
Anna de FinaGeorgetown University | GU · Italian Studies
Anna de Fina
Ph.D. In Linguistics
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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (111)
In this study, I apply the notions of chronotopes and scales to analyze how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a US politician and activist, constructs a relatable persona in her Instagram stories. I focus on two strategies that she deploys: the mixing of chronotopes associated with different scales of formality/publicness within the same story, and the use...
Vlogs, as one of the most popular digital genres for the construction of personal experience, are an important site
for the study of digital storytelling. Although the narration of ongoing events is becoming increasingly common
in vlogs, narration of past events is still present. As they incorporate both storytelling modes, vloggers also act as
edi...
The chapter investigates the digital communication practices among a group of young migrants living in Palermo. In particular, the analysis aims to study both how migrant youth who belong to superdiverse networks use communicative resources and the way they handle the networked relations they establish in the host community. The data of the chapter...
This special issue responds to an increasing interest in decolonial and Southern thinking in applied linguistics. In this Introduction, we first discuss some basic historical facts about colonization, and we highlight some key concepts. We then present the six contributions in the special issue. Three contributions compellingly expose the pervasive...
In this study we compare 8 American and 8 South Korean vlogs by YouTubers documenting their experiences of COVID in 2020. We propose a nuanced approach to cross-cultural difference that rejects binaries and involves the study of how communicative resources are used by participants in specific events. We detail similarities and differences between t...
The focus of this article is the analysis of stance taking vis-à-vis a chronotope born during the Covid-19 pandemic as a window into how people react to global crises and into the kinds of values that get an uptake and become widely shared in periods of unrest. I focus on Twitter users’ reactions in relation to a “chronotope of the balcony performa...
In this introduction we discuss the centrality of the management and perception of space-time coordinates during the Covid-19 crisis and highlight some of the main themes that contributors develop in their articles. In particular, we analyze how contributors’ elaborations of the notion of chronotope involve a discussion of fundamental issues such a...
This encyclopaedia of one of the major fields of language studies is a continuously updated source of state-of-the-art information for anyone interested in language use. The IPrA Handbook of Pragmatics provides easy access – for scholars with widely divergent backgrounds but with convergent interests in the use and functioning of language – to the...
The study of narrative has been at least from the beginnings of the ‘narrative turn’ (Bruner 1986, Polkinghorne 1988) one of the most important areas for investigating migration and migrants. Through personal stories narrators represent social relations between them and others, and among collective agents, they depict power struggles and ways in wh...
The impact of mobility and superdiversity in recent sociolinguistic research is well-established, yet very few studies deal with issues related to immobility. The chapters in this book focus on the sociolinguistic investigation of the dynamics between mobility and immobility as experienced by migrants, asylum seekers and members of minority or expl...
The focus of this chapter is on a specific kind of immobility: the one experienced by refugees and asylum seekers in temporary reception centers (henceforth TRCs), a domain that has not received the attention it deserves in sociolinguistic studies. We focus on the representation of social and linguistic conditions within such environments in the di...
Este trabajo revisa, amplía y elabora en forma considerable un argumento trazado en avances de investigación anteriores (Blommaert, 2015b; De Fina, 2015), que a su vez desarrolla lo planteado en Blommaert y Varis (2015). Nuestra gratitud para Ben Rampton, Piia Varis, Ico Maly, Jef Van der Aa, Max Spotti, Rob Moore, Sjaak Kroon, y Jos Swanenberg por...
Discourse studies, the study of the ways in which language is used in texts and
contexts, is a fast-moving and increasingly diverse field. With contributions
from leading and upcoming scholars from across the world, and covering
cutting-edge research, this handbook offers an up-to-date survey of discourse
studies. It is organized according to persp...
Resistance has proven to be a hard concept to define. Debates about resistance in the sociological and sociolinguistic literature cover many aspects: from the degree to which resistance can be seen as related to established social groups (see Rampton 1996), to the level of agentivity and intention that is required for an action to be regarded as re...
The aim of this chapter, in line with a critical ethnographic sociolinguistic approach, is to investigate the kinds of communicative practices and repertoires of resources that emerge and are deployed by residents in temporary accommodations to construct, deal with or oppose conditions of both physical and experienced immobility. The focus is on wh...
In this article, we discuss the discursive processes that surround storytelling of traumatic experiences in the case of minor asylum seekers involved in the recent migration flow to Italian ports. We argue that in order to understand not only how traumatic experiences are told but also how they are overcome, it is necessary to focus on the reciproc...
Storytelling in the Digital World explores new, emerging narrative practices as they are enacted on digital platforms such as Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Contributors’
online ethnographies investigate a wide range of themes including the nature of processes
of transformation and recontextualization of offline events into digital narrati...
This entry presents the main trends in the analysis of identities in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics from three discursive approaches. One studies primarily social identities, a second focuses on personal or biographical identities, and the third pushes for a complication of established identity theories in the face of new developments in...
