Lecture in Spanish (with English translation)
Anna De Fina is Professor of Italian Language and Linguistics and affiliated faculty with the Linguistics Department at Georgetown University. Her interests and publications focus on discourse and narrative, qualitative interviewing, identity, chronotopes, migration and super diversity. She has published extensively on these topics, including 80 articles and book chapters and 12 volumes between authored and edited books. She is one of the editors of the book series Encounters for Multilingual Matters and Discourse, Narrative and Interaction for Routledge. Among her latest publications are the volumes Exploring (Im)mobilities: Language Practices, Discourses and Imaginaries, coedited with Gerardo Mazzaferro (2021, Multilingual Matters) and the Cambridge Handbook of Discourse Studies, coedited with Alexandra Georgakopoulou (2020, Cambridge University Press).
Abstract
In this talk I present a reflection on the digital practices of young migrants to Italy communicating with peers, relatives and friends on Facebook. In particular, I analyze communications happening on the Facebook walls of two focal participants. I show how these youth use linguistic and semiotic resources to orient to different communities and socio-cultural centers in the virtual space of Facebook. Among these centers, the most important are the one represented by the community of people whom they left behind in Africa, and the one represented by the community of new friends that they made when they arrived in Italy or during their travels. In the data we find a tension between adherence to convention, for example with the use of colonial languages (specifically French) in exchanges with members of their community of origins and innovation, for example in the incorporation of creative translanguaging practices in their exchanges with peers in Italy and other countries. I also exemplify how their targeted and growing use of Italian indexes their changing sense of belonging. These phenomena and the reflections that they induce are particularly useful for the study of communicative practices emerging among migrants who go through complex mobile trajectories. Indeed, many modern-day migrants and refugees experience unprecedented movement across spaces and times and create emotional links both with other people in similar circumstances and with peers in the places where they live. Data for this talk come from an ethnographic project which started in 2018 involving interviews and observations of online communications and of the Facebook profiles of two focal participants, young migrants from Africa who entered Italy as asylum seekers, arrived in Palermo, studied in a local language school and are now permanent residents of Italy.
