Anna De Fina – författare

The relationship between language, discourse and identity has always been a major area of sociolinguistic investigation. In more recent times, the field has been revolutionized as previous models - which assumed our identities to be based on stable relationships between linguistic and social variables - have been challenged by pioneering new approaches to the topic. This volume brings together a team of leading experts to explore discourse in a range of social contexts. By applying a variety of analytical tools and concepts, the contributors show how we build images of ourselves through language, how society moulds us into different categories, and how we negotiate our membership of those categories. Drawing on numerous interactional settings (the workplace; medical interviews; education), in a variety of genres (narrative; conversation; interviews), and amongst different communities (immigrants; patients; adolescents; teachers), this revealing volume sheds light on how our social practices can help to shape our identities.

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 and identities, narrative language, power and ideologies. It also offers an overview of a wide range of methodologies, analytical modes and perspectives on narrative from conversation analysis to critical discourse analysis, to linguistic anthropology and ethnography of communication. The discussion engages with studies of narrative in multiple situational and cultural settings, from informal-intimate to institutional. It also demonstrates how recent trends in narrative analysis, such as small stories research, positioning analysis and sociocultural orientations, have contributed to a new paradigm that approaches narratives not simply as texts, but rather as complex communicative practices intimately linked with the production of social life.

The relationship between language, discourse and identity has always been a major area of sociolinguistic investigation. In more recent times, the field has been revolutionized as previous models - which assumed our identities to be based on stable relationships between linguistic and social variables - have been challenged by pioneering new approaches to the topic. This volume brings together a team of leading experts to explore discourse in a range of social contexts. By applying a variety of analytical tools and concepts, the contributors show how we build images of ourselves through language, how society moulds us into different categories, and how we negotiate our membership of those categories. Drawing on numerous interactional settings (the workplace; medical interviews; education), in a variety of genres (narrative; conversation; interviews), and amongst different communities (immigrants; patients; adolescents; teachers), this revealing volume sheds light on how our social practices can help to shape our identities.

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 and identities, narrative language, power and ideologies. It also offers an overview of a wide range of methodologies, analytical modes and perspectives on narrative from conversation analysis to critical discourse analysis, to linguistic anthropology and ethnography of communication. The discussion engages with studies of narrative in multiple situational and cultural settings, from informal-intimate to institutional. It also demonstrates how recent trends in narrative analysis, such as small stories research, positioning analysis and sociocultural orientations, have contributed to a new paradigm that approaches narratives not simply as texts, but rather as complex communicative practices intimately linked with the production of social life.

Analyzing Narrative Online: Affordances and Practices offers a comprehensive introduction to exploring narratives in fast-evolving social media spaces such as Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter, TikTok and YouTube. It traces the rise of “small stories” as a form of storytelling that thrives within the logics of immediacy, ephemerality, and curated sharing.Adopting a technographic, hands-on approach, this book addresses the theoretical issues and methodological choices that shape narrative discourse research, equipping readers with robust, replicable tools for analysing stories in context. Building on their innovative research in narrative and sociolinguistics, De Fina and Georgakopoulou unpack the unique features that distinguish digital stories and storytelling practices from other face-to-face situations. Across six engaging chapters, the authors showcase a wide range of practical examples, from vlogs, memes and conspiracy narratives to Instagram influencers and political commentary, illustrating the interplay between personal expression and platform design. They demonstrate how participants in storytelling practices shape and reshape their stories, emotions, and identity while being simultaneously facilitated and constrained by the very platforms used to circulate stories. The book further highlights the influence of design features on reframing events and collective sense-making.This applied guide is ideal core reading for programmes in digitally oriented discourse analysis, narrative analysis, sociolinguistics, and language and media. It is also an invaluable resource for researchers designing projects on online discourse and storytelling of all kinds.

