Textbooks for language education do not only represent seemingly legitimate knowledge(s) about the world (Canale, 2023), but they can also be understood as contact zones (Pratt, 1991) in which questions of community and identity are negotiated in a particularly clear way. In the sense of recognition through representation (Crenshaw, 1991; Fraser, 2005), such textbooks have the potential to contribute to a just transformation of societies.

However, research has shown that most language textbooks do not meet the requirements of an anti-discriminatory and inclusive education (Koreik & Fornoff, 2020; Risager, 2023; Zhang et al., 2024). My research questions are as follows: What representations of community are developed in recent textbooks for German and Norwegian as foreign and second languages? What are the relations between these representations? And to what extent do the textbooks encourage pupils to question and modify them? The latter understood as a prerequisite for the development of critical diversity competence (Steyn & Vanyoro, 2023; Zabel, 2024).

To ensure methodological transparency and rigour, I combine Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (Canale, 2023; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2021; Mullet, 2018; Weninger, 2021) with the coding procedures developed within Grounded Theory (Postholm, 2019).

My work contributes to filling these research gaps (Zhang et al., 2024):

• I examine the different modalities of the textbooks in relation to each other, not only individually.
• I follow an intersectional approach to community and identity, working with intersections of – among others – race, ethnicity, country, religion, social class, gender and (dis)ability.
• I also address affiliations that go beyond the typical reference frame of a national target culture.