BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//events.la.psu.edu//EN CALSCALE:GREGORIAN BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/New_York BEGIN:STANDARD DTSTART:20201101T020000 TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=11;BYDAY=1SU END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT DTSTART:20200308T020000 TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=3;BYDAY=2SU END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VEVENT UID:17886-a9c8255245d8894275d643d7dd1e799b@events.la.psu.edu DTSTAMP:20260514T154129Z DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20251212T090000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20251212T110000 SUMMARY:African Studies Global Virtual Forum: Decoloniality and Southern Epistem ologies—Aleksandra Ita Olszewska DESCRIPTION:\nIn this talk\, I illuminate how an exemplary public school in Poland creates radical multilingual and multicultural spaces of hope for refugee-background students amidst anti-refugee narratives and poli cies\, uncertain times of this socio-historical and geopolitical region\ , situated at the crossroads of Western and Eastern Europe\, and facing a humanitarian crisis on its eastern border due to Russia’s invasion in Ukraine. Arts-based methods are called for\, especially in research with minoritized populations. In particular\, refugees tend to be dehumanize d\, and their voices remain unheard\, misrepresented\, and silenced. One of the tenets of RefugeeCrit Theory (Strekalova-Hughes et al.\, 2018) u rges scholars to look for alternative ways of examining and analyzing re fugees’ experiences. Drawing upon a humanizing methodology and counter-s torytelling\, I applied language self-portraits\, I Am From poems and Hu manizing Multimodal and Multilingual Analytic Portraits to illuminate st ories of Chechen refugee-background students in Poland and to humanize t he data collection and analysis through centering participants in the pr ocess in multimodal and multilingual ways. Guided by the constructs of t ranslanguaging (García\, 2009)\, critical pedagogy and hope (Freire\,199 8\; hooks\, 1994)\, this qualitative study has shown transformative cult urally and linguistically sustainable policies and practices for refugee -background students.\n\nAleksandra Ita Olszewska is a guest researcher at the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies\, University o f Oslo\, Norway. From 2021–2025\, she worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan (MultiLing)\, University of Oslo. Aleksandra received her Ph.D. in curri culum and instruction with a specialization in ESOL and bilingual educat ion from the University of Florida in 2020 as a Fulbright scholar from P oland. Aleksandra’s research interests include bi/multilingual education \, migration\, teacher education\, humanizing and arts-based research me thods\, linguistic justice\, and socially just pedagogies.\n\nFor more d etails: https://events.la.psu.edu/event/afr-global-virtual-forum-aleksan dra-ita-olszewsk/ X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:

In this talk, I illuminate how an exemplary public school in Poland creates radical mul tilingual and multicultural spaces of hope for refugee-background studen ts amidst anti-refugee narratives and policies, uncertain times of this socio-historical and geopolitical region, situated at the crossroads of Western and Eastern Europe, and facing a humanitarian crisis on its east ern border due to Russia’s invasion in Ukraine. Arts-based methods are c alled for, especially in research with minoritized populations. In parti cular, refugees tend to be dehumanized, and their voices remain unheard, misrepresented, and silenced. One of the tenets of RefugeeCrit Theory ( Strekalova-Hughes et al., 2018) urges scholars to look for alternative w ays of examining and analyzing refugees’ experiences. Drawing upon a hum anizing methodology and counter-storytelling, I applied language self-po rtraits, I Am From poems and Humanizing Multimodal and Multilingual Anal ytic Portraits to illuminate stories of Chechen refugee-background stude nts in Poland and to humanize the data collection and analysis through c entering participants in the process in multimodal and multilingual ways . Guided by the constructs of translanguaging (García, 2009), critical p edagogy and hope (Freire,1998; hooks, 1994), this qualitative study has shown transformative culturally and linguistically sustainable policies and practices for refugee-background students.

Aleksandra Ita Olsz ewska is a guest researcher at the Department of Linguistics and Scandin avian Studies, University of Oslo, Norway. From 2021–2025, she worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Multilingualism in Soc iety across the Lifespan (MultiLing), University of Oslo. Aleksandra rec eived her Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction with a specialization in E SOL and bilingual education from the University of Florida in 2020 as a Fulbright scholar from Poland. Aleksandra’s research interests include b i/multilingual education, migration, teacher education, humanizing and a rts-based research methods, linguistic justice, and socially just pedago gies.

For more details: https://events.la.psu. edu/event/afr-global-virtual-forum-aleksandra-ita-olszewsk/

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