Danièle Klapproth

Danièle Klapproth works as a lecturer in English linguistics at the University of Basel. Her main teaching and research interests are in the fields of anthropological linguistics, sociolinguistics, narrative analysis and critical discourse studies, focusing in particular on questions of language, power and identity, and on the cultural politics of English in a globalising world.

Her long-standing interest in narrative as social practice took her to Australia in the 1990s, where she carried out anthropological-linguistic fieldwork in a Central Australian Aboriginal community exploring the intricate relationship between oral traditions, cultural constructions of space and identity, and sense of belonging. In 2004 she published Narrative as Social Practice: Anglo-Western and Australian Aboriginal Oral Traditions (Mouton de Gruyter), in which she engages with these issues from a contrastive perspective, highlighting the cross-cultural variability of narrative practice and its wider implications for cross-cultural understanding.

Continuing her work in narrative analysis, she has recently set out on a new research project in which she aims to explore the narratives (and counter-narratives) emerging from the lived experience of migration and displacement. As she is planning to investigate narratives of displacement in the context of refugee theatre/theatre for social change, etc., she is currently broadening her perspective by moving into the fields of applied theatre and performance practice. Her main focus in this research project will be on investigating the role of linguistic/creative resources accessed in the process of story-telling and performance and used to create a space in which alternative voices may emerge, voices that commonly remain silenced in mainstream discourses on migration, dislocations and their impacts. Her aim will be to explore the roles – both beneficial and controversial – of performed stories as instruments in cross-cultural dialogue, conflict negotiations and multicultural co-existence.

Selected Publications

• Narrative as Social Practice: Anglo-Western and Australian Aboriginal Oral Traditions. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2004.
• Narrating across cultural boundaries, or 'Where were Rocky's fathers' brothers?' In Engler, Balz and Lucia Michalcak (eds.) Cultures in Contact. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2007.