo Centre for German studies. Being a sociolinguist, my research interests include language- and identity-related topics, with a focus on (forced) migration and the concepts of home and exile, and especially their representation in autobiographical texts. For my PhD, I had already spent several months in Canada to do fieldwork in the Canadian-Latvian community, investigate the level of Latvian heritage language maintenance in Canada and the community’s immigration history. The time in Waterloo gave me the chance to continue doing research in the Canadian context and start working on a project that focuses on German and Baltic-German immigration to Canada, including autobiographical life stories of community members and heritage language maintenance within the community.

My time in Waterloo was however also characterized by some rather unexpected opportunities. In addition to the research I conducted, I came across a course on language teaching that I spontaneously decided to sign up for. I have been working as a language instructor for over ten years and appreciated the new perspectives on my teaching and theinspiration I got in that course. These are now feeding into a new project on blended learning.

I really enjoyed my time in Waterloo. It was a very productive time at UW, and I appreciated the quiet workspace I was offered and the infrastructure. Moreover, I got to know the city and met some great people that made these months really special.

Kristin Weiser-Zurmühlen is a research associate at the University of Bielefeld, Germany, Department of German Studies. She also teaches linguistics, media, didactics and communication analysis on university level: 

“My main research focus is the social aspect of interaction, i.e  to not merely study the way we talk, but rather what we exactly do when we talk and how we do that. That’s why I use Conversation Analysis as a method for exploring the ‘fine-tuning’ processes and subtle negotiating of meaning within social encounters. These processes are closely linked to what we call ‘identities-in-interaction’: How do we tell others the way we see them and how do we guide them in which way to see us?

I am especially interested in two aspects that play a crucial role when answering these “big identity questions”: The interactive organization of knowledge and assessments. We continuously display, redefine and reject what we know about something or what others claim to know about something. Also, we often display, redefine and reject how we or others assess something. In my PhD project, I analyse how people position themselves and others through displays, shifts and changes of such epistemic and affective stances. I collected video data of group discussion by students and young adults about their favourite tv series. It turned out that the interactants constantly implicitly negotiate their assessments and knowledge of series and media. In order to understand these dynamics properly, I argue that taking the ‘known’ and/or ‘assessed object’ into account is also relevant for identity management. The focus group topic permits a further research aim , I try to figure out what we can learn about the participants’ understanding of popular media.

Professor Grit Liebscher is one of my PhD supervisors, she is an expert for methodological questions and research subjects related to my thesis. I came to Waterloo from March to May 2018 as a visiting researcher to get to know her in person and to discuss my current research. Grit turned out to be very kind and exceedingly helpful in providing me with rich advice and coaching for my PhD project. Furthermore, she introduced me to her colleagues and other PhD students who work in the same field as I do. I invited them to data sessions on my videos, thus gaining new perspectives on my research and findings, which was very inspiring and encouraging. I was offered my own desk at the Waterloo Centre for German Studies, a peaceful and quiet setting for writing some chapters of my thesis. Yet, I also got the chance to gain insight into the academic and social life of UW and the city. Everyone I met was friendly, caring and helpful. I had a really good time in Canada and would definitely come back again!”