Analyzing Narrative Online: Affordances and Practices offers a comprehensive introduction to exploring narratives in fast-evolving social media spaces such as Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter, TikTok and YouTube. It traces the rise of “small stories” as a form of storytelling that thrives within the logics of immediacy, ephemerality, and curated sharing.Adopting a technographic, hands-on approach, this book addresses the theoretical issues and methodological choices that shape narrative discourse research, equipping readers with robust, replicable tools for analysing stories in context. Building on their innovative research in narrative and sociolinguistics, De Fina and Georgakopoulou unpack the unique features that distinguish digital stories and storytelling practices from other face-to-face situations. Across six engaging chapters, the authors showcase a wide range of practical examples, from vlogs, memes and conspiracy narratives to Instagram influencers and political commentary, illustrating the interplay between personal expression and platform design. They demonstrate how participants in storytelling practices shape and reshape their stories, emotions, and identity while being simultaneously facilitated and constrained by the very platforms used to circulate stories. The book further highlights the influence of design features on reframing events and collective sense-making.This applied guide is ideal core reading for programmes in digitally oriented discourse analysis, narrative analysis, sociolinguistics, and language and media. It is also an invaluable resource for researchers designing projects on online discourse and storytelling of all kinds.

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 perspectives and areas of engagement, with each chapter providing an overview of the historical development of its topic, the main current issues, debates and synergies, and future directions. The Handbook presents new perspectives on well-established themes such as narrative, conversation-analytic and cognitive approaches to discourse, while also embracing a range of up-to-the-minute topics from post-humanism to digital surveillance, recent methodological orientations such as linguistic landscapes and multimodal discourse analysis, and new fields of engagement such as discourses on race, religion and money.

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 perspectives and areas of engagement, with each chapter providing an overview of the historical development of its topic, the main current issues, debates and synergies, and future directions. The Handbook presents new perspectives on well-established themes such as narrative, conversation-analytic and cognitive approaches to discourse, while also embracing a range of up-to-the-minute topics from post-humanism to digital surveillance, recent methodological orientations such as linguistic landscapes and multimodal discourse analysis, and new fields of engagement such as discourses on race, religion and money.

Featuring contributions from leading scholars in the field, The Handbook of Narrative Analysis is the first comprehensive collection of sociolinguistic scholarship on narrative analysis to be published. Organized thematically to provide an accessible guide for how to engage with narrative without prescribing a rigid analytic frameworkRepresents established modes of narrative analysis juxtaposed with innovative new methods for conducting narrative researchIncludes coverage of the latest advances in narrative analysis, from work on social media to small stories researchIntroduces and exemplifies a practice-based approach to narrative analysis that separates narrative from text so as to broaden the field beyond the printed page

The centrality of narrative analysis in the investigation of social processes and practices has become an established fact in the human sciences. The focus on narrative and displacement in this volume provides a starting point for a reflection on current issues in narrative theory as well as a timely interrogation of the role of narrative in illuminating social phenomena that are central to modernity such as migration and displacement.At the centre of the analyses presented in the book are stories that are ignored, silenced and othered by contemporary public discourses on displacement, migration and settlement. Drawing on insights from narrative theory, linguistic ethnography, sociolinguistics and cultural studies, contributors to the volume examine both how migrants, refugees, asylum seekers and marginalized minorities position themselves through narrative practices and how they are positioned in institutional and official narratives.

Exploring the intersections between storytelling and identities by and about migrants, this edited volume expands our knowledge of how mobility and narrative relate to politics, ethics, climate change, globalization, and new technology. Drawing on rich ethnographic case studies, it presents exciting new theoretical and methodological perspectives and reflects on the challenges and ethical dilemmas involved in analyzing migrant narratives.The chapters offer insights into identity construction by members of communities such as returning migrants or migrants originally from the global north moving to the global south, domestic workers, and descendants of war refugees. The contributions also describe linguistic and identity practices in understudied environments such as different digital contexts, publications for children, and parliamentary debates.The volume is divided into three parts. Part one gathers chapters in which authors investigate identity construction among a variety of migrant groups of different origins, generations and ages in various geographical spaces including Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Hong Kong, Italy, and the United States. The second part, entitled Stories in Institutional Contexts, includes chapters that examine narratives by and about migrants as they emerge in, and are influenced by, institutional settings. Finally, part three reflects on methodological and ethical issues in research focusing on storytelling among migrants. Covering diverse migrant groups and geographical areas, Narratives and Migration: New Perspectives and Challenges is an indispensable resource for scholarship on migration and narratives around the world.

