Title: Migrating, belonging, and the ‘feeling of home’: Analyzing identity through narrative discourse
Guest speaker: Martina Podboj
Date: 18 November 2021, 11h00-12h20
Venue: Room Sala C137, Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa
Organisation: University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies | RHOME – Representations of Home project
Abstract:
Narrative, identity, and migration are three robust and complex notions that are studied from different perspectives in various disciplines within the humanities and social sciences. In this talk, I will attempt to outline their interconnectedness from a sociolinguistic perspective. I aim to present the background of narrative analysis in sociolinguistics and show how the analysis of
narratives of personal experience about migration can be employed to investigate discursive construction of identity. I will illustrate this through examples of authentic narratives told by different profiles of female migrants (professional
glomads, economic migrants, climate migrants). I will focus on how they rely on various linguistic devices and discursive strategies to express belonging, agency, and authenticity in social contexts characterized by uncertainty and instability.
Bio note:
Martina Podboj is a junior researcher and teaching assistant at the Department of English Studies, University of Rijeka, Croatia. She conducted her doctoral research at the University of Alberta, Canada, as a visiting doctoral research fellow (2017-2018) and received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Zagreb in 2019. Her main research interests include sociolinguistics, narrative and discourse analysis, and second language acquisition. She is also an associate lecturer of Croatian as a Second Language at the University of Zagreb, Croatia.