Storytelling in the Digital World explores new, emerging narrative practices as they are enacted on digital platforms such as Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Contributors’ online ethnographies investigate a wide range of themes including the nature of processes of transformation and recontextualization of offline events into digital narrati...
Storytelling in the Digital World explores new, emerging narrative practices as they are enacted on digital platforms such as Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Contributors’ online ethnographies investigate a wide range of themes including the nature of processes of transformation and recontextualization of offline events into digital narrati...
In this article we analyze the role of chronotopes in the formation and negotiation of identities. In particular, we consider the case of a superdiverse community of practice formed by minors asylum seekers and teachers in a school of Italian in Sicily, Italy. In our analysis we stress the role of reciprocity on the ways in which the chronotopic fi...
In this chapter we focus on the centrality of what we will call “the chronotope of the south” in the discourse of members of Mapuche families who have been displaced or have migrated from their places of origin in the Southern parts of Chile to the capital: Santiago. We will concentrate on narrative discourse and on the ways in which this chronotop...
These papers are part of a wider ongoing discussion that emerged within a four-day symposium, “Conceptualizing Rapport”, where relationship between language and rapport received sustained intellectual attention. Many themes emerged from these discussions and this book presents just some of them. The first theme presented in this current volume rela...
The interview is a very common and popular data collection tool in the social sciences. However, interviews are also important tools to collect information in many other non-academic practices, such as asylum seekers’ procedures. Researchers and practitioners working with interviews (particularly in the area of narrative, which is the one that has...
Commentary on the papers of the Special Issue of the Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice on Storytelling and Moral Work
The retelling and sharing of stories is not a new phenomenon. Many narrative analysts have devoted research to these processes. But the culture of participation (Jenkins 2006) in the digital world has brought sharing to a completely new level by allowing users not only to broadcast their opinions and evaluations of a story but also to reappropriate...
The narrative mode has a special significance for the study of politics in that it has been long regarded as a privileged mode for the ideological construction of events and for the manipulation of public opinion. From Hayden White’s theorizations about the relations between narrative, politics and ideology to modern day investigations about the wa...
In this paper I analyze a corpus of 15 video narratives of migration experiences posted on the United We Dream Movement website. The narratives are part of the group's campaign to convince the public and then President Obama to promote legislation to reform the migration system and help undocumented families stay together and not be deported. Based...
http://press.georgetown.edu/book/languages/diversity-and-super-diversity
SUPER-DIVERSITY OFFERS SCHOLARS a broad range of opportunities to revise and rethink parts
of their conceptual vocabulary in attempts to arrive at more sensitive and accurate
tools for thought and analysis. The recognition of a reality that might, in some
respects and to some degree, have always been there but was never enregistered in
theoretical...
This article examines the ways in which narrative discourse contributes to the construction of Mapuche ethnic identities within a context of displacement and investigates how such identities are negotiated in interactional contexts of communication. The larger study comprised 12 focus groups and 36 in-depth semi-structured interviews with members o...
Storytelling is among the most common forms of discourse in human communication. The increasing influence of technology in our life is having a significant impact on the types of narrative that are told and on the way they are produced and received. In order to understand such impact we need to approach the discursive study of narrative from a pers...
In this chapter we will detail key questions and instruments in the field of the study of migration narratives. While this discussion will demonstrate the existence of an ample diversity of perspectives and
objects of study, we consider that studies can be broadly grouped into two fields: (1) studies that concentrate on the types of representations...
This chapter reviews some of the main current trends in narrative analysis and discusses its applications to the study of Intercultural Communication. It proposes some broad theoretical-methodological distinctions among narrative approaches and focuses on two main areas: research on narratives as ways of telling, and research on narratives as refle...
An application of Bakhtin's ideas on chronotopes to the study of identities in superdiverse contexts
William Labov, The language of life and death: The transformation of experience in oral narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. 239. Pb. $27.99. - Volume 44 Issue 5 - Anna De Fina
In this chapter we describe the development of narrative analysis within discourse studies from its initial focus on the structural properties of stories to its current emphasis on narration as discursive practice embedded in interactional context. Besides comparing structural and interactional approaches, we also review major trends in narrative r...
Narrative and identity are often regarded as closely connected. Narratives are seen as the prime vehicle for expressing identity, and narrative analysts have gone so far as to argue that the stories one tells mold us into what we are. This chapter focuses on the main trends in ways of theorizing the connections between narrative and identity. It di...
In this chapter I focus on the interplay between stereotypical and new identities in interview talk of migrant and transmigrant Latin Amercian women in the United States. I argue that in order to capture the existence of both reproduction of socially accepted patterns and communication of new ones in the construction and expression of identities, s...
In this article I discuss relationships between language use and identity among Italian Americans. I argue that the study of identities needs to abandon essentialist stances that are particularly common in research on Italian Americans, and approach identity construction as a process that takes place within concrete social practices enacted by spec...