Narratives are fundamental to our lives: we dream, plan, complain, endorse, entertain, teach, learn, and reminisce through telling stories. They provide hopes, enhance or mitigate disappointments, challenge or support moral order and test out theories of the world at both personal and communal levels. It is because of this deep embedding of narrative in everyday life that its study has become a wide research field including disciplines as diverse as linguistics, literary theory, folklore, clinical psychology, cognitive and developmental psychology, anthropology, sociology, and history. In "Telling Stories" leading scholars illustrate how narratives build bridges among language, identity, interaction, society, and culture; and they investigate various settings such as therapeutic and medical encounters, educational environments, politics, media, marketing, and public relations. They analyze a variety of topics from the narrative construction of self and identity to the telling of stories in different media and the roles that small and big life stories play in everyday social interactions and institutions.These new reflections on the theory and analysis of narrative offer the latest tools to researchers in the fields of discourse analysis and sociolinguistics.

Sociocultural linguistics has long conceived of languages as well-bounded, separate codes. But the increasing diversity of languages encountered by most people in their daily lives challenges this conception. Because globalization has accelerated population flows, cities are now sites of encounter for groups that are highly diverse in terms of origins, cultural practices, and languages. Further, new media technologies invent communicative genres, foster hybrid semiotic practices, and spread diversity as they intensify contact and exchange between peoples who often are spatially removed and culturally different from each other. Diversity-even super-diversity-is now the norm. In response, recent scholarship complicates traditional associations between languages and social identities, emphasizing the connectedness of communicative events and practices at different scales and the embedding of languages within new physical landscapes and mediated practices. This volume takes stock of the increasing diversity of linguistic phenomena and faces the theoretical-methodological challenges that accounting for such phenomena pose to socio-cultural linguistics.This book stages the debate on super-diversity that will be sure to interest societal linguists and serves as an invaluable reference for academic libraries specializing in the linguistics field.

Sociocultural linguistics has long conceived of languages as well-bounded, separate codes. But the increasing diversity of languages encountered by most people in their daily lives challenges this conception. Because globalization has accelerated population flows, cities are now sites of encounter for groups that are highly diverse in terms of origins, cultural practices, and languages. Further, new media technologies invent communicative genres, foster hybrid semiotic practices, and spread diversity as they intensify contact and exchange between peoples who often are spatially removed and culturally different from each other. Diversity-even super-diversity-is now the norm. In response, recent scholarship complicates traditional associations between languages and social identities, emphasizing the connectedness of communicative events and practices at different scales and the embedding of languages within new physical landscapes and mediated practices. This volume takes stock of the increasing diversity of linguistic phenomena and faces the theoretical-methodological challenges that accounting for such phenomena pose to socio-cultural linguistics.This book stages the debate on super-diversity that will be sure to interest societal linguists and serves as an invaluable reference for academic libraries specializing in the linguistics field.

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 exploited groups. Central to the book is an exploration of how mobilities are affected by and in turn affect power relations and of the kinds of resources used by people to deal with (im)mobility processes. The book brings to light a new critical sociolinguistic imagination that is responsive to 21st century processes of (im)mobilities as socially, discursively and emotionally constructed and negotiated.

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 exploited groups. Central to the book is an exploration of how mobilities are affected by and in turn affect power relations and of the kinds of resources used by people to deal with (im)mobility processes. The book brings to light a new critical sociolinguistic imagination that is responsive to 21st century processes of (im)mobilities as socially, discursively and emotionally constructed and negotiated.