Digital platforms and narrative exchange: hidden constraints, emerging agency

It is well known that narrative exchange takes distinctive forms in the digital age. Less understood are the digitally based processes and infrastructures that support or constrain the wider exchange of narrative materials. This article reports on research in a UK sixth form college with ambitions to expand its students’ digital skills. Our approach was to identify the preconditions (sometimes, but often not, involving fully formed narrative agency) that might support sustained narrative exchange. We call these conditions collectively ‘proto-agency’, and explore them as a way of establishing what a ‘digital story circle’ (not just a digital story) might be: that is, how new digital platforms and resources contribute to the infrastructures for narrative exchange and wider empowerment in a complex institutional context. During our fieldwork, interesting insights into the tensions around social media emerged. Only by understanding such forms of proto-agency can we begin to asses

Education without a shared language: dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in Norwegian introductory classes for newly arrived minority language students

Based upon fieldwork in two upper secondary schools in Norway, this article offers an analysis of inclusion and exclusion processes for newly arrived minority language students. Minority language students are defined by policy as students who have a different mother tongue than the Norwegian and Sami languages, and students who are newly arrived in Norway are considered especially at risk for marginalisation. This article explores processes of inclusion and exclusion in two schools with segregated classes for this group, called introductory classes. The analytical framework is Niklas Luhmann’s theory of autopoietic social systems, where inclusion is defined as the requirements for participation set by a system, and exclusion accordingly as being unable to meet these requirements. The article displays different constellations of inclusions and exclusions for newly arrived students in the educational system: in school organisations, organisation-based interactions and informal networks of students. It will be showed that introductory classes erect several barriers towards newly arrived students’ inclusion, especially towards those students who are placed at the basic level of the schools’ hierarchy of performances. As a consequence of multiple educational exclusions, informal networks emerge as alternative socialities that include and exclude students on the basis of mother tongue