In this article I discuss the positive impact of the concept of positioning on identity studies, with particular reference to the analysis of narratives. I argue that the notion of positioning (particularly as developed in Bamberg’s 1997 three levels model), together with other constructs such as indexicality, has helped enormously in bridging the...
Before introducing the topic of this entry, it needs to be clarifi ed that the term discourse is employed here to refer to language in use as organized and culturally shaped ways of talking embedded in concrete social practices (see Gee, 1996, p. 131, on this point).
In this paper I closely examine spontaneous interactions between members of a tri-generation Italian American family. I argue that members show different language preferences and differing attitudes towards the family's multilingual identity but that they all demonstrate a degree of 'engagement' with the heritage language. Phenomena that I describe...
The socially minded linguistic study of storytelling in everyday life has been rapidly expanding. This book provides a critical engagement with this dynamic field of narrative studies, addressing long-standing questions such as definitions of narrative and views of narrative structure but also more recent preoccupations such as narrative discourse...
This article investigates how Latin American women who migrate to the US frame their language experiences through narratives told in sociolinguistic interviews. As narratives reflect and shape social realities and relationships, narrative analysis can illuminate how individuals position themselves relative to language obstacles and ideologies, thus...
We describe and discuss discursive approaches emerging over the last 50 years that in one way or another have contributed
to identity studies. Approaching identities as constructed in and through discourse, we start by differentiating between two competing views of construction: one that moves progressively
from existing “capital-D” social discours...
In this article I focus on the influence of researcher/informant roles on the types of narratives that are produced and on the ways in which storytelling interactions are managed in research contexts. In particular, I show that storytelling activities and story types both reflect and shape relationships among participants based, among other factors...
The popularity of interviewing as a method of data collection in the social sciences is a recognized fact. In their survey of qualitative research paradigms and methods, Denzin and Lincoln (2004:353) declare that "the interview is the favorite methodological tool of the qualitative researcher." And, describing data-collection techniques in sociolin...
Research on identities has become one of the major fields of investigation in discourse oriented linguistic analysis and sociolinguistics. This unprecedented development has been spurred by a growing realization that identity negotiations are at the heart of many social encounters in a variety of contexts, and that former sociolinguistic paradigms...
This article examines how Spanish-speaking Latina (im)migrants position themselves relative to US language policies. Drawing from interviews with 15 Latin American women in the USA, we illustrate how understandings of language policy are constructed through individuals' reports of everyday experiences and framed within the constraints of contempora...
Introduction Italian Americans constitute one of the earliest and most important immigrant communities in the USA, with their presence felt around the country both culturally and economically. Today, Italian ranks ninth among the non-English languages spoken in the USA, with nearly 800,000 persons still using it as their home language. Although the...
Narratives told in interview have become a central tool of data collection and analysis in a variety of disciplines within the social sciences. However, many researchers, particularly those who embrace a conversational analytic or ethnomethodological approach (see among others Schegloff, 1997; Goodwin, 1997), regard them as artificial and oppose th...
Ben Rampton, Language in Late Modernity. Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp.xviii; p. 443.
Departing from a critique of the conventional paradigm of narrative analysis, inspired by Labov and the narrative turn in social sciences, we propose an alternative framework, recommending combining a focus on the local occasioning of narratives in interaction with the analysis of their participation in a variety of macro-processes, through mobiliz...
The point of departure for this special issue is the recent shift within discourse and sociolinguistic narrative analysis from a long-standing conception of (oral, cf. natural, nonliterary) narrative as a well-defined and delineated genre with an identifiable structure toward the exploration of the multiplicity, fragmentation, and irreducible situa...
This article focuses on the inter-relations between storytelling and micro and macro contexts. It explores how narrative activity is shaped by and shapes in unique ways the local context of interaction in a community of practice, an Italian American card-playing club, but also illustrates how the storytelling events that take place within this loca...
In the past twenty years the existence of a sense of ethnic belonging among immigrant groups of European ancestry in the United States has become the focus of frequent debates and polemics. This article argues that ethnicity cannot be understood if it is abstracted from concrete social practices, and that analyses of this construct need to be based...
En este artículo examino la construcción del tiempo y el espacio como elementos de orientación en narraciones que tratan sobre experiencias que desorientan. Me enfoco en cómo los narradores articulan la orientación y cómo quienes los escuchan interactúan con ellos para entender los eventos narrados. Sostengo que el manejo de la orientación en la na...
The different traditions that have inspired the contributors to this volume can be divided along three different orientations, one that is rooted predominantly in sociolinguistics, a second that is ethnomethodologically informed, and a third that came in the wake of narrative interview research. All three share a commitment to view self and identit...
I Am My Language: Discourses of Women and Children in the Borderlands By Norma González. Tucson. The University of Arizona Press. 2001.
The relationship between language and identity has been a topic of interest for language scholars for centuries. As early as in the 1800s many philologists, including the famous brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, were proposing the idea that language reflected the collective identity of national communities. Benveniste (1971), one of the most